Letter to the editor

To the Editor:

I endorse Michael Shapiro’s point that “The response to a perennially slumping team is not to destroy it, but to fix it.” But “slumping” is hardly the appropriate adjective. The Times pointed out that Columbia has had only five winning seasons in the 56-year history of the Ivy League (“Millions? Private Jet? Columbia Offers New York,” Dec. 7). A recent Wall Street Journal feature showed not only that Columbia’s historical percentage of victories ranks last in the league, but also that it is light years below the seventh team.

None of that is news to me. I entered Columbia in 1954, the year the Ivy League was formed. As a rabid fan, I have probably sat through as many losing games as almost anyone in the country. So my optimism about a new coach is, to say the least, guarded. I have seen coaches come and go, athletic directors come and go, New York City decline and revive. The only constant is that we continue to lose.

My contemporaries try to understand what fundamental problem could account for a half-century of failure. When I suggested to one friend that merely bringing in another new coach (which I think was absolutely necessary) is tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, he responded, “It’s worse than that—there are no chairs, there’s no ship.” Someone suggested that having the training facility five miles from campus is an insurmountable problem, but another pointed out that Yale’s facility is a couple of miles from campus.

I want to believe that a new coach will make things better, but I would feel more comfortable if the powers that be had a reasoned analysis of the range of underlying problems, and why they have not responded to so many previous “fixes.”

Ernest Brod CC ’58, Law ’61
Columbia Spectator Trustee
1957-1958 Spectator Sports Editor and WKCR Sports Director
Dec. 12, 2011