Alex Pettee's Georgetown Experience (A sprinter's perspective)

I had the unbelievable privilege to play two sports at Georgetown, a statement that surely leads one to drastically overestimate my athletic ability. I never won any awards. I was never All-American, All-League, or All-anything, not even in high school. I wasn’t the best player on my team, and haven’t been the best player on my own team since maybe tee-ball. My college sports career was pretty atypical, to say the least.

At the start of my senior year at Georgetown, I was a 0 sport athlete. After three years of unsuccessfully trying out for the baseball team (once at Trinity College-Division 3- and then twice at Georgetown) it seemed like the slow walk out of a coach’s office with watery eyes and a lump in my throat after being told “I appreciate the hard work, but maybe next year” was just an annual occurrence that may or may not end in ever playing a college game.

After three tries I was done. It was around the time that Moneyball came out. “We're all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children's game, we just don't know when that's gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we're all told.”

I packed up my baseball glove and cleats and just wanted to live like a typical college kid, unburdened by the constant need to stay fit and maintain a disciplined lifestyle. And I did. Sometime the next spring, though, watching a baseball game at Povich, that competitive instinct seemed to come roaring back, after months of suppression. Too bad I was now 40 lbs overweight and currently eating an entire Dominos Pizza.

But that night I started running. I always hated running, and having had 2 ACL surgeries and now carrying 40 extra lbs certainly didn’t make it any easier. 30 yards at a time, I’d jog back and forth. I didn’t want to go on a treadmill because I wasn’t ready to accept that I couldn’t run continuously for even a quarter mile. But for some reason I kept running, day by day, yard by yard, and eventually mile by mile.

I arrived back at school the next fall, 45 lbs lighter than the day I left 3 months earlier, and apparently looking pretty different. That first day while I was bringing my stuff into the house, a close friend on the baseball team stuck his hand out and said, “hey nice to meet you.” It wasn’t until someone else said my name a couple minutes later that he realized what just happened.

I didn’t email the coach this time to ask if I could try out, I was afraid he’d had enough of me and would say “no”. So I just showed up to the first day of tryouts, the dreaded 2-mile run, a right of passage for the Georgetown baseball program. “Hey coach, I’m trying out again.” I could tell it took more than a second to register who I was. “Good.”

10 minutes and 35 seconds later, I finished the 2-miles, averaging just over 5:15 minute/mile pace. I rocked back and forth in the fetal position in pain for the next 5 minutes as everyone else finished the run, the next finisher crossing the line around the 12 minute mark.

Long story short, I made the baseball team this time. I got to step on the field, I got to swing the bat in a Division 1 college game, and catch a fly ball. I was able to go on the excruciating long bus rides to the middle of South Carolina, had the privilege to drive to Povich Field (30 minutes from campus) to put the tarp on the field in the 35 degree rain. And when three of us players had to share 2 twin beds on a roadtrip at some 2-star hotel in New Jersey. I was ecstatic when I opened up a pair of Nike shoes that I got for free just for being an athlete. Crazy! I didn’t care they were 2 sizes too small, I wore them till there was a hole in the front and my big toe pushed its way out.

Running 400m runs had become the foundation of my workout routine- the quarter mile was that first hurdle I passed when I started running a year and a half earlier. First 2 minutes, then 1:45, then 1:30. Each milestone harder than the last, yet increasingly more rewarding. Under 1:00, then :59, then :58.

And while it took me 4 years to make the baseball team, I got offered a spot on the track team after 51 seconds. Wearing track spikes for the first time is a weird feeling. It’s as though someone is physically pushing you forward, and during that 51 seconds I’m still convinced someone was.

There are few things in sports that bond teammates together more than the shared sacrifice of a 400m relay. The back-stretch of the 400 Is a feeling that words could never adequately describe. “Hopeful hopelessness” is about as close as I can describe it. A feeling of exerting 110% effort, seeing the finish line, being in excruciating pain, and still seemingly moving backwards. Add in the crowd noise, the grunting and yelling, the baton that is slipping out of your sweaty hands, and the implied duty to your teammates, who you saw experiencing the same thing 50 seconds earlier.

