College athletes get a bad rap, but they're just about the only students who relish the opportunity to stick around way beyond the end of the school year.
Last week, UNLV's golf and baseball teams were eliminated from their respective NCAA tournaments after stellar seasons. In the case of the golf team, which had national title hopes, an eighth-place finish was a bit of a disappointment. In the larger scheme, though, it was yet another sign that the program has already become, in the parlance of college sports, a "traditional power," a team so steadily near the top of the national rankings that its success is no longer a surprise to anyone. What's more, the program, which will lose star senior Ryan Moore, has repeatedly shown another hallmark of a "traditional power": the ability, when its top performers graduate, to find new ones. As they used to say about Nebraska football: "They don't rebuild; they reload."
For the baseball team, making it to the NCAAs was in itself a remarkable accomplishment. After getting off to a horrendous 3-14 start, the team rampaged through the Mountain West Conference and wound up at 35-29. Two years ago, when well-regarded Coach Jim Schlossnagle left for Texas Christian, some worried the Rebels might fall back into obscurity. This season's resurgence, however, gives hope that Schlossnagle's successor Buddy Gouldsmith has the team on track to national prominence once again.
Because sports are, by their very nature, a performance, athletes wind up fair game for the criticism of the chattering classes, and no one this side of Broadway chatters quite so well as the great American sports fan. So it's somehow refreshing when athletes get the chance to perform and succeed quietly, and we wake up a bit late to their success—too late to jump on any bandwagons, too late to tell our friends "I told you so" (even if we never told them any such thing), too late too show up for the big game, too late to claim some sort of vicarious glory for ourselves. All we can do is glance at the happy aftermath of someone else's accomplishment and feel that simple and generous impulse: Good job, fellas.
Not surprisingly, it's just this sort of even-keeled emotional generosity that we find at the core of most championship teams. The NFL's New England Patriots exemplify it, and, so far, so do the Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs, who are playing for the NBA title this week.
With this in mind, take a look at some of the selfless talk from UNLV's baseball and golf squads after last week's losses:
• Speaking of the golf team's future without him, Ryan Moore told the Las Vegas Sun, "I think they'll be even better next year."
• "We're at that point in the program where you're expected to perform," Chris Bonnell, a sophomore on the baseball team, told the Sun. "It' going to be an exciting season next year."
So it will. And, maybe once again, we won't quite notice until the end, when the hard work has already paid off. But that's OK: It's sort of healthy, isn't it, for fans to remember that kids will play the game and play it hard—that they'll play it for one another—whether we're watching or not.