Duke vs. University of North Carolina, Michigan vs. Ohio State, Harvard vs. Yale. From crossing out every “M” on Ohio State’s campus to camping outside of Duke’s Cameron Stadium before a basketball game against North Carolina, students across the country rally against their school-wide rivals.
Now imagine Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood in a lab with the Ohio State wide receiver Jeremiah Smith just two days after a game. To most college students in the United States, that might be absurd. In Claremont, that’s a normal Monday. This is because Claremont has a culture other rivalries cannot match. We live, study, and party with the opposing side. A rivalry that runs from classrooms to courts all year long deserves a restructured trophy: A year-long Sixth Street Cup.
I’ve been writing and editing sports articles since I arrived at Pomona College. As an avid Yankees fan in a Red Sox household, rivalries have shaped my sports fandom. As a friend of athletes across the 5Cs, I have heard countless stories from Sixth Street matchups, and know what the rivalry means to the athletic programs on our campuses. I believe Sixth Street is one of the best narratives in college sports.
Nowhere else would your friend from your chemistry class play the biggest game of their season against your mentor from your afternoon economics course in a rival stadium that’s just a 10-minute walk from your dorm room. Even the teams themselves are coalitions of two or more schools, one of the few combined team rivalries nationwide. Nowhere else has the same level of interwoven academics, culture and athletics that is so natural and inherent to the 5Cs, which is exactly what makes the rivalry the best in the country.
This dynamic is special, and deserves a scoring system to match.
Pomona-Pitzer (P-P) and Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) do have a “rivalry week”, nine days of Sixth Street matchups between different sports, which this year took place on Sep. 22-30. Yet, it desperately needs reorganizing. Under our current system, the Sixth Street Rivalry is perceived by many as if it were only one football game. While the football game draws crowds from across the schools and awards, the iconic Sixth Street Trophy — a Sixth Street sign gifted from the city of Claremont — we need to redistribute the attention across our different sports.
From Sixth Street women’s water polo national championships, where the two teams have met four times in a row, to women’s soccer SCIAC title fights, our rivalry features two of the best Division III athletic programs in the country; it decides league titles and shapes national rankings, and each game deserves attention.
To properly showcase all of our sports and the fierce competition between the two sides, P-P and CMS should replace the one-game trophy with a year-long Sixth Street Cup, awarding points for every head-to-head result in every sport and crowning a winner at the final meeting of the spring. The standings would be posted after every matchup, building to the final handoff of the Cup at the end of the year. The football game could still award a trophy; it would simply count towards something bigger.
Now, I understand why the scope of such a system could cause worry. Some might say stretching the rivalry across the year and all of our sport would dilute the Sixth Street Rivalry itself, or that it is too ambitious of a concept to actually implement. Yet, under the new system, each game would still retain its atmosphere. Football could still play their fall classic, and even continue awarding their Street Sign Trophy. The only difference would be that the game would be a headline to a bigger story, not the entire narrative itself, drawing more fans and students out to support.
To this point, this new Sixth Street system fits right into our shared culture. Across the campuses, students take the same seminars, work in the same library late into the night and hold themselves to the same high standards in the classroom and beyond. Our athletes live that culture too. They balance lab reports and problem sets with early morning practices and long weekend trips. Friends and classmates compete and collaborate in every Sixth Street game edition, exemplifying the same culture that holds students to such high standards. Our rivalry already runs all year. The Sixth Street Cup would just let us keep score.
Jake Creelan PO ’29, a sports editor from Brooklyn, is an avid New York Yankees fan in a Boston Red Sox household. That rivalry made him fall in love with baseball, (despite not much competition from the Red Sox this year) and is why he thinks we need to appreciate ours even more.
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