How an Op-Ed in Support of Football Divided Oberlin’s Campus
To explain Oberlin’s social scene, Tullis used the dance department’s biannual show, saying that it might include watching spoken word about a performer’s menstrual cycle, maybe while the performer rolls around the stage. Or, she said, “it’s Friday night, you’re, like, let’s go crazy, and then there’s just a guy with a bassoon in the corner.” Such jazz parties, I learned, are one of the few settings in which football players and non-athletes regularly mix outside Oberlin’s classrooms. If the football team has live jazz at a postgame party, Lucy Wadman, another senior, said that she will try to get there early to snag a good spot where she can hear the music clearly. She does not, however, attend the football games themselves, at least not since the home opener her freshman year.
Oberlin won that day, one of two victories while Wadman has been on campus. That night, the jazz party, she told me, was probably the biggest party of her first three years. “It was insane,” she said. “Nobody cared, obviously, but it was just something to celebrate.” It makes you wonder what the Review coverage would read like if the Yeomen would just win another game.
Oberlin is not without some real football history. The last team in Ohio to beat Ohio State? That would be Oberlin, a 7–6 win in 1921. The first coaching job for John Heisman, of college-football-trophy fame, in 1892? That would be Oberlin again. And the school Peyton Manning almost chose before committing to Tennessee, when every program in the country was fighting for him? O.K., that one wasn’t Oberlin, but you get the point.
Football at Oberlin has not always felt so oxymoronic. But the true tradition, no matter the era, is the debate about how—or whether—football fits into Oberlin’s culture. “It’s part of Oberlin folklore to think of athletics as a problem, in some way,” Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic studies, told me. Faber has been at Oberlin since 1999 and is in his first semester advising the student paper. “I think if you would run through the archives of the Oberlin Review,” he said, “you would see on the op-ed page regularly the same kinds of pieces about how football should be abolished, then people saying, ‘No, no, the football players that I know are also really good musicians and they love to read novels.’ It’s a permanent battle.”
When Khalid McCalla, a member of the Oberlin class of 2021, was looking to play college football, Division I coaches told him that he was too slow for a running back and too small to play linebacker. He ended up as a linebacker—at Oberlin. At his freshman orientation, in 2017, someone told him that there were three distinct groups on campus: athletes, NARPs (non-athletic regular people), and Obies. Ask fifteen Obies to define the term and you might get fifteen different responses. One clean answer is anyone in a co-op. But, broadly, an Obie is more likely than the average student to say “sportsball” or “athletic-type person” to describe an athlete. They’re also more likely to walk around barefoot, or to participate in activities like jello wrestling, as many students did during a weekend music festival last spring.
McCalla wanted to bridge these social divides, which eventually led him to quit football to do more on campus. (He was unhappy with how little playing time he was getting, too.) Another Oberlin graduate told me that McCalla was like a translator between athletes and non-athletes. But McCalla felt that some friends looked at him sideways for being on the team in the first place, because they felt that sports were “tools of the patriarchy or tools of oppression,” he said.
