If you’re a “NARP,” or a non-athletic regular person, you may not be in the know. For those who are paying attention, though, it is clear that Tufts sports teams are dominating.
“We have six teams in the NCAA tournament. We’re hosting NCAA tournaments in soccer…field hockey, volleyball…” Director of Athletics Ryan Pisarri said. “It’s almost unprecedented.” Indeed, Tufts athletics are succeeding across the board. The women’s field hockey team recently won the national championship, the men’s and women’s soccer teams both competed in the NCAA Division III (DIII) Final Four, the men’s lacrosse team won their second straight NCAA DIII title, the women’s squash team recently became a top-10 program in the country, men’s tennis was a contender in the 2025 NCAA DIII semifinals, and the sailing team finished seventh in the nation for coed fleet racing.
Sanjana Rao, a senior on the women’s rowing team, credited much of the team’s success to their culture, which she said was one of her primary motivations for wanting to row at Tufts. Lily Siddall, the head coach of the women’s rowing team, feels that Tufts is unique from other schools, who maintain an air of seriousness. “Of course I want people to work hard, but I think we’ve really adapted to the human-first mentality,” she said. “We have to have people who are healthy and happy and excited to do the work.” The women have taken home the NCAA DIII title for the past two years and have won the Collegiate Eights event at the Head of the Charles Regatta for three consecutive years.
Rao said that another factor which differentiates Tufts from similar schools is that “We almost train as if we were…a DI [Division I] team.” Allie Zorn, a senior on the women’s lacrosse team, echoed this sentiment. “Our hours may be limited, but the expectation is the same, and I think we really buy into that,” she said. The women’s lacrosse team has won several NESCAC titles and was the runner-up in the NCAA national championship last year.
Peter Conard, a junior on the men’s rowing team, disagreed with this characterization, offering a clearer distinction between the divisions. “In DIII, we have an allotted number of practices we have per year, and that’s not the case for DI,” he explained. “[DI teams] have a whole extra season that they are getting coached…so I think that’s definitely different and why I don’t think we could ever say we’re training at a DI level.”
A more open schedule in the academic year allows for more diverse pursuits for student-athletes. “The upside of DIII is there’s so much emphasis on academics,” Zorn said.
In contrast, the lives of DI athletes are more dominated by their sport. “I know someone that goes to Princeton…a much higher-level school, and all he does is row,” Conard said. At those schools, “the rowing community is one of your only communities.”
Clearly, one of the purported advantages of DIII is a more comprehensive experience that is not monopolized by athletics and therefore allows for diversified extracurricular and social engagement. Student-athletes at Tufts have different perspectives about the extent to which this holds true. “I would say it’s sport dependent,” Zorn said. “I think certain teams stick within the athlete circle, but I think some venture out more.”
Rao said that she has lots of friends outside athletics and has built a robust community on campus beyond the rowing team. However, she feels that being an athlete is somewhat limiting to her engagement with the broader Tufts community.
“I feel like a lot of times, when I’m going about my day or when I’m doing something that’s not related to athletics, I’ll kind of not tell people that I’m a rower,” she commented. “I feel like people are going to have preconceived notions about me because I’m an athlete and assume things about my intelligence or what my favorite activities are [or] who I hang around with.”
“Of course it’s something that I’m super proud of and it’s the thing that I’m the most involved with on campus,” she clarified. “But to other people, who aren’t athletes, it feels like something that is weird or inhibitive of my other identities or my other interests on campus.”
“I would really love for there to be better integration between athletes and everyone else on campus,” Rao concluded.
Holly Erbe, the equipment manager for Tufts athletics, also spoke about the strong community formed among varsity athletes. “I’ve seen so much cross-sport support,” she wrote. “I think it’s what makes this place special.”
There are institutional discrepancies to reconcile, though. Nicola Donlan, a senior on the women’s lacrosse team, described an imbalance in funding between men’s and women’s teams. “I think a lot of the differences in our situation versus the men’s situation are a little out of our control.” She elaborated that while the women’s team recently established an endowment, the men have a much more substantial and longstanding fund.
Rory Murray Little, a member of the Board of Advisors for Athletics at Tufts, said that external fundraising is typically stronger for men’s sports, from the youth to the college level. In an effort to close this gap, Tufts recently created Women Impact Now! (WIN!), an initiative aimed at raising support for women’s athletics at Tufts by creating an universal endowment for all women’s teams.
Murray Little, who co-chairs WIN!, said that this initiative follows the momentum of women’s sports in recent years. The initial target of the endowment is to raise $3 million over three years, which will be used in a variety of ways to support female athletes at Tufts.
The initiative includes professional development programs for female athletes. At the WIN! Athletics Leadership Forum this September, more than 40 alumni gathered for a panel and to network with current female student-athletes.
Additionally, several student-athletes praised Tufts’s athletic department for their support in addressing disparities between men’s and women’s teams in the NCAA. Although both of Tufts’s lacrosse teams qualified for the national championship in 2025, the women had to travel to Salem, Virginia, for the game while their male counterparts had the opportunity to play at Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts. In a postgame press conference that has since earned attention across the league, head coach of the women’s team Courtney Schute expressed her frustration: “This is a hard place to get to. The NCAA needs to do something about accessibility at the championship. We had an incredible crowd, but the men’s team was playing in front of all their alums tonight…We had four alums here today—I had hundreds reach out that would have been there in a major city.” Schute and her players took the message to their online platforms and the team wrote a letter to the NCAA, both of which Zorn said Tufts was very supportive of.
Issues of diversity and access go beyond the gender divide. Many of Tufts’s most prominent and successful sports carry high costs, engendering a student-athlete body that is composed of a disproportionate number of wealthy students. Rao noted the roots of modern competitive rowing in upper class and predominantly White spheres, a legacy which has in some ways continued to manifest in the present. “All of our coaching staff is White, the majority of our rowing team is White…and frankly speaking, a large amount of the rowers came from private clubs,” Rao said.
“I think women’s lacrosse is at a very interesting time,” Zorn concluded. “It’s a sport that is hard to access for a lot of people in the world and has a lot of cultural roots and Indigenous roots. And I think that it’s at a really unique time where the sport…is acknowledging the roots of the game while also trying to make it more accessible and elevate women’s lacrosse as a whole.”
The cost of attendance, a major component of access, brings the divide between DI and DIII schools back into focus. As a private university, Tufts presents a higher financial barrier to entry for its athletes. DI schools with similar tuition (other than the Ivy League) offer partial or full athletic scholarships while recruiting athletes. However, DIII universities do not offer such scholarships, leaving athletes to apply for other financial aid to help cover costs. “People don’t necessarily get their financial aid packages before they commit, and that can be really scary,” Coach Siddall said. To ensure access for all athletes, Siddall emphasized that “It just goes back to recruiting, making sure that you are broadening and having a bigger pool, reaching out to public schools and to different places, and not just necessarily reaching out to the prep schools that we get a lot of interest from.”
Tufts athletes and coaches are undeniably animated by a common thread: a genuine love for their teams and the Tufts athletics community. “I could rave about it for days,” Donlan said of her experience on the lacrosse team. As Tufts athletics conceivably continue to flourish, issues of access will remain relevant. For those of whom access is top of mind, it is paramount to ensure that as many people as possible can experience the academic rigor, athletic success, and rich community of a Tufts student-athlete.
Photo by Jack Smart