The College Court | Playing through the pain of sports: Are student-athletes masochists?

Emma Carmichael Columnist

Somewhere just outside of Hoboken, N.J. on the night of Tuesday, Nov. 27, I reached an astonishing conclusion, one that nearly made me choke on my Wendy’s chicken sandwich and one that will surely break psychological ground in just a matter of weeks. I, Emma Carmichael, am what I hereafter classify an “athletic masochist.”

Let me explain my reasoning and the specifics of this landmark term. That Tuesday, I found myself on a stuffy Coach bus at about 12:30 in the morning. Three hours earlier I had played 35 minutes in a basketball game against Stevens Institute of Technology, during which I had been thrown to the floor more times than I could count by players that could probably bench my body weight. I had dalmatian-like bruises dotting my upper arms, and a suspicious pain crawling up my left foot and into my calf. I was eating a barely-cooked piece of meat from Wendy’s (definitely not free-range chicken), and a large glob of the mysterious orange-tinted sauce had just dripped onto my urban theory reading. I had Intro to Psychology in eight-and-a-half hours and I had yet to crack open my textbook that week. And to top it all off, we had lost by 32 points. It was, needless to say, a low point.

There seems to be only one explanation for my resigned acceptance of this kind of lifestyle: athletic masochism. I am a masochistic athlete. I derive pleasure and satisfaction from pain and humiliation. Surely this is the reason that I surrender my October break to play basketball for five hours a day during double sessions, take only 48 hours off for Thanksgiving and during Winter Break move my belongings into Noyes for two weeks, where I live off of PB&Js and canned soup. Obviously this is the explanation for why I consent to run “Sweet 16s” in practice every week—16 sprints from sideline to sideline in one minute and five seconds.

There’s no other way to rationalize it when I’m bent over in pain, nearly spewing my ACDC wrap onto the hardwood after running a suicide, or when I got up at 4:30 a.m. for early morning practices last year. I, and all college athletes, must get some sick satisfaction out of this torture. We are masochists.

Once I arrived back on campus, I set out to test my hypothesis. I approached my fellow student-athletes and asked them about the lowest point of their collegiate career. I didn’t have to look too far.

Senior Elise Okusami is my teammate on the women’s basketball team; she averages 9.6 points per game and is leading the team in steals this season. She is also the starting fly on the women’s rugby team, which is headed to the USA Rugby Sweet 16 national tournament this spring, and led the team with 13 tries this fall. She told me about the injury she suffered on Oct. 20 of this year, when playing rugby against Radcliffe (Harvard) in Cambridge.

“I bruised my ribs in that game, and the athletic trainers said the only way to heal them was to rest,” said Okusami. “But it was during playoff time, so I had to play. We had two games in one day and in one of them I ended up getting stuck under the bottom of this pile of people and someone was lying right on that spot. So I was killed for a few days.”

Nevertheless, Okusami played through the pain that afternoon in a loss to Army and a win over University of Massachusetts. “I went home that night and laid down and couldn’t get back up or turn over in bed or anything,” she said. “But rugby’s really not that bad.”

I also talked to Shannon Fuhr, a junior on my team who has dealt with back problems since high school. This season she has been forced to watch from the sidelines as she gets MRI after MRI and travels to consultations with various chiropractors.
“This all really hit me when I would have to ice my back all night all season long, just to be able to sit for the hours I needed to set aside to get my work done every night,” said Fuhr.

Despite her injuries, Fuhr started and scored 4.5 points per game last season and, along with Okusami, was named to the Liberty League All-Academic Team.

In order to prove this was not a women’s basketball-specific masochism, I talked with junior Tyler Bellstrom, who plays infield and pitches for the baseball team.

“Last spring, I pulled an all-nighter for a take-home midterm. I didn’t sleep at all. Then I
boarded a bus at 6 a.m. that morning for a six-hour bus ride to St. Lawrence. But I had to write another paper on the bus,” Bellstrom said.

“We played a double-header at St. Lawrence that day and lost both,” he added. “We had the tying run on second and we hit into a disputed double-play where a guy made a questionable diving catch. I got doubled off the base. Then we drove six hours back to Vassar and I had class the next day.”

Clearly, this psychological condition is ubiquitous amongst college athletes. We sacrifice countless hours of sleep, our vacations, sometimes our grades, usually our social lives and definitely our bodies just to play our respective sports. We put ourselves through immense physical pain and agony to finish a sprint or a lap or to get back on defense. And yet, we still play.

I asked Okusami to list the injuries she’s endured in four years as a two-sport collegiate athlete. She paused for a long while and then rattled them off.

“Chronic tendonitis—but that’s treatable, it’s fine—a sprained shoulder, a stinger, a sprained sternoclavicular joint, a broken pinkie, my bruised ribs, peroneal tendonitis, a few hyper-extended elbows I think, probably a few concussions. And one time I got poked in the eye and it bled—that was kind of gross. And besides that there were more minor things like calcified bruises and a couple black eyes. But none of those were a big deal.”

Maybe it’s not a “big deal” because we still love to play. It’s possible, I suppose, that we aren’t really masochistic. That we don’t get some kind of perverse satisfaction out of our injuries and our sacrifices and our exhaustion. Maybe it’s more that we love to compete, we love being on teams and we love representing Vassar. But sometimes, as on that Tuesday night in Hoboken, we just need little reminders of solidarity in this twisted rationale.

Emma Carmichael ’10 is an urban studies major and a member of the Vassar women’s basketball team. This semester she is editorializing on issues in all divisions of collegiate-level athletics.