A lot has changed in the four years since I started covering Penn sports. Ten head coaches have left the school.
We started losing to Columbia in basketball.
And we went from a "split-P" logo and a mascot in a Quaker suit to new "split-P" logo and a different guy in a Quaker suit.
But most things haven't changed at all.
We still haven't beaten Princeton at lacrosse, students are still severely overcharged to attend the Penn Relays and the softball team is still losing more games than it wins.
But the one change I was hoping for never occurred. Penn athletes, like their counterparts around the Ivy League, are still treated like little children.
They're told when to study and when they're allowed to play.
They're told when they are allowed to speak and when to keep quiet.
They're the only students at Penn with their own public-relations staff.
And for the most part, Penn's athletes listen and follow along.
They keep quiet when they disagree with the way the school or the league is treating them. Case in point, the historic reticence of football players, despite their unhappiness with the Ivy League's ban on postseason play.
They're told to keep quiet in times of controversy or tragedy, and they go along with it.
There was once a time when athletes were the biggest leaders on this campus; John Edgar Wideman, a Penn basketball star who graduated in 1966, may be the best example.
On the court, he led Penn to its first-ever Big 5 title. Off the court, he was a regular on the dean's list, Phi Beta Kappa and then only the second African-American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.
A 1963 column in the The Daily Pennsylvanian said this about him:
"Today's Penn athlete is more of a student than ever before, and yet Quaker teams still produce a high caliber of competition. ... In this age of specialization, the Ivy athlete emerges as an example of all-around excellence."
In an era of extreme racial tension on campus, Wideman was a leader for the entire student population. He shaped campus discourse. He spoke out when he disagreed.
Many of today's Ivy League athletes are just as smart as Wideman. The current basketball team has another potential Rhodes scholar on its roster in Steve Danley.
But Wideman played in an era before massive athletic departments with multi-million dollar budgets. He was a Penn student who happened to play sports, not an athlete who happened to attend Penn.
Each class has a diverse group of activist leaders. That group normally features an eclectic mixture of student voices -- some from student government, others from performing arts groups and more from cultural organizations.
But the structure of modern day NCAA athletics -- particularly in the Ivy League -- puts athletes in a box.
They are forced into regimented schedules, with designated work outs in the gym and required study halls. They have bureaucracies of professional adults built around them. If they have a problem, they have to deal with their own athletic administrators before they even think about reaching out to the larger Penn community.
I have seen and written about a lot of things in my four years at Penn and I've learned that Penn athletes are some of the smartest and hardest-working people, with some of the most dynamic personalities on campus.
But it is my wish in this, my final column in this sports section, that athletes start now to become leaders of a community that goes far beyond Franklin Field or the Palestra. David Burrick is a senior urban studies major from Short Hills, N.J., and former Senior Sports Editor and Executive Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mailaddress is dburrick@sas.upenn.edu
