Nat Graham | Why the men’s basketball team sits for the anthem
This is a unique year for Penn basketball. The Ivy League was the only league that did not compete last year because of the health risks surrounding COVID-19. Partly because of that hiatus, we have a team that only has a few players with any real college basketball experience at Penn. The rest of the team — whether it be sophomores who missed their first season, players who have not played because of injury, or this year’s first-year class, new to college basketball like any year — has no experience. With that year off, our student-athletes were left to react remotely and in isolation from the rest of our team to the protests that arose from the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace, among many others, as well as incidents like that in Central Park with Amy Cooper telling Christian Cooper she was going to weaponize the police against him.