Integrating Athletes and Non-Athletes at Colby Alex Beach English 115A * Professor Sheriff Solving the Problem at Colby On the Colby Campus there must be a constructive push from the administration to make the student body more unified and by having making athletes and non-athletes more comfortable together that will make a big difference. After the administration starts the push to get students involved with their peers extracurricular activities the captains of each respective sports team must encourage their teammates to interact with students on the campus not part of their sports team. Finally, the students on campus will have to embrace what being a unified community means. Without that this initiative will become a two week fade that will eventually revert back to normal. The Problem on the Colby Campus On the Colby campus, the athletes experience is much different that what a division I athlete will encounter. Colby has a small student body of around eighteen hundred students, but about 44% of students will be part of a varsity team. Athletes will instantly belong to a group on campus and be able to have a group of close friends, which makes some students never branch out an interact with other students outside the classroom. The problems begin to develop once students begin to only identify with their sports teams. At Colby this can be seen every day you go into the dining hall, the athletes will be sitting with their respective teams and there is very little intermingling of the friend groups. Another issue is the perspective of students is that a lot of athletes do not belong academically at the school. There are definitely students on campus where it would have been hard to get into Colby without athletics helping them in the admission process. There is a view of favoritism on athletes that makes some athletes uncomfortable and feel they are being judged by the student body, and makes athletes constrict themselves to their being around their sports team because they know they are accepted there. At a Colby basketball game the student body makes a difference to the players on the court by showing their support Works Cited Anonymous Colby athlete, Personal Interview, 16 Apr. 2015.   Anonymous Colby non-athlete, Personal Interview, 20 Apr. 2015. "Colby College." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. Dee, Thomas S., Stereotype Threat And The Student-Athlete," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 52(1), pages 173-182, 01. Parker, Clifton B. "Stereotypes Can Affect Athletes' Academic Performance, Stanford Researcher Says." Stanford University. Stanford Report, n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2015..    Shulman, James Lawrence, and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Print. Copyright Colin Purrington (http://colinpurrington.com/tips/academic/posterdesign). The dining halls on campus become the place where the separation in student groups are most evident. The First Three Steps Have the administration push events that get students to come out to each others extracurricular activities -Encourage students to come out to each others events -Holds events that brings the whole student body together The captains of the sports teams must encourage their teammates to break out of their comfort zone and engage with other groups of students on campus -Captains can lead the charge for their team and choose to sit at lunch with someone they don’t know on campus After there has been a strong initiative from leaders on the campus the entire student body must embrace the idea of becoming a single community. -Students must establish connections with people they would not normally hang out with. -Everyone must continue what the administration and the captains started or everything will go back to normal. Research Methods For my research I first used databases to find scholarly journals on the topic of stereotyping athletes on college campuses. Then after my analysis on the causes and effects of athlete stereotypes, I adapted my topic to an issue on the Colby Campus, the integration of Coly athletes on campus. I used articles from the schools newspaper and interviews with members of the Colby community to find different view points on the issue. Acknowledgments I wanted to thank Dr. Sheriff for her help with this project, and to thank the people that I interviewed for giving me information on the problem at Colby.