While I appreciate Stephen Bednar ’60’s opinion about ending the sprint football program (letters, Feb. 24), I do not appreciate his tactic of trying to make his point through embarrassing the team and its players by highlighting a lopsided score of a single game.
As someone who recently spent four years on the team, sprint football was one of the hallmarks of my Princeton experience, despite the team only winning one game during my tenure. I was able to compete in a sport that I loved at a collegiate level with dedicated teammates, and I was proud to continue on a tradition that has been at Princeton for more than 75 years.
The team maintains a strong alumni base that would never allow Dr. Bednar’s suggestion to come to fruition and even scrimmages the current squad every fall in a full contact game. I know my former teammates and fellow sprint football alumni will agree that we were all able to experience something as a part of that team that we could never find in a college classroom. Sprint football is the only varsity sport at Princeton that is exclusively open to “walk-ons” and does not rely on recruits, a unique opportunity that many students have taken advantage of and a policy that is not practiced by our opponents.
Despite the present economic climate, I believe that it is important for Princeton to maintain programs like these that have been a part of our campus community and offered so much to hundreds of students for decades.