Yale Alumni Magazine: Sporting Life

In the annals of Yale soccer, it will go down as The Shot.

It was late afternoon on Sunday, November 13, in New Haven, and the women's soccer team was in the second round of the NCAA College Cup championships. With the clock winding down on regulation, the team was locked in a surprising 1-1 tie with Duke, which was then ranked 10th in the country to Yale's 22nd. The Bulldogs were having a good season -- on November 5 Yale had won the Ivy League title outright for the first time in the program's history -- but the Blue Devils had beaten them 1-0 early in the year and were expected to win again. Then, with one second on the clock, Yale midfielder Laurel Karnes '06 deflected a cross from Crysti Howser '09 past a stunned Duke goalie for a huge upset.

Coach Rudy Meredith declared he'd never seen an endgame like it in his decades as a player and coach. The Shot marked one of the single best moments in the university's athletic history. But it wasn't the only success story.

Autumn 2005 was one of the best sports seasons in recent memory.

Autumn 2005 was one of the best sports seasons in recent memory, as Yale's finest held their own against national powers. The men's and women's soccer teams each won at least a share of the Ivy title and played in their respective national tournaments; the women won two of the NCAA games before exiting proudly in a hard-fought game against last year's defending champion, Notre Dame. The women's volleyball team fell just a game short of the league title. And women's sailing continued its recent string of dominance, winning a major season-ending event and finishing second in another.

Sailing is one sport for which no college in the country gives athletic scholarships, so Yale enjoys a rare level recruiting field. When sailing moved from club to varsity status in 2002, increased funding for coaching, equipment, and travel helped put Yale at or near the top of the nation's programs. The team was ranked first much of this season and won the Atlantic Coast Championships, and those triumphs likely will beget more winning. "Everyone wants to be on a good team," says All American sailor and team captain Molly Carapiet '06. It doesn't hurt that Carapiet got to go to Hawaii for the Singlehanded North American Championships -- and won.

For this year's soccer stars, choosing Yale required more of a leap of faith. The Yale men had winning records in seven of the prior nine years, but they hadn't won a league title since 1991. The women hadn't won a share of the league title since 1992. Yet Alex Munns '07 says the men's soccer team was full of talent. For good soccer players, there's a trade-off, he says: "You may not win the national title, but you can get an education unrivaled pretty much in this country, and play for a team that's going to compete consistently against the top ten."

The Ivy League competition was especially stiff for men's soccer. Heading into their final league contest, against Princeton, the Bulldogs had little hope of winning a share of the title -- not only would Yale would have to win, but also, league leaders Dartmouth and Brown would have to tie. About 45 minutes before the Yale-Princeton game started, Yale coach Brian Tompkins learned that the improbable had occurred: Dartmouth 2, Brown 2. He decided not to tell his players: "My thinking was that if the players knew all they had to do was win the game to share the Ivy title, it might make them a bit more nervous than they needed to be." Many of the players were still in the dark at the end of the game -- until their teammates jumped off the bench and streamed onto the field to celebrate the victory and the co-championship.

Women's soccer faced no such drama. The team easily wrapped up the Ivy crown with a rout of Brown. Yet the moment was special for coach Meredith, who had never before won the league title; he says now that it was as sweet as the NCAA victory against Duke.

With both soccer teams returning the bulk of their key contributors, each should again challenge for the league title, but repeats won't come easy. "The Ivy League has a lot of parity in men's soccer, and the talent level of a number of teams is very high," says Tompkins, whose team made the NCAA tournament but lost at home in overtime, 2-1, to Stony Brook. Meredith says, "I worry about the post-championship season. You have to be prepared for everybody to step up against you. I don't know how we're going to handle it." It's a worry Meredith's coaching rivals would love to have.

The Anthropology of The Game
by Carl Zimmer '87

Carl Zimmer '87 writes about science for the New York Times. His books include Soul Made Flesh and Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins.

I came to The Game on a warm November 19 as an amateur anthropologist.

I had been to a few Yale football games as an undergraduate; after my wife Grace and I returned to the New Haven area two years ago, we'd gone to a few more. But this would be my first Harvard-Yale game. In all this time, I've never really understood its mystique. I didn't even know how Grace should dress. Raccoon coat? Jeans? I had no idea. Clearly I was going to have to learn about the culture of The Game from scratch.

We crossed the street into Lot D and entered, well, chaos.

In my self-appointed role as an anthropologist, I decided we couldn't just head straight to our seats in the bleachers. Instead, Grace and I hiked along an arc, making our way past an inflatable bulldog that towered over the parking lots like a canine sphinx. We passed the Harvard Club of Fairfield County's tent and other sedate attractions situated near the Yale Bowl. We then crossed the street into Lot D and entered, well, chaos.

