By Ryan Mulligan

When a student is an athlete, their team can feel like a family. That feeling of fraternity or sisterhood is a large part of the reward of being an athlete, and helps students get out of bed at 5 a.m. for practices or meets and sends them to bed happy after a late-night party. At a school where students hold dear a sense of belonging to a community, an athletic team is capable of welcoming and sustaining the individual who makes its goals and hardships his or hers.

But these communities, these families, are sure to meet hurdles. In many communities, an individual’s queer sexuality can be an insurmountable obstacle to their feeling respected or even safe. What happens when a Haverford student athlete is not heterosexual? Will such students still feel like part of a family on the field, in the locker room, or at parties with the team?

As is always the case with difficult questions, there is no simple answer. But Haverford athletes, responding through e-mail to requests for comment, provide a few perspectives.

A male varsity athlete, who wished to speak to the general attitude of male athletics at Haverford and not to any case in particular, said “I think it is more intimidating to come out to a sports team than to one’s own family or a close group of friends. By sheer volume of numbers, you are bound to have people on the team who don’t share the same views as you do and who have different outlooks on life. If you choose to come out to a small group of friends, you can be more certain what their responses will be.”

A female varsity athlete offered a different perspective, saying “I have had gay teammates here at Haverford, and they came out to the team without problems.” She continued, “For them at least, coming out to teammates and friends here at Haverford was much easier than coming out to their families.”

Ivan Meehan is a freshman on the Women’s Track and Cross-Country teams who identifies as bisexual. She spoke about arriving at Haverford.

“The only concern I really had about being queer actually was being on the sports team, specifically sharing locker rooms. I never had to do this before in high school and I didn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” she said. “I like to let people get to know me a little before mentioning it; otherwise that’s the only thing they know about me and I feel they will only think of me as ‘the bisexual.’”

Meehan’s experience thus far has been encouraging.

“I feel you really become close to your teammates early on, and it’s natural to come out to people you care more about since sexual orientation is such a big part of life and it’s weird not to share it no matter what your sexual orientation is. I’m not really sure how much of the team actually knows, but so far, over the course of the year, I have come out to several of them with relatively little stress about it and have not received any negative reactions.”

Ari Worthman ’02 spoke to a similar experience during his time as a gay man on the Haverford Crew team from Fall of 1998 to Spring of 2000.

“I was out when I arrived at Haverford as a freshman and remember wondering, after one of our earlier practices, whether showering in the boathouse’s ‘gang-style’ showers would be an issue for anyone. It never was.”

Worthman believed that his experience on the Crew team turned out to be not so different from his experience with the Haverford community at large.

“The experience of being on an intercollegiate team only reinforced the sense of community that I experienced in other ways at Haverford.”

Other respondents agreed that the atmosphere of their teams reflected the larger atmosphere at Haverford. A member of the Women’s Fencing team, who identifies as asexual, said that her team is no different an environment than any other on campus when it comes to her sexuality.

“The fencing team is a subsection of the Haverford community, true, but it doesn’t really act differently than the Haverford community as a whole,” she said.

The same member of the fencing team said that the individualized nature of competition leads to a different sense of team. “We’re all on a team but we’re all competing and doing things as individuals, which probably makes the ‘team community’ dynamic different…” she noted. She also said that the sport’s “low profile” leads to less stigmatization, and noted that the team’s former coach was gay, which may change how the team “reacts to such things.”

Many students who responded commented on the difference between how sexuality is perceived on a women’s sports team and on a men’s sports team. One anonymous respondent who identified as a queer female athlete spoke about her interactions with her team’s male counterparts at Haverford.

“When I’m around the Men’s team, I have fun interjecting myself into conversations about women. I can tell that it makes them slightly uncomfortable, but they don’t know exactly how to react, so they don’t really. I think the guys make less homophobic statements when I’m in earshot than when I’m out of earshot or they think I’m out of earshot,” she said. “Also, lesbian women aren’t taken seriously. The Men’s team makes jokes all the time about girls making out and how hot that is. It’s like queer women’s sexuality isn’t legitimate. The women, too, see it as something less queer than male queerness.”

A male varsity athlete agreed that the dynamic among female athletic teams would be “more accepting” and “a lot better” for an out student athlete.

“I think there would be individual members of the [male] team who would be accepting and supportive of a homosexual teammate, but I think that the overall dynamic would still change with the team in respect to the person’s sexuality. I’d assume that most things would be passive, but I still think sports teams are very conscious of their masculine elements and having a homosexual player would disrupt some of the team unity.”

