When Sport Does It Right

As someone who worked in college athletics for more than two decades (and still dabbles in it), my favorite stories aren’t the underdog who surprises or the cutting down the nets after earning a championship. Not even close.

My favorite stories are the ones that demonstrate how far the combination of athletics and education can take someone.

Just today provided a perfect example.

In my previous life I was the Associate Director of the Ivy League, which is comprised of eight of the most renown and decorated institutions in the world. Most people can tick off Harvard, Yale and Princeton without reflection. The other five are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn.

Those schools emphasize athletics. Not that they offer athletic scholarships, but that the have far more sports and many more athletes than your big-time programs, be it Purdue or IU, Florida or USC.

Athletics in the Ivy League are fiercely competitive (just like admissions), but sport is intended as an integrated component of a quality education. Even in the most hallow of halls, people know that lessons learned on a field of competition may very well last longer than those drilled in the classroom.

That’s why I enjoyed telling the story of Samyr Laine today. Five years ago, he was an Ivy League champion triple jumper, but injuries robbed him of an opportunity to defend his title as a senior. But when an opportunity was lost, he found another, packing up his Harvard degree and setting sail for Austin, Texas, with one final year of eligibility… as a Texas Longhorn.

While earning his graduate degree at UT, he made connections with people who saw to it that he represent the nation of Haiti in international competition. Already national class, he kept getting better and better as the triple jump takes about 10 years to master. Samyr now holds the Haitian national record and attends law school at Georgetown University.

But he is taking a break from his studies this week to visit Doha, Qatar, where he will compete in the IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships on Friday. The trip is teaching him more and more about what it means to represent Haiti on a world stage as well. Through sport he became an ambassador of the devastated nation where his parents were born.

I put the story online this morning and within an hour a member of the Office of Admissions of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar emailed me because she hopes to “get a contingent of Hoyas from our Qatar campus here to the Aspire Zone to cheer him on this Friday and again (insha’allah) on Sunday evening at the finals!”

Nothing like strangers rallying around a law student a half world away from his childhood home, the sleepy town of Newburgh, N.Y., along the Hudson River.

Yup, those are the stories I love.

2010 Virginia Tech Challenge – Final Jump from Samyr Laine on Vimeo.