New stain mars Harvard sports
‘Spreadsheets’ for women runners echo lewd soccer ‘scouting reports’
The first to fall was the Harvard men’s soccer team, the remainder of their fall season cancelled after the student newspaper reported last month that the team creates lewd, annual “scouting reports” of female soccer recruits based on their physical appearance and sexual appeal.
Among the most egregious — from a 2012 report — was the assignment of hypothetical sex positions and numerical ratings.
The university launched an internal investigation, learned that the 2012 report wasn’t an isolated incident and disciplined the men’s team accordingly.
Then Harvard University president Drew Faust told the Harvard Crimson that she started to ask: “Is this wider spread?” The answer, apparently, was yes. In social media group chats, obtained by the Crimson, members of the Harvard men’s cross-country team talked about spreadsheets they would create each year before their annual dance with the women’s cross-country team.
The men used the spreadsheets to guess which female cross-country runners would ask certain men to the dance, the Crimson reported, and in some documents added “sexually explicit” comments.
“Hahaha dude 2012 was the absolute worst I saw,” wrote a former runner. “It got tamer each year after that.”
“It’s terrible God,” wrote another recent graduate, adding the 2014 spreadsheet included information about one female runner’s sexual history.
Except for one lewd comment reported by the Crimson, the content of the annual spreadsheets has yet to be revealed.
Harvard men’s cross-country captain Brandon Price, a senior, told the Crimson his team was “particularly ashamed of” the 2014 spreadsheet. But he said the 2016 one is free of lewd language.
“We have really changed the team culture since then,” Price told the Crimson, “and now the spreadsheet is clean, and we try to refrain from making comments like that.”
Price emailed the rest of the men’s cross-country team over the weekend, the Crimson reported, asking them to reproduce any old spreadsheets and said he had already shared one with their coach.
“We don’t want the school to find this, without us first bringing it to them,” Price wrote, according to the newspaper. “The problem with the men’s soccer team was they tried to hide their stuff.”
After the report about the soccer team, coaches from across the university’s athletic teams met with athletic director Robert Scalise to discuss culture and respect, Faust told the Crimson. “Harvard Athletics does not tolerate this sort of demeaning and derogatory behaviour, and we will address any credible information we receive,” Scalise wrote to the newspaper.
The most recent revelation about the men’s cross-country team comes just days after the Harvard men’s soccer team apologized to the 2016 women’s soccer team.
“The relationship we have enjoyed with their team to this day means the world to us ... No woman deserves to be treated in this manner; not our mothers, our sisters, nor our peers,” the team wrote in an op-ed in the Crimson.
A week before the men’s soccer team’s op-ed, the six women featured in the 2012 report signed their names to an open letter, published in the Crimson, that addressed their disappointment, betrayal and frustration.
“This document attempts to pit us against one another, as if the judgment of a few men is sufficient to determine our worth,” they wrote. “But, men, we know better than that.”