Column by Tim Kroboth

If Commonwealth Stadium fell through a hole in the ground before tomorrow’s home opener against Louisville, would you be devastated by boredom resulting from the lack of a home football game on a September Saturday afternoon?

If 123 students dropped your class and only four students and the professor remained, would you be uncomfortable in such a cozy learning environment?

Would you boycott campus dining if all on-campus dining locations, except Commons Market, were shut down?

I wouldn’t. I would be right at home.

If you suspect that I am not a typical UK student, you are correct. I am not a foreign exchange student (unless you deny that the Carolinas were readmitted to the Union following the Civil War), but I am a National Student Exchange (NSE) student. I am one of about a dozen NSE students who have come to UK this academic year to broaden their university experience.

As a student from Winthrop University, a public university in South Carolina, my view of college life has been vastly different. Winthrop’s enrollment of 6,000 students falls well short of UK’s enrollment of more than 27,000. Winthrop lacks a football team, large classes and a wide variety of on-campus dining options.

I have found the differences between the college experience of the two universities to be fascinating, and throughout this semester, I will share my bird’s eye perspective of UK, as a Winthrop Eagle and as a Kentucky Wildcat.

An immediately apparent difference is the prominence of UK sports. Winthrop’s Division I teams, nicknamed the Eagles, are typically an afterthought among students.  On the UK campus, students commonly wear UK paraphernalia, unlike Winthrop’s campus, where Clemson Tigers and South Carolina Gamecocks shirts are more prevalent than Winthrop Eagles gear.

Bad teams are not the problem. Winthrop’s men’s basketball team has earned invitations to March Madness in eight of the last 11 years and capitalized on its 2007 tournament appearance with a 74 to 64 first round victory over Notre Dame. So what’s the reason?

Sports apathy at Winthrop can be partly attributed to its status as a mid-major sports school. As a member of the Big South Conference, Winthrop’s conference games are against the likes of Gardner Webb and the Virginia Military Institute. However, you may remember that in the last two years, Gardner Webb and VMI have beaten the Wildcats at Rupp Arena by a combined 24 points.

In my view, the difference in student attitude is largely due to one sport: football. When I moved to the UK campus in August, the first major landmark for me was Commonwealth Stadium, a testimony to SEC football at UK. Rabid UK student interest is already clear to me: When I recently walked past Memorial Coliseum (lottery site for single-game football tickets for the first three home games), a line of students for the lottery poured out of the entrance and stretched past the Joe Craft Center. On Winthrop’s campus, the most visible reference to football is a popular T-shirt that brags “Winthrop Football: Still Undefeated.”

Without a football team, sustaining a high level of sports-related school spirit is difficult. On fall weekends, Winthrop’s campus is nearly a ghost town. By the time basketball season begins in mid-November, student interest in sports is low. For Winthrop’s biggest sporting event last year, the homecoming basketball game against arch-rival Coastal Carolina, the 6,100-seat Winthrop Coliseum was filled to only sixty percent capacity. When I asked a fellow Winthrop student only an hour before tip-off if he was going, I was met with a puzzled look and a question: “What game?”

I recognize that I have missed out on sports-related school spirit as a Winthrop student. I treasure the memories of the ups and downs of being a diehard Georgia Tech football fan since age 8. Last Thursday, as I watched the “Ramblin’ Wreck” blow a 24-point lead before kicking a field goal to beat Clemson in the final minute, I thought how much more strongly the Georgia Tech students experienced the desperation and glee that I felt. However, at high noon tomorrow when the Cats take the field against Louisville, I will finally know what it means to be a college student cheering for my own football team. UK is my football school.