Like the baseball team, I loved every minute of my time on the track team. I’ve had some good coaches in my sports career, but never have I met such intelligent, passionate, and hard-working coaches as the Georgetown track coaching staff.

The first week I was on the team, while I was sitting in the ice bath after a painful practice, Coach Henner came up to me. “You know what the other coach’s call you? They don’t know your name so they’ve been calling you Commando.” “Why’s that?” He smiled, “Because you just put your head down and do the workout. No complaining, no second thoughts. And I can tell it hurts.”

And it hurt. I spent enough time in the ice bath that I could feel the water and guess the temperature within 2 degrees. One day it was 38 degrees. 38 degree water makes you numb within a minute, but you better have a towel in your mouth during that minute or you’ll be screaming.

I loved my teammates. They took me as one of their own despite being a mid-season walk-on. They taught me the rules, showed me how to use the blocks, and were right there in front and back of me during the more excruciating workouts. The vast majority of my fellow teammates felt this common bond, this shared sacrifice, and felt equally grateful for the tremendous opportunity to run for Georgetown.


Enough about my story, here’s the reason for writing this post, and its painful to write this, because in doing so, I am calling out the actions of a couple of my former teammates. I’m trying to set the record straight on the coaching staff and the culture of the program relating to the alleged discrimination.

My perspective may be unique, because of my rather unique story. I wasn’t recruited by the coaching staff, and I’m not a decorated athlete. I have no interest in protecting anyone, don’t owe anybody anything, and no loyalties but to the truth as I saw it.

The only thing keeping my experience from being "perfect" was a small group of teammates who, for reasons I never was able to understand, seemed intent on making major changes in the program. Their complaints seemed odd to me- disappointed with the facilities, the workouts, and their personal track success. Much of the blame for these issues, it seemed, was placed on Coach Henner.

Increasingly, it seemed that their answer to the complaints about the facilities, the workouts, and the athletic struggles was to get the head coach fired through whatever means necessary. It was essentially explained to me as, “once we get a new coach, we’ll get new facilities and be a more sprinter-focused school.”

And us sprinters were treated differently. I saw it in the same way that pitchers were treated differently than hitters on the baseball team. Different workouts, different gear. Personally, I didn’t get any “free” gear, but didn’t mind. I got my sprint spikes for $25 and that’s all I needed. If you read my story above, you’ll realize that I get offended when athletes complain about “free gear.”

I’d hear jokes and occasionally serious conversations about fabricating or exaggerating stories about Coach Henner, about making lists of small things that seemed to be taken out of context to prove some sort of mal-intent. These individuals did not seem to understand the seriousness of accusing another individual of being racist or sexist. They seemed to justify a feeling of being “underappreciated and undervalued” as justification for sweeping false accusations.

They didn’t understand, or care, about the lives they were about to destroy. About the community they were about to break apart. And the friendships they would forever tarnish. They did not think that people would challenge their claims. That people like myself and so many others on the track team, who gave everything we had to Georgetown athletics and to our fellow teammates. We would not let them tear it all apart for their own personal gain. For social media approval, for that misplaced feeling of doing good, of being on the side of social justice, even when they were doing something malicious, and working in direct opposition to social justice.

18 months later, it seems that their plan was put into action.

I don’t think I need to try to “debunk” many of the claims, because I think the level of absurdity of claiming that the lack of a new Olympic-sized track, for instance, is an overt act of discrimination rather than a financial constraint should speak for itself.

I’m not here to lambast the conspirators for publically shaming and “outing” my fellow teammates. I think their actions of injustice speak for themselves, and clearly runs in opposition to a lot of the work, as members of SAAC, that we put into aiding the LGBT athletic community with the “You Can Play” campaign.

I’m not here to explore a deeper statement about how false claims of discrimination do a tremendous disservice to the fight for social justice that so many of us fight so hard to achieve.

I just wanted to get that part of the story out there- my perspective as a sprinter and what I saw during the outdoor season of ’13-’14. I wanted to set the record straight and vehemently oppose the notion that there were any racial undertones or biases from the coaching staff or other teammates towards us sprinters.

I’m a diehard Hoya, and this track program needs to withstand the unjust attacks. Hoya Saxa.