College students create new experience

University of North Carolina forward John Henson in bounds the ball at Duke University in 2012.

COURTESY OF RUSHTHECOURT

University of North Carolina forward John Henson in bounds the ball at Duke University in 2012.

Louis LaVenture,
Sports and Campus Editor

With the NCAA March Madness Tournament just around the corner, college students all over the world gear up for one of the most exciting postseasons in all of sports. However, I will never have this experience as a college student and my experience is much different than the antiquated notion of America’s past.

Turn on any basketball tournament game, or any collegiate football game for that matter, and you will witness a sold out stadium filled with a sea of school colors and the crowd collectively losing their minds in support of their favorite college team.

The broadcasts always cut away to the student section and show young teens and twenty-something’s with their faces and bodies painted yelling as loud as they can in a frenzy for their school.

This is something that most college students, including myself, will never experience. Some people call it the “real” college experience, living away from home on a campus that has huge sports programs to root for.

However, I am part of the new era of college students that live off-campus on their own and go to a school where sports are more of an afterthought than a priority.

For years in America the notion has been that the “traditional” experience is you graduate from high school, live in the dorm rooms, visit your hometown in the summer, get a job after you graduate and then begin your life. Yet this traditional view is drastically changing and now, in 2015, a new generation of college students is creating their own experience and traditions.

Many students at California State University, East Bay have created a new college experience, one that includes living alone, with roommates, or even parents or relatives in the area.

Most students don’t attend sporting events on campus and as a result, those events draw no more than a few hundred fans on a great attendance day.

On Sep. 6, 2013 the University of Michigan and Notre Dame played a football game in front of a world record crowd of 115,109 at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor.
Here, at CSUEB, we haven’t had a football team since 1993 and Title IX has made it nearly financially impossible to carry the sport, along with the additional women’s teams that would be required through the government mandate.

As a student at a school that competes in NCAA Division II athletics, this is something I have to accept will never happen at my school. I will never go to a rally on campus the day before the big game against our rival and lose myself in the environment and experience. A lot of college students like me are helping create a new vision of the American college experience that is constantly changing everyday.

I only come to campus when I have class or something to do, which further changes how many view the traditional college experience and create a new one for themselves.

The college experience is more than just sports games and events, it also has a lot to do with how much time students spend on campus. The average student spends six hours a week on campus in classes while they spend nearly half of that time, two and a half hours, at sporting events on the campus they attend, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

While the new college experience seems to be overtaking the antiquated notion that America used to have of higher education, there are still people and places where America’s traditional view takes place everyday.

However, at schools near urban environments like CSUEB that attract students of all ages and backgrounds, the experience is constantly evolving and becoming a personalized experience that caters to the needs of their life.