| by Michael Berger After four years as a Northwestern athlete, Jenn Shull is sick of answering the same question diplomatically. Make no mistake about it: She's as proud as anyone to strap on 10 pounds worth of catcher's gear or smother line drives for the NU softball team. But she is tired of being part of a losing tradition. "People always ask, 'Oh, Northwestern? Do they even have sports there?'" she says. Of course we do. We just lose all the time. Perhaps more so than at any other Division I school, the athletes, coaches and administrators at Northwestern have internalized and institutionalized losing as something of a way of life, an acceptable state of affairs that is as well-documented as it is unthinkable. A handful of former NU players even deemed it necessary to break the law in order to ensure that we lost games by a bookie-specified margin. Now, it's time to break the law once again. It's time to get the "friends of the program" on the horn and tell them to whip out their checkbooks. Tell them we're sick and tired of losing and it's about time we start stocking our rosters with blue-chip athletes. "I see NU football and basketball players get laughed at all the time," Shull says. "Hell, I go here and I tell them they suck all the time." But those who swear by the glory of the purple and white always seem to have their list of scapegoats readily available – a bunch of hollow rhetoric about being the smallest and only private school in arguably the most daunting athletic conference in the nation. So how then, these NU faithful argue, can we woo the nation's finest teenage athletes away from the proverbial pirannhas of the Big Ten and bring them to the shores of Lake Michigan? Let's try a sea of cash. Unfortunately, NU athletic director Rick Taylor is a bit more morally sound than that. "Do you need a reason not to rob a bank?" Taylor said. "You've got rules, and you follow them. It's an unacceptable form of behavior." Okay, so giving a gym bag full of money to some 17-year-old phenom wouldn't exactly qualify Taylor or anyone else for Sports Illustrated's annual Sportsman of the Year contest. But ethics aside, illegal recruiting on college campuses across the country has become more pervasive than anyone would like to believe. And it happens at schools with academic reputations that, well, leave a little something to be desired. Surely, student athletes and alumni of such a prestigious academic institution as ours could be ever so meticulous in such an endeavor. A paper trail so convoluted, even Eliot Ness couldn't take us down. "About 80 to 90 percent of schools out there probably follow the rules," Taylor said. "Just because 10 to 20 percent of them might not, it doesn't give us the right to break the rules." Maybe not, but we have broken the rules twice in the past two years – two big strikes against our already appalling athletic reputation. So if we're gonna go down, let's go down swinging, shall we. That's why now is the time to act, while it's the last thing the NCAA would expect from a school already in more hot water than it can handle. "I might be a little obvious if we get really good at everything all of a sudden," Shull said. "But I'm all for pushing the envelope. I do something until I get caught." And if we do it right, we won't. Then maybe, Shull or any other NU athlete won't be so embarrassed about being a Wildcat. As long as we don't caught. Michael Berger is a Medill junior. When he's not sniffin' discarded jockstraps, you can reach him at m-berger2@northwestern.edu. | 
