Millikin University, being a private university with Division III athletics, is known more for its academics. Not only can we not grant athletic scholarships, but few Division III athletes have proceeded to make major league in anything. However, athletics still play a huge role in the campus community. They serve to attract recruits, and participants remain a huge contributor to the campus life.

But what makes these students contributors?

Athletes at Millikin tend to be far more sociable and outgoing than other students. They have to be in order to function as part of a team. These are the students that manage to reel in the recruits with their witty and desirable comments and interests. Truly, Millikin gets a large portion of its students from athletic visits and otherwise.

I know that one of the main reasons I was interested in Millikin was because of the kindness former Track and Field Coach Doehring showed me upon hearing of my interest in the school. While I no longer participate in sports, I (and many others) were affected greatly by the athletes here.

However, being an art/ English writing major in the honors program, I was an exception.

The majority of athletes seem to be in either a medical or business associated major. Sport management, physical education, and health, recreation and fitness all tend to draw in athletes, as athletics are a major part of their future careers. Nursing, biology and likewise are related majors that could lend similar careers. Business, however, I could not find directly related. But living on the floor beneath the business LLC last year, you could easily tell that many of them were athletes simply by the sounds of bouncing balls late into the night.

In the honors program, we have few athletes. There are some reasons for this, the best I could think of was a lack of time. Some sports require practices to run late into the night, sometimes until ten, eleven or even midnight. Others require early morning practices, sometimes as early as four or five. Furthermore, athletes require more sleep to function, thus preventing them from staying up later than necessary.

Yet this does not always stop these sportswear-clad individuals from going out on the weekends.

Being more sociable also leads athletes to the desire to attend more parties on the weekends, with only the fear of hangovers or random drug tests holding them back. As many of us have heard in the rumor (I cannot prove its validity) about the soccer team removing players due to excessive partying, this has occasionally proven to be an issue.

Yet regardless, athletes still remain an important part of campus life. And this, we should never ignore.