Now that the Celebration of Excellence is behind us and most of the spring sports have started their off-season training, I’ve realized that this is the end of many Dartmouth athletes’ careers in sports. These seniors have trained for thousands of hours, taken countless bus rides and airplane trips, eaten an ungodly amount of peanut butter sandwiches and experienced a blur of locker room memories in just four years at the College. I can almost guarantee that if you asked any athlete in the Class of 2014 about the day they officially found out that they would represent the Big Green, they could recount the rush of feelings as if it were yesterday.
Although I’m still a junior -— for at least a little while longer — my coach has started to call the members of the Class of 2015 on my team the “senior class.” The first time I heard this, I felt my heart skip a beat. I remember at the end of my freshman year, I was sitting at dinner with some of the then-seniors, freaking out about everything from the new girls coming to them leaving (and even the fact that I was going to graduate soon). Though they laughed a little because I had three years left, they were happy to see that they had made such an impact on my life.
It’s odd to look back when I still have things to look forward to, but with every senior day, the feelings hit closer to home, and I realize that I will be graduating shortly. The field hockey team celebrated senior day in the fall. The rest of the team watched our seniors accept bouquets of flowers from their families, tears slowly rolling down their already sweaty faces. The underclassmen held each other close, thinking about the next phase in our collegiate careers and remembering our friends and family behind us. This column could get incredibly sappy, but I have little room to get emotional. With an entire year left, I will do my best try to refrain from any more clichés.
Every year, we graduate a handful of incredible teammates and friends, only to gain a new set nine months later. For me, the turnover hits hardest in the few days following our last game. Last year, the six seniors led our team as a class and individually. They were there for us on the field, in the classroom and anywhere else we needed them. Nobody wants to admit it, but in that extended moment after every season the team dynamic shifts entirely. There are no more freshmen on the team — there are only upperclassmen, preparing to welcome the freshmen who are still in high school, unaware of this transition.
Luckily, as fall athletes, we get to keep our seniors close to us outside of the turf for two more terms, easing this transition a bit. I can hardly imagine having my season end and then losing the class above me just a few weeks later, as many spring athletes do. Whether you are a freshman who is still scared of the talented seniors or a junior who could name every single person in the seniors’ families — including middle names and first-grade goldfish — saying goodbye is never easy.
As we bid adieu to the great Class of 2014, we will always know that the athletes are just a text message away, all too willing to listen to stories about incompetent refs and hard fitness tests.
I said I’d try to avoid the clichés, but these feelings resurface as each senior class leaves, and we’ll miss the Class of 2014 dearly. A new team is forming, and we can only hope that we can make our mark on them, the same way that the Class of 2014 and the senior classes before them did for us.
Inside the Locker Room is a weekly column written alternately by Phoebe Hoffmann and Sarah Caughey.
