The Continentals have struggled in NESCAC competition across all sports this season. In non-conference games, the story is the same. While not a representative sample this early on in the season, it does illustrate a problem within athletics on campus—an inability to compete within the NESCAC and more broadly within Division III athletics.
With such a dramatic claim, one may point to the fact that the Men’s Hockey team won the NESCAC last year, and Men’s Basketball won the NESCAC the year before; therefore, the program is competitive. To debunk that is simple: five colleges last year won more NESCAC championships in 2024 than Hamilton has won in the last four years combined. Most of these championship runs were sparked by firsts for the college. When over 50 years into a program’s history you are still having firsts, that is generally not a good sign.
Those three championships won between 2024 and 2020 have been a golden age for Hamilton, as beforehand a singular win in 2003 was the extent of the college’s success this century. Three programs, Middlebury (6), Tufts (5) and Williams (5), had more wins last year than the Continentals in 25 years. Put simply, a below average year for Middlebury is a renaissance over half a decade for Hamilton.
This is not about the student athletes who put their blood, sweat and tears in athletics but rather the higher ups who are paid to produce this product. They are not only cheating the student body but the very student athletes they are meant to champion.
To compare Hamilton to the likes of Syracuse or Colgate would be unfair; they are Division I programs and therefore well funded. But the income of Name, Image, and Likeness and pay to play has yet to trickle down to the NESCAC and Division III. Looking at history, this lack of competitiveness from the Continentals is not a new phenomenon. To find success for most programs at Hamilton, you need to go back to before women were allowed on campus. Hamilton should be able to compete with the giants of the NESCAC and yet somehow is unable to even come close. Hamilton has few things in excess, money being one of them, and yet the college seems unable to buy a win most days.
Outside of that, the college is still without an athletic director despite having a summer to fill the position. Communication has been sparse and as a result the programs have suffered. The team chosen to pick the new director has only two students, though this lack of student representation in large college decisions is common. The athletics department is unable to focus on improving itself without a leader, something they have been unable to find after the abrupt departure of the previous one and a seeming lack of urgency in filling the vacancy.
The current focus on athletics and athletes alike gets students to come out to watch their sports teams—but what is there to watch? Hamilton Football has not had a winning season since 1996. We are told we have a rivalry with Middlebury but no history backs this. Is it a rivalry if you haven’t won in over two decades? Golf, the only team with consistent success, is unwatchable in its current form to students. Hockey carries Hamilton culture around campus but that may only be because of the Citrus Bowl and the violence it allows.
Why should a student body dedicate itself to a lack of success and inadequate viewing experiences? Time is precious and Hamilton’s athletic programs have yet to prove they hold enough value for students to invest in them. Often club sports outshine college ones. Most weekends, Men’s Rugby has a bigger crowd then most Hamilton games. T-shirts and gimmicks can only go so far. When you start having to create apps to bribe students to sporting events, there is a systematic failure in play that an app-sized bandaid is unable to solve.
There is no quick fix, no solution that magically makes Hamilton competitive or brings fans to games. But with one will come the other, and once the administration or athletics admits there is a problem, the faster solutions can be found. Otherwise, Hamilton is destined to languish in the one thing worse than mediocrity, irrelevancy.