Greg Rosnick ’09, captain of the Men’s Basketball team, said that to his knowledge he had never played on a team with a queer athlete, but that the sense of masculinity among most men’s teams would be at odds with stereotypes about homosexual men.

“At least from my point of view, male athletic teams tend to promote masculinity in most everything that they do,” said Rosnick. “Homosexuality, however, is often seen as extremely feminine, which flies in the face of a lot of the aura that surrounds male athletes and athletics more generally. Homosexuality, then, becomes something that is not only not masculine, but non-athletic in a sense. I think you see this a lot in male sports when people say they are playing like a ‘pussy,’ ‘fag,’ etc. This obviously does not create an environment conductive for gays to feel comfortable.”

Most respondents believed that their teammates’ performances, practices, and outward dynamics towards one another, both in competition and in the locker room, would not necessarily change if a teammate were to come out.

One female respondent said “Speaking from experience, my teammates’ sexuality never really mattered in terms of team dynamics or whatever.”

Another male athlete said, “I don’t think having a player come out on a sports team would in any direct way affect the performance of the team. I do think the dynamic between the out player and the team as a whole, or, for certain, the individual player and certain members of the team would change for the negative. I feel the player might feel ostracized and not feel [they are as] welcome as they once were.”

Some athletes responded by saying that they felt obligated not to speak on the subject, out of their desire to make their team a safe space. They considered what they and their teammates say to one another to be privileged information that they have been entrusted not to discuss in a public forum. Some people also expressed their desire to prevent individual views from being seen as representative of several groups of people, especially when those groups are constantly in flux.

Maggie Cronin ’11 of the Field Hockey and Softball teams said, “Being on a team requires you [to] have the utmost trust in your teammates and for me to say anything about my teammates’ sexuality (or really anything about my teammates) feels like a violation of that trust.”

Teams that are successfully able to embrace individual athletes regardless of their sexual orientation have proved foundational to those students’ feelings of acceptance at Haverford.

One female varsity athlete said “When I began my junior year, I realized that I needed to come out to my team in order to be completely up front with them. I was so nervous when I decided to tell everyone and I feared that some would feel uncomfortable with having a gay teammate in the locker room, at parties, etc. However, to my surprise, I found a completely supportive group of teammates who accepted me with open arms. [Thanks to the] fact that coming out to my team was such a smooth endeavor, I was finally able to feel comfortable with myself and being out at Haverford.”

Meehan acknowledged the reciprocal relationship between comfort with one’s team and comfort with the Haverford community in general, saying “As I’m beginning to be out to more people, I feel more comfortable and it’s probably becoming easier to be out with teammates since they are kind of my Haverford family.

Worthman’s story offers a model of a team that successfully allowed an individual to feel fully a part of the community, regardless of his homosexuality.

“The fact that I’m gay never created any type of rift between my teammates and me; the ten to fifteen guys on the team joked and talked about an array of topics—occasionally women or dating—and included me in the conversation when the chitter-chatter veered in that direction,” he said.

The current captain of the Crew Team, Lauren Dickey ’10 expressed her hope that her team would feel like a safe environment if, hypothetically, any member were ever to come out.

“We focus on people working together, which cannot happen when an individual feels alienated. We depend so much on each member of the team and only want to see athletes improve as they learn more about the sport. We spend so much time together that it is important to feel comfortable not just as an athlete on the team, but also as a person.”

One female varsity athlete said “Whether players decide to come out depends on the level of trust, communication, and understanding the team develops…It is very important for the team to create the safe space for anyone to share their concerns that relate to the team.”

Another said, “I really feel like this is an issue that coaches also need to be comfortable dealing with. Teams are just like families and if certain issues provide teammates or coaches with any discomfort it only negatively affects the team.”

Rosnick said that, as far as he knows, he has never played on a team with a queer athlete, but he expressed his hope that anyone he played with would feel comfortable coming out to him and the team.

“I just hope that at Haverford, sports teams would be made up of individuals who create a comforting environment for any member of their team, black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Jewish.”

These responses generally indicate that a feeling of acceptance as part of an athletic team is foundational and necessary for a feeling of acceptance at Haverford in general. There is hope that teams can provide such an environment at Haverford, and that they might live up to this responsibility. Perspectives from different individuals and different teams express different evaluations of their status on the road to achieving such a goal, but it is a goal shared by many on behalf of a few. After all, such is the duty of brothers and sisters.
 

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