Spending four months in another country will teach you a lot. In between pints of Stella on Friday nights in Brussels, my academic exchange in Belgium shed light on the cultural differences that make the world such an endlessly fascinating place. One such difference was sport.
I was in a peculiar situation. As one of the few Canadian exchange students at the University of Leuven, I tried to find my place amongst the native Belgians and the majority of Americans that comprised the program. When people found out where I was from, they would respond with a clichéd comment about how I was stuck somewhere in between Europe and North America. I initially reacted with my nationalist rhetoric, explaining that Canada shouldn’t always be compared to other cultures, and that we have many things that make us distinct and unique.
But after a couple of weeks, I came to realize they were kind of right. When it came to campus sports, Canada is caught in the tide somewhere between the Old and New World.
Canadian universities aren’t known for their athletic prowess. With the exception of Western and Laval around the Vanier Cup playoffs, Canadian university students are far too preoccupied with their studies and social melodramas to pay attention to athletics. Granted, U of T suffers from spectator fatigue more than most Canadian institutions. But let’s face it: when it comes to our own athletics, Canadian universities look the other way.
I learned from my American counterparts that it couldn’t be more different south of the border. American college students are obsessed with campus sports. The whole country goes crazy during football bowl season, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single college student in class during the Final Four. Witnessing the mania first-hand made me realize just how important sports are to the American college experience.
Living in my Belgian residence was fellow foreigner Patrick Buley, originally from Kentucky but attending Hanover College in Indiana. “Quite often support for collegiate sports easily surpasses that for professional divisions,” he said. I’ll never forget they day I heard an elated cheer resonate from his room at four in the morning as his basketball team hit a buzzer beater to win the quarterfinals in the Division III playoffs. He cheered for his beloved Panthers with the same gusto I do when the Leafs are in a game seven (if long memory serves me correctly).
Many American students value their campus athleticism as a matter of self-identification and pride. American colleges institutionally support campus sports, both for athletes and for fans. Millions of dollars go into athletic scholarships, training facilities, arenas, fields, and courts. Schools plan activities to make sure students support major rivalry games and turn it into a big event. It’s a whole culture down there, one that Canadians have never experienced at the post-secondary level.
Then there are the Belgians. Over 50 per cent of students at Leuven participate in sports. My old buddy Niels says, “Leuven has a university soccer team, a basketball team, an American football team, a field hockey team, a handball team, a volleyball team, and a gymnastics team.” On a participatory level, student involvement is quite high.
But on the spectator side of things, they show about as much enthusiasm for their teams as they do for Dutch beer. Even though there are many facilities where sporting activities take place, there are barely any places for spectators to watch. No bleachers, stands, or seats, and hardly any standing room.
I was perplexed by how students could be so involved in playing sports, yet so disinterested in watching them.
Unlike the Americans, who had their entire sense of school pride tied up in their Division III basketball team, Belgians had other priorities. Not a single one of my housemates could name a Varsity athlete or tell me the score of last night’s game unless they were playing in it. Their football team’s shameful losing record didn’t phase them one bit.
Canadian students are stuck somewhere in between. Our athletes aren’t celebrities, the Vanier Cup isn’t the holy grail, and a men’s hockey team first round exit doesn’t prompt students to toss themselves off the eleventh floor of Robarts. Most of us don’t obsess over the standings and stats, yet we care enough to notice when our football team wins a game for the first time in seven seasons. So I began to take those clichéd comments as compliments. We’re caught somewhere in between complete obsession and total apathy. A healthy medium, especially when it comes to sports, is a good thing.
