Mines Mixes Sports, Books with Success A few years ago. Nice, sunny day in the foothills. The Colorado School of Mines baseball team is playing Metro State smack in the middle of finals week. Chris Dittman, the Regis Athletic Director, is umpiring the game, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing. "Mines has just gotten Metro out," Dittman remembers, "and I looked over at the Mines dugout and I did a double-take. These guys were running in from the field, sitting down in the dugout and picking up books and studying. Here they were, between innings, waiting for their turns at bat, and they ‘re sitting there cramming for tests." Only at Mines. Two weeks ago. Cold, blustery day in the foothills. The Colorado School of Mines football team is losing convincingly to Mesa College, and the Mines fans amuse themselves by counting off the last seconds of the loss. "Five, four, three, two, one." Only at Mines. Only at Mines, the Golden factory that churns out engineers like the company across town churns out kegs, will you find an athletic program so casual—the band outfits itself in flannel shirts and blue jeans—and yet so vital. Talk to a Mines athlete, any Mines athlete, about athletics at Mines, and you will hear the word "release." You also hear the word "outlet." He sees sports as a way to escape the rampant studyaholism of what is truly one of the most demanding academic institutions in the world. "Hey, you can’t study all the time," says Brenda Crum, a junior volleyball player from Colorado Springs. "At this school, you could conceivably study all the time, all your waking hours. But if you did that, you’d go completely crazy. So you have to have a release. You have to have something you can do to completely get away from the books. To me, sports is the best way to do that." And, luckily, Crumb and her peers have an administration that feels the same way. Mines offers 18 intercollegiate sports, more than any other school in Colorado except Air force and Colorado College. It would be easy for Mines to throw its students a few athletic bones—a football team, a basketball team, a women’s basketball team—and figure the students are too busy for a bigger program. How tough is Mines academically? Well, 11 percent of the students were ranked No. 1 in their high school classes. How diverse is the athletic program? Well for one, it offers lacrosse and the Rocky Mountain region isn’t exactly a hotbed for the sport with funny sticks. But academics is clearly first. It’s also second, and third, and fourth. Athletics at Mines is a diversion, a supplement, an activity and not an obsession. Mines athletes have been excused from practice because they absolutely have to study. On several occasions, teams have traveled to away games without key players who had to stay back because of field trips or exams or papers. "But we don’t let that happen too much," says football coach Marv Kay, a Mines graduate who’s coached football for 14 years. "They know that being at practice is the price they have to pay, and then in the long run, being on the team helps them budget their time. In anybody’s life, the disciplining of time and energy is one of the most important things a person can learn." Kay’s players have learned that discipline pretty well. Most say they get better grades during football season than after the season, which doesn’t surprise Allison much. If they weren’t competitive, they wouldn’t be here in the first place," Kay said. "That type of competitive mind naturally does well in the classroom as well as the playing field." From The Mines Magazine December 1982 By:  Randy Holtz Rocky Mountain News staff