This past weekend I had the great opportunity to travel to Columbus, Ohio to be on the field at the 100,000-seat capacity Ohio Stadium, home of the defending college football playoff national champion Ohio State Buckeyes.
The No. 1 team in the country took on my hometown Hawaii Rainbow Warriors in front of a sold-out 107,145-person crowd at “The Shoe.” Although a great sight to see, I didn’t think it was too overwhelming.
When it came time to choosing what college I wanted to attend, the only reason I would consider going to a big state school would be because of the crazy gameday atmospheres.
When I had looked at the University of Hartford for the first time, I was surprised that it had a Division I athletics program despite having a relatively small enrollment size.
After having attended many Hartford Hawks games, I am left wondering where our own sense of school spirit, tradition and culture is at.
I appreciate each and every single one of the students and fans that have gone out to games to support, but I feel like the school spirit, personal pride is lacking at times.
Sure, we don’t have multi-million dollar facilities, a DI football team, a long line of national championships or anything crazy like that. But we have the same thing that every other school in the world has and that is: students.
After whining about why we don’t have any cool traditions or much of a crazy atmosphere, I realized that it’s all on us.
I guess we don’t have the luxury of having a culture and tradition to have been passed down to us.
We need to go and create that positive culture and environment ourselves.
Instead of waiting and complaining about what we don’t have, we just need to go out and do it ourselves.
It’s all on us.
Even athletics director Anton Goff said that it’s all about what the “Dirty Birds” want and what they want to do.
The athletics department and administration is not going to tell us what to do and they’re not going to create the culture for us.
It has to be built organically with the students.
Like I said earlier, it was fun and a cool experience to be at Ohio Stadium, but the crowd just felt so distant and far away.
But that’s an advantage Hawk Nation can have.
Our facilities aren’t overly ginormous so we can get right up in there in the faces of our players and the other team to give us a huge home-field advantage.
But it also extends past just athletics.
We all have friends or at least know people who go to other schools, and I’m sure we’ve seen them post stuff about cool events or traditions that their school does.
We may not have what they have, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t start it now.
There’s a ton of resources and help on campus, and it takes communication, awareness and a change of attitude to make things happen to become the best that Hawk Nation can be.