In the top-heavy world of college sports, it’s easy to focus entirely on football and basketball and ignore the 23 other sports recognized by the NCAA.
At Ohio State or Notre Dame, that would be fine, but this attitude often causes Northwestern’s best teams to go overlooked.
And that’s too bad, because our lesser-known winter sports are tearing it up this year.
Leading the charge is women’s tennis, where Claire Pollard’s squad is leaving a trail of elite teams in its wake. While the men’s and women’s basketball teams were falling to their Big Ten counterparts last weekend, junior star Georgia Rose and her teammates beat No. 12 Fresno State, No. 7 California, and No. 14 North Carolina on consecutive days at the prestigious National Indoor Championships.
The scores of these duals? 4-0, 4-0, and 4-0. Clearly, these girls have attended the Bill Belichick School of Winning (pre-Super Bowl XLII, that is).
While the Wildcats lost 4-2 to defending NCAA champion Georgia Tech in the final, the result wasn’t heartbreaking for the team; NU had knocked off the then-No. 1 Yellow Jackets the week before.
These girls won’t be just a flash in the pan either. The squad has only one senior, and its highest-ranked player, No. 2 Maria Mosolova, is a freshman.
The wrestling team has been equally impressive thus far. Many thought the departure of NCAA champion Jake Herbert to train for the Olympics would cripple the squad. The Cats quickly proved the naysayers wrong and took their place among the nation’s best schools. Currently No. 11, the grapplers are led by the gargantuan Dustin Fox, who as the top-ranked heavyweight in the country is truly a Big Man On Campus.
Even NU’s most obscure winter sport has gotten into the act. Quietly, the fencing team has beaten top-10 foe after top-10 foe behind the best foil squad in the country (if that reference means nothing to you, don’t worry; I barely understand it myself).
The Cats’ best athlete no one has heard of might be foilist Sam Nemecek. The junior posted an unconscious 224-37 record in her first two seasons and has only lost one match this year. She has also been a de facto assistant coach while recovering from a knee injury.
This barrage of small-sports success is nothing new for NU. Between lacrosse’s total domination of the NCAA in recent years and men’s soccer posting a 12-5-3 record, the sports that don’t make ESPN are the highlights of this school’s athletic program.
Nowhere is this fact more apparent than in the standings for the Director’s Cup. Awarded to the best all-around athletic school, the Cup has gone to Stanford the last 14 years. Last year, the Cats finished a respectable 30th, a feat made more incredible when you consider that basketball and football combined for zero points of our final total.
Despite these myriad triumphs, the victories of the school’s “other” teams tend to go unnoticed by the general NU community. Most of us would rather dream of our next bowl game than go and cheer on our lesser-known teams, when in fact the small sports are the best we’ve got.
If you want to see TV cameras, go to Welsh-Ryan Arena; if you want to see NU win, go watch tennis, or wrestling, or fencing.
I think you’ll find a Cats’ victory more satisfying.
Assistant sports editor and message-board pariah Jake Simpson is a Medill junior. He can be reached at
