Column: Signing Day Earns No Applause

On the Moscow campus, there are hundreds of university events to celebrate every year.

I consider myself lucky to attend a school with a diverse array of events that include music, writing and culture.

As a sports reporter for The Argonaut, I have been exposed to a number of athletics-related events and press conferences each week.

My most recent assignment dealt with national signing day: a media shindig that is given all the pomp and circumstance of graduation itself, a fluff event to create positive press for the university and its athletic programs.

In all honesty, I have never been a “sports” person. As a student with a passion for music, I have always felt like an outsider looking in on sports culture.

Celebrating feats of the human body through athletic endeavors has never been my style. If I’d known in high school that I’d become a college sports reporter, I would have laughed.

Before I dive into this column, I admit that being a student-athlete is difficult and often burdensome for a number of players.

As a full-time student with three jobs, I can empathize with the time management skills needed to make it through one week. I can’t imagine adding hours and hundreds of miles of travel to that schedule every month.

However, I feel that signing day is an event that overlooks some of the more deserving programs on campus.

Athletes are given scholarships for their participation in sports, and signing day celebrates these scholarships and the athlete’s decision to attend the University of Idaho. But if an elite program on campus gets overlooked because of the prominence of another sport, then I believe it shouldn’t exist.

Signing day always places more emphasis on the football recruits rather than the soccer signees. The football team has made improvements in recent years, as the team won four games during the 2015 football season. However, several off-field incidents put a damper on the season and created negative press for the team.

During Wednesday’s press conference, Idaho football head coach Paul Petrino’s press conference was packed full of reporters, while several more joined in via conference call. The head of the Vandal football program fielded questions from reporters for a half an hour.

Meanwhile, women’s soccer head coach Derek Pittman was met by just a handful of reporters during his press conference, and experienced an awkward moment of silence from reporters just minutes into the event.

It’s not as though the women’s soccer program is something to be ignored.

The Vandal soccer team won the Big Sky Conference regular season championship with an undefeated record in conference play. Eight athletes were placed on all-conference teams at the end of the season, and freshman goalkeeper Amanda Poertner set a new program record with nine shutouts.

Junior midfielder Clara Gomez also set the Big Sky single-season record for assists with 13. The Vandals also recorded more goals, shutouts and assists than in previous years.

Of the 26 Idaho athletes who earned All-Academic honors in the Big Sky Conference, 10 of those were soccer players, proving just how tirelessly these women work in the classroom and on the field.

I understand that football is a more popular sport than women’s soccer. But shouldn’t success of any kind be celebrated, especially when those athletes are excelling both on the field and in the classroom?

I find signing day to be an overhyped event that focuses on the wrong programs on campus. Instead of heaping praise and media attention on the football program, maybe we could show the women’s soccer team some well-deserved recognition.

Tess Fox can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @tesstakesphotos