Nathan Kropp doesn’t need a place. He just needs people.

With the Fredonia Newman Center now closed down, Kropp, the Fredonia Catholic minister, now looks for new places and ways to build spirituality on campus. 

“I think it’s important for students to grow in all aspects of their lives, and recognize there are different aspects,” said Kropp. “[Education] is the central thing, but there is so much more that happens. People grow emotionally.”

Kropp met me on campus, wearing a vibrantly red button-up shirt, with socks to match. He sported a pair of black slacks accompanied by a brown pair of dress shoes. 

Kropp is a shorter man who wears his blonde hair short, and can always be found in a pair of glasses.

Newman Centers are Catholic-run ministries that operate at non-catholic universities and colleges. 

The Fredonia Newman Center operated up until this year, when it was closed by the Buffalo diocese. 

“For various reasons, parish income in recent years has been declining, and this has impacted the budget of the Central Administrative Offices of the Diocese of Buffalo. Thus, the Diocese has been forced to make some hard financial decisions,” said the Buffalo Diocese in a statement. “It is with heavy hearts that we announce that the eight team members of Daybreak TV Productions will be laid off in July, and the Fredonia Newman Center will be closing.”

Since the Newman Center’s closing, Kropp now looks to build spirituality using the Fredonia campus. 

Kropp now holds mass every week on campus in the Williams Center, and works with the Catholic Student Fellowship.

Kropp was not the only person affected by the closing of the Newman Center. Many students used the center as their primary place of worship and now, like Kropp, they have to look to new places, both on campus and off, to find and build their faith. 

“The Newman Center to me was a place where you could go to escape your normal everyday life and relax,” said sophomore MaryClaire Haseley.

“I felt like I could get through the upcoming week when I went to mass [on Sunday] so it helped me a lot in that aspect,” said fifth-year senior Merlin Joseph, who also played drums at the masses held at the Newman Center.

Through all of this, Kropp has kept an extremely positive and loving attitude.

Kropp also reaches out to groups on campus. He is a consistent supporter of the Fredonia cross country and track teams, often showing up to meets. Kropp also used to host dinners at the Newman Center for the teams while it was open.

“The dinners that Nathan invited us to were always a pleasure,” said men’s cross country member Ryan Dunning. “He was always incredibly generous and kind towards us and treated us like family.”

Kropp can often be found walking around the Village of Fredonia, or running with his dog. 

He always takes the time out to say hello to the students and community members he knows and is inviting enough to  welcome a conversation with anyone and everyone. 

He was even very accomodating of me when I explained to him my experience with religion. 

“I think it’s unfortunate when people don’t realize that there’s something deeper. That there’s a depth dimension to life that’s easy to miss. And it often doesn’t come through the normal avenues at college,” said Kropp.

I was a Catholic school student from preschool up until middle school, and I explained to him my distaste for having the religion forced on me. 

“I think that a particular tradition is a way to get to the deeper dimension,” said Kropp. “But there are many ways to get to that deeper dimension.”

I later said that time away from closely practicing Catholicism has allowed me to think for myself about how I view  religion and reassess my connection with faith and spirituality. 

“So often religion is presented that way where it’s just given to you,” said Kropp. “When you get to college you’re growing beyond that. If you don’t have something to help you grow out of that childhood religion way you had, you’re just going to let go of it. ”

Moving forward, Kropp looks to use the Catholic Student Fellowship and the Fredonia campus and community to continue fostering spirituality at SUNY Fredonia.

Kropp also strongly believes that being physically present on campus is important to his work. 

“Being visible [is important] even at things like Activities Night. Just having a table there,” said Kropp. “Presence. That’s how we have our ministry continue here.”

Even though the Newman Center has closed, Kropp has not abandoned the importance of faith and spirituality on campus. 

He looks to the future as an opportunity to connect people to people rather than connect people to a building. 

“The most important thing to remember is that church is people,” said Kropp. “Christians follow a person, not a building or a temple where a god resides. It’s a people-centered reality and a people-centered mission.”

Kropp works with the Fredonia campus community to bring faith to those who want it, and lets it adapt to people’s lives naturally. He doesn’t force it into the community.

Whether or not you choose to let it in, faith and spirituality will always be in and around the Fredonia community, as long as Nathan Kropp is there to foster it.

Fredonia Athletics is growing. And with that comes a little bit of hurt. 

Alongside the renovation of facilities, developing drug testing policies and increased academic expectations of athletes, Fredonia’s athletics department has gone through a number of coaching changes. 

Since last Fall, the track and field teams have lost a throwing coach, the lