For much of my life, following sports has been synonymous with newspapers. I remember waking up early in the morning as a little kid to read about how Cleveland’s professional teams did the night before in The Plain Dealer when I was still too young to stay up for night games. I remember thinking it was really cool to see my name in Oberlin News-Tribune articles — written by parents of kids on the team — for my U8 rec soccer heroics. I remember designing my own newspapers on printer paper inspired by playing sports video games and drawing detailed pictures that surely had captions and photo...

On March 31, the Oberlin Athletics Instagram account posted eight photos of Oberlin transgender student-athletes in celebration of Transgender Day of Visibility. Student-athletes posed in creative ways in front of a black background, which made the colorful expressions and unique poses stand out. Maggie Balderstone, a third-year athlete on the women’s basketball team, and Chase Sortor, a fourth-year athlete on the men’s track and field team, were the brains behind the TDOV photoshoot. “Chase had talked to [Assistant Director of Athletics Communications] Amanda Phillips about wanting to...

Founded in 2019, the Black Student- Athlete Group has played a pivotal role in helping Black athletes find community on campus. According to the BSAG webpage on GoYeo, the mission of the group is to “create a united community for Black student-athletes on Oberlin College’s campus [and] to provide that group of students with a voice and an organization specifically dedicated to promoting them and their success.” Naeisha McClain, OC ’20, is a founding member of BSAG and a former thrower on the women’s track and field team. McClain said that their experience as a thrower inspired them to...

Amid unrest after the Vietnam War, one of the societal values that was called into question was a term known as SportsWorld, the idea that sports were known for sacrifice and honor, coined by journalist Robert Lipsyte. From the arrest of Muhammad Ali to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics protests, more people were interrogating this belief. Jack Scott was one of these people. A runner for Stanford and Syracuse University and a Ph.D. candidate from the University of California at Berkeley, Scott had a radical philosophy that advocated against traditional views of competition in favor of breaking down...

When talking about Oberlin football, the conversation eventually diverges to the legendary Heisman era. But what about the other contributors during this time period, and what legacy did they leave behind at Oberlin? John Henry Wise was born in 1868 to a German father and a Hawaiʻian mother. Originally a student at Hilo Boarding School, he was brought to be a part of the first class of the Kamehameha School for Boys by the Reverend William Brewster Oleson, OC 1877, who wanted to educate native Hawaiʻians on Christianity in hopes of spreading a Protestant revival across the island. “These...

Some might assume that such an intellectual group as the Review staff would not have many experiences in the sporting world. However, after conducting extensive interviews with my co-workers, I discovered that we are a staff of athletes with incredibly interesting sports stories to tell. You will notice that my name doesn’t appear in this list. That’s because I know nothing about sports. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Kushagra Kar, Editor-in-Chief: I have done swimming my whole life. It was always something fun for me to do with my brother. In boarding school, it was...