When I applied to Occidental, I wrote my personal essay about the baseball fields I grew up playing on in my native Brooklyn. Fields without chalk lines, with skewed dimensions, pockmarked dirt, overgrown grass and trash cans in the outfield. One of the fields was even built in the backyard of a sewage plant. The lack of quality in these spaces became an important part of my mindset — it didn’t matter to me where I played as long as I was playing at all. At Occidental, I get to see a well-kept mound, clear baselines and a gorgeous backdrop of Los Angeles and mountains stretching out for miles. I see all of this from behind two locked fences.
Occidental has numerous athletic facilities all over campus: sports fields, gyms, a pool and more. But most of them are closed to the non-athlete student community or otherwise have extremely restricted access. The baseball, softball and upper campus soccer fields aren’t available to anyone except the teams that play there, and the athlete-only Culley Athletic Facility gym doesn’t let players use it when not participating in whole-team lifts. Even the pool, one of the most desirable hangout spots on campus, has extremely limited open swim hours. Occidental bars the majority of its community from substantial parts of what it has to offer — and most of the time, the athletes aren’t even using their own areas, according to my friends on various teams.
It seems like a waste to have huge swaths of usable recreational space just sitting there, completely off-limits to the sizable portion of the student body who would want to access them. I’ve walked by the empty baseball and softball fields more times than I can count, especially during the Fall semester before their seasons start. As someone who still plays baseball recreationally, I would jump at the opportunity to use the field to host a practice or scrimmage with my friends in similar situations.
Having a sign-up system to reserve times to use the fields and other exclusive facilities would be an easy solution to this problem that wouldn’t be hard to implement. It would ensure these spaces weren’t largely abandoned, and a reservation slot would also provide information on who was on the field at specific times. This would mean accountability for anyone who might cause damage, as well as a way to track which resources students are interested in.
Still, there are arguments that general access to otherwise restricted facilities would undermine the purpose of designated spaces for athletes, or that the wear and tear on equipment is too great a risk. Those are reasonable points, but it’s the school’s responsibility to maintain the equipment, not the teams’. In a perfect world, Occidental would be forced to do maintenance if there were widespread usage of those spaces. More people having a stake in the condition of the facilities would mean a stronger voice for upkeep and maybe even an increase in interest in the teams that open their gates.
That being said, Occidental doesn’t have a good track record of caring about the non-athlete experience. Looking at where the administration allocates funding makes its priorities clear, and the blame doesn’t fall on any decisions by teams or coaches. Our liberal arts competitors are making new spaces available to everyone, such as Pomona-Pitzer’s $57 million athletics center, which opened in 2022. Occidental seems content to do the bare minimum to claim it offers a well-rounded experience, but with roughly 75% of the student body not participating in varsity athletics, that promise falls short for most. The school has the capacity to solve this, but funding general physical amenities for students is clearly not one of its top goals. The Alumni Gymnasium that opened in 2010 hasn’t received any renovations since, and it doesn’t exactly have a robust selection of equipment.
For what it’s worth, we’re lucky to have access to some areas in the first place. Recently, my friends and family on the East Coast have been sending me pictures of snow piled up above their heads as they dream about a spring thaw that won’t come for months. Talking to them makes me grateful that I get to spend a large portion of my days outside on Patterson field playing catch and stretching in Southern California’s warm February weather. But even that isn’t close to the full experience.
There’s a divide between how athletes and non-athletes are treated by Occidental, and barring the majority of students from accessing parts of the campus we pay for with our tuition only exacerbates the issue. Of course, teams should have exclusive access to their spaces during their own practice and game times, but it’s a waste of school resources to have those areas be completely unused otherwise. There are equitable solutions to this issue that would allow every student to use the campus we live on to its fullest potential. I hope those changes happen soon, but it would require a level of commitment to non-athletes that Occidental has yet to show.
Contact Angus Parkill at parkhill@oxy.edu
