For our group’s project, we chose to focus on traditions and superstitions of the Dartmouth Cross Country and Track and Field teams. Specifically, we collected pre-meet traditions for these sports from both the men’s and women’s varsity teams at Dartmouth. We made sure to find pieces of folklore that were done by two or more members of the team, rather than individual superstitions, because a main characteristic of folklore is that it is shared among a group of people. We chose this topic because a few of our team members are on the cross country and track teams and because there are so many athletes that are a part of these teams, so we thought that there would be a lot of traditions and superstitions to examine. Our group had 7 members and collected a total of 30 pieces of folklore from 30 people. We interviewed current and past student athletes and coaches from both the men’s and women’s teams at Dartmouth. The interviewees spanned a wide range of years at Dartmouth, from graduates of the class of 1977 to the class of 2025. We interviewed athletes from both cross country and track and field teams because all cross country athletes are also part of the track team, so the superstitions and traditions that they experience also influence the track team culture.

The pieces of folklore that we collected spanned a wide range of customary, material, and verbal folklore. There were a few interesting takeaways that our group was able to gain from our interviews. First, because our interviews were able to span such different graduation classes at Dartmouth, we were able to see the changes in traditions over time. Although some traditions, such as the track team cheer, are exactly the same, others have been lost or morphed over time. Even since the current seniors’ freshman year, things have changed, with parts of traditions being eliminated and other traditions or superstitions being added. Another finding that we had was that freshmen didn’t know about these traditions before coming to Dartmouth, and they were taught about them by the upperclassmen. Some traditions became a “rite of passage” of sorts, such as the embarrassing stories that every athlete must tell at their first Ivy League Championship meet. Many of the traditions and superstitions we collected were created for team building, to bond everyone together before a competition. Additionally, Track and Field is an interesting sport because it is both an individual and team sport. Awards are given to the best competitors and then points are tallied up to determine which team had the best overall performance, and an award is given for this as well. This is likely why many traditions are designed to bond the team together, since everyone must want to work hard for their teammates in order for the team to win. Lastly, we believe that the origin of a lot of the collected folklore is in the fact that in Track and Field, you are unable to control what others do in the race or competition. Therefore, athletes often want to go into the event controlling everything they can, which is evidenced in their traditions/superstitions about appearance, playlist, meals, etc. on race day. This was a common theme that we saw throughout many of our traditions, though different athletes expressed this in different ways.

We hope you enjoy reading this collection! See attached for the presentation we gave in our RUSS 13 class on 11/10/21.