By Peter Yor
Over his 13-year presidential
tenure John McCardell has overseen a number of remarkable changes to the
athletic landscape of
The Campus: When you first took office did anything
surprise you about athletics at the College?
J-Mac: Only that when I would go to NESCAC meetings
and hear some of my colleagues talk about the problems they were having either
with a particular coach or a particular sport, I was mystified. Either I
thought I was naive or oblivious, because I'm not having those problems. And it
didn't take long for it to dawn on me that I wasn't having those problems and
the reason was that I had a wonderful Athletic Director in Tom Lawson and
subsequently Russ Reilly who had gone out and hired a first rate coaching staff
who because of the kind of people they were because of their commitment to our
students and because of their understanding of what their job was were going to
be every bit as strong and committed to their jobs as our faculty. And so I was
delighted to discover that I was not naive and not oblivious, but in fact I had
the finest coaching staff of any school in NESCAC. And I still believe that.
The Campus: What do you think the role of athletics
is at the Middlebury?
J-Mac: I think it is a very important component of
our students' educational experience for those who participate. It is a very
direct opportunity to experience teamwork and commitment over a period of time
to the pursuit of a goal to learn leadership to learn cooperation to deal with
victory and defeat and all those things sound like clichés, but in fact they
are important lessons to learn. And for those who are spectators or followers
it's a chance to see some leadership by example. I also think it is important from
a campus spirit, a campus moral standpoint. Anyone who has ever been to a
Middlebury hockey game certainly knows how that experience can attach one even
more closely to the College, and that goes for alumni as well. I don't think it
at all surprising, and I don't think it at all harmful that many of our alumni
go to the sports pages on Sunday morning and look up to see how their teams did
the day before. I think it's great that they do that, and I also think that it
is great when they see us in the win column as much as we can be.
The Campus: What do you think has been the biggest
change in athletics at Middlebury since you first took office?
J-Mac: The dramatic growth in women's sports and the
success of our women's teams. I think if you go back 20 years you will see an
athletics program that is dominated by men's teams and men's sports, and the
great success that our women's teams have had, which is a fairly recent
phenomenon, has been a significant change. What is striking is that that has
happened, but not at the expense of success for the men's teams. There was a
broadening of the opportunity rather than a reallocation of it.
The Campus: What about the change to national
post-season play? What effect has that had?
J-Mac: I think that probably would get mixed
reviews. On the plus side is discovering what we had suspected but hadn't known
for certain, that the level of competition within NESCAC and the quality of our
teams was as good as if not better than the competition anywhere else in the
country. I think we've learned convincingly that the quality of play in NESCAC
is very high and the ability of NESCAC teams to compete at the national level
for championships is very strong, and I think that's a plus. That tells us that
our athletic programs are of a successful competitive quality.
I also think that the effect that success on the
national level can have for a team, a sport, a program, is incalculable. That
doesn't mean that one should put a premium on winning or on championships. I'm
not going to take that bait, but I do think that our successful teams have bred
a sense of self-confidence, have raised the profile of the college because of
the ways that our students represent us, have done
those things altogether positively and that those have been good things for
Middlebury.
On the negative side I think that within the
conference as a whole there is probably more of an emphasis on postseason play
as a determinant of success than is appropriate. The best example I can come up
with is a few years ago when our men's hockey team won the NESCAC championship
in overtime against Williams. The place was packed, the crowd was revved. It
was an exciting game, and we pulled it out. And Bill Beaney
said to me after that game, "You know what, if it were all to end tonight
these guys would think they were on top of the world and they had done it
all." Instead they had to get on a plane and fly out to
The Campus: Why has the College invested so much
money in athletics over the last decade?
J-Mac: Well, we've invested a lot of money in a lot
of things, science building and library as well. The reasons for those
investments were several. First, in some cases they were replacing facilities
that were deplorable, and secondly they met needs for the college of the
present and the future rather than the college of the past, and third they
addressed needs for lifelong health and fitness that went beyond the needs of a
particular program or team. We had let some things slide for a very long time that need to be replaced. The approach that we took for the
most part was to do those things first that would likely benefit the greatest
number. So that the things we did and the order in which we did them had some
logic to it and were meant to benefit more than just the varsity teams that use
them.
The Campus: How would you define the ideal
student-athlete at Middlebury?
J-Mac: I think it is a student who will come here
and excel as a student and excel as an athlete. I believe in the case of our
athletes we have students who happen to excel at athletics and in most cases
excel in other things as well. I think
The Campus: What has been the biggest challenge for
the Athletic Department during your time here?
J-Mac: I think the pressures that result from
postseason competition have been an issue. There was for instance a year when I
was given to understand by some members of the extended family that playing a
semifinals lacrosse game was more important than commencement and if something
had to be moved it was not going to be Middlebury's hosting that lacrosse game.
The answer to that question seemed to me much more automatic that it did to
some of our supporters.
The last several years our lacrosse team has
competed for the national championship on the day of their commencement. In the
end it seems to me that should be their choice. But I hope in 25 years they
still think they made the right choice.
In a completely different area I think there are
challenges posed by the proliferation of student interest in new sports, not
all of which we can elevate to varsity status, crew and rugby being the most
obvious. I think that there will be continuous pressure to raise crew and rugby
to varsity status and the challenge there is going to be to reconcile the
benefits of broad participation which both of those sports do provide with the
costs involved.
I also think we are going to be continuously held up
to scrutiny in terms of the academic performance of our student athletes.
The Campus: Why do you think the academic
controversy about student-athletes has been so incendiary?
J-Mac: I think it could potentially have been much
more incendiary. There are a number of ways you could
slice and dice a class and come up with subsets other than athletes to make
that same point. It would be every bit as incendiary with another one of those
subsets as with athletes. No one likes being stereotyped, no one likes being
pigeonholed.
The Campus: In 10 to 15 years do you see Middlebury
athletics being in the same place they are today?
J-Mac: I hope so. I certainly hope we remain in
Division III. I certainly hope we don't succumb to the pressure to give
athletic scholarships or merit or leadership scholarships which can simply be a
disguise for athletic scholarships. I hope that we remain active in NESCAC and
don't seek some other form of conference affiliation, and I suspect that we
will see more sports offered at the varsity level than we have now. That's not
a terribly bold set of predictions, but I think that if any of them turned out
to be wrong we would have a radically different kind of institution.
The Campus: Lastly, do you have any favorite sports
memory from your time as President?
J-Mac: Certainly winning that very first national
championship in hockey was a special moment, and the team gave me a ring from
that year. They put their numbers on them, on mine
they put 'P'.
That was a very special moment. I remember going to
Lehigh to watch the women's lacrosse team win their first championship, and
winning that first men's lacrosse championship was the same way.
But you know, in many ways the most touching moment
of all was the dedication of Kohn Field, because here you had a group of very
generous donors whose children were all involved in athletics who thought it
was important to build that turf field and who could very well have decided to
put any one of their names on it, and they said no, we ought to name this for
Peter, and that tells you a lot about this place.