The 2020 Senior Perspectives is the 15th in a series of annual collections. Senior captains and representatives of teams at Harvard have been invited to contribute viewpoints based on personal experience from both their senior seasons and full varsity careers at Harvard.

Aaron Kruk
Hometown: Naperville, Ill.
Concentration: Neuroscience
House Affiliation: Pforzheimer

At the end of my freshman year, a friend of mine, then a graduating senior and a hound for debate, proposed a difficult question to me. What is the value of athletics to a storied, top-tier academic institution like Harvard? He, knowing I was a wrestler and recruited athlete, argued athletics seems to offer no value to Harvard. He raised some compelling points: the best students at Harvard are often non-athletes; most collegiate athletes do not become professional and only the minority will be successful at a national level; athletics distract from time that could be spent pursuing worthwhile academic goals. The real kicker to his argument though, was that there was nothing athletics could teach you that you couldn't find a proper analog to outside of sport.
 
Obviously, I thought he was wrong, as most readers of this will. But I didn't have a verbal counterargument to defeat his question back then. So, our conversation ended with his question unanswered. But over my next three years competing and training as a Harvard athlete, I consistently came back to it. I might think of it during the middle of a particularly sadistic workout our coaches would put together. Or after a tough road trip, with hours of homework left to do on an eight-hour bus ride from Nowhere, Pennsylvania back to Cambridge. It'd be one of the questions which marked the beginning and end of my seasons. What value was I giving to Harvard, as a wrestler, that I couldn't otherwise? What value was wrestling giving to my collegiate life that couldn't be had without it?
 
At the close of my senior season, I still lack counterarguments to most of the points my friend made. I won't be going on to wrestle past college at the senior level. I never won a national championship to bring fame and glory to my team and Harvard. I was a good student, but quite plausibly may have been better if I spent all of my time devoted to academics. Even more so, another student given my opportunity at Harvard might have been more deserving or achieved more than I have, or ever could have. I'd wager many senior athletes may share some of these sentiments and it seems like we're left answerless to this question about the value of athletics at Harvard.
 
There is an idea I learned at Harvard, though, about what's called "non-observational knowledge". Most of the things we learn, we learn through observation, through sight, touch, taste and hearing. I know Harvard's color is Crimson because I see the color Crimson on our shield. But some things we know not because we observe them, but for some other reason, like how I know where my arms are in space. These things are non-observational knowledge. Particularly, knowledge of our actions and intentions are of this kind. It is non-observational knowledge that has given me my answer to this question.
 
You could never learn how strong the human will is by observing it in others. But after having forced my body to keep going countless times after being down, broken and struggling while wrestling, I've learned what it's like. You would never know what it's like to take complete ownership over your destiny, both failures and triumphs, by watching the courage of others, but I know it now after having done it every single time I stepped onto a mat with the H shield on my chest. You could never understand the true depths of loyalty by just seeing it, but having been through hell and back with Harvard wrestlers who would sooner die than give up on each other, I know what loyalty is like. I don't even know what thing I learned as Coach Weiss held me in his arms after my last ever wrestling match, me broken down, physically and mentally, sobbing to each other, but whatever I learned, I know I could never learn it without having wrestled.
 
My friend's argument fails when it assumes there is nothing athletics can teach you that can't be taught elsewhere. There is immense knowledge to be found in athletics, in wrestling. And there are things I could never learn without wrestling, without having done it myself. I've not just been blessed to get to go to Harvard because of wrestling, I've been blessed to get to wrestle at Harvard. I know what it's like to be a Harvard Wrestler, something that's both so incredibly valuable and impossible to know without having done it yourself. Whatever my friend thought I missed out on by being a wrestler at Harvard, I can assure him now that he missed out on a lot more by not being one.