Rows of U-Haul trucks, loaded with speakers blasting hip-hop and Guns 'n' Roses, rose above huge crowds. With a new halftime curfew in effect, people seemed to be getting as much alcohol into their systems as quickly as possible. Some were held upside down as they drank beer from kegs. Others drank Bloody Marys at the tailgate set up by School of Public Health students. It looked as if a lot of the people surrounding us had forgotten The Game completely.

By the time we made it to our seats, Yale was leading 7-3 in the second quarter. As I settled in to watch the action, I tried to use The Game as a telescope to look back in evolutionary time. How did our history over the past few million years shape our minds and bodies so that something like football would become such a passion? Primates are intensely social animals, and humans are intensely social primates. Our hominid ancestors formed larger and larger groups, and acquired the mental capacity to cooperate on complicated projects. The players on both teams were working together like a seamless whole, in part because they could understand the intentions of their teammates. Without mind-reading, there would be no football.

Some researchers claim that sports are a form of sexual display.

When people talk about human evolution, sports usually comes up as an example of how hardwired our behavior is. Some researchers claim that sports are a form of sexual display -- males competing with other males to show observing females how strong and smart they are. But once women were allowed to join team sports, they proved to be able to play fiercely and competitively as well. And certainly when I looked around at the people who had come to The Game, I saw plenty of shouting males, not an unbroken sea of swooning female faces.

A more interesting perspective on The Game comes from Greg Downey, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. He points out that sports such as football put the human body and mind through a remarkable transformation. As athletes train, they rewire their brains and alter the way the genes in their muscle cells work. And while the Harvard and Yale football players resculpt themselves in one way, their counterparts who do gymnastics, long-distance running, swimming, fencing, and other sports are transforming themselves in other directions. Go to other cultures, and you'll find people who have been remodeled for still other kinds of performance -- from Brazilian capoeira dancers to Japanese pearl divers. Rather than showing how hardwired we are, football shows just how malleable our bodies are under the force of culture. And we humans are unique in this regard -- call us Homo athleticus.

As an amateur anthropologist, I was also interested in the people in the stands: the crew-cut boys from West Haven, the young families with babies in slings, the old alums in tweed jackets. A man and a woman emerged from a nearby gate and stopped in front of us. They chatted for a while, their gaze drifting from The Game to the stands and back.

Before long people were yelling, "Down in front!" The offenders didn't hear the complaints at first because of the noise of The Game. That got people angrier. When the couple finally did notice, the two of them sauntered slowly away, trying to look as if they had just decided to move on of their own accord.

"Harvard," a woman near me said. Her voice had the same tone as if she were saying, "Typical."

The amateur anthropologist in me snapped to attention. How did she know the couple was from Harvard? I hadn't noticed any giant H on their coats. I strained to look at them as they walked away. In the woman's hair I could just make out a thin crimson ribbon.

The differences between Harvard and Yale are minuscule when you compare them with the differences between nations, ethnicities, and religions. Yet their rivalry supports a healthy trade in sweatshirts, scarves, hats, and hair ribbons in order to draw that distinction as brightly as possible. Anthropologically speaking, this is a distinctly human behavior. A chimpanzee can tell a friend from a stranger, and bands of chimps will even engage in deadly battles over territory. But chimpanzees don't adorn themselves with leaves or flowers to distinguish themselves from others.

Humans, on the other hand, have been drawing that line for tens of thousands of years. In South Africa, archaeologists have found caches of snail shells dating back 75,000 years, each carefully drilled to be strung on a necklace. This early jewelry may well have served to identify people as part of a group, and as David Berreby '79 has written in his new book, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, we humans have a penchant for seeing ourselves this way. But we don't need to carry sandwich boards to show which side we're on. A slender ribbon can be enough.

It was supposed to be over, but some people were still trying to drink from two beer bottles at the same time.

At halftime, with Yale ahead 14-3 and seemingly cruising to its first win in five years, I decided to see what had become of the U-Haul party. It was supposed to be over, but the music still boomed, people still danced in dense packs, and some people were still trying to drink from two beer bottles at the same time. The divisions were subtler here. The Harvard and Yale shirts tended to be clustered together, but any bright dividing line was covered in the mud. The police were discreetly moving from truck to truck, slowly persuading the DJs that their playlists had come to an end.

Back at the Bowl, The Game charged on, as Harvard evened the score at 24-all near the end of the fourth quarter and sent the contest into overtime -- something that had never happened in the previous 121 Games. Then it went into double overtime, then triple overtime. As late afternoon shadows deepened and it seemed possible The Game would have to end in a tie -- the Bowl has no field lights -- Harvard's Matt Berg intercepted a pass, and three plays later, Harvard had a touchdown. I still feel a bit sad as I write this, which makes me think I understand a little more what The Game is about. Just don't ask me for fashion advice.