For as long as I can remember, playing and watching sports have been a part of my life. Growing up in Menlo Park, California, my team was our backyard Stanford Cardinals. My parents actually met tailgating at a Stanford football game as adults. Neither of them attended the school, but bonded over their love of football (and partying). We lived walking distance from Stanford and I attended sporting events of all kinds — I can still hear my mom asking me if I’ve finished all my homework before tossing a few lollipops in her purse to distribute during the men’s basketball halftime.
Athletics were rooted in my college decision. Not because I was hopeful for my own athletic career (I was always a varsity basketball benchwarmer), but because I was salivating at the thought of a true college town, one where the whole city came together. I didn’t have a niche academic interest, either: every college has economics, but not every college has good football. In an alternate universe, I’m a Cornell graduate who spends fall Saturdays hiking instead of watching ESPN. Luckily, I never got off the waitlist.
It is not a novel insight to say that sports evoke emotion. Anyone who has ever watched “Remember the Titans” or seen fathers coach fifth-grade basketball knows this to be true. But when I’m thinking about my own emotional connection to sports, it’s not necessarily feeling a high when Blake Corum, ’23, scores a touchdown or knowing I have Saturday plans for all of fall. It’s the feeling of community, which contradicts the popularized persona of the “entitled jerk” sports fan. This media-depicted rowdy fan is a gatekeeper of fandom, interrogating your knowledge of players and statistics. Amongst U-M friends, I’ve never known this persona to be true.
The 2023 Michigan football season felt so special because I felt love and compassion from both friends and strangers. I can’t count the number of times I heard “Go Blue” on the streets of San Francisco or the nervous texts exchanged across time zones during games. Leaving orientation the summer before school started, I felt so overwhelmed and out of place. Now, almost 10 years later, I have a true Michigan family I can find anywhere.
When Michigan fans are excited about winning the national championship, it’s not just about how well our quarterback threw the ball on a Monday night in Houston. It’s about how the community showed up every week to support the team as they finished what they started. It’s about the maize-and-blue takeover of a San Francisco bar, and countless others across the country. It’s about the hundreds of thousands of Wolverines who will always remember where they were when the confetti rained down.
When you leave college, you’re leaving the friends that helped shape you, ones that you lived with and explored with. But having a team to root for bridges that divide as you live in different parts of the country and enter different stages of life. Because of the community we build on campus, as alumni, and around our beloved sports teams, our bonds with college friends and families don’t rust with time, but grow stronger.
CJ Watson, ’19, hails from Menlo Park, California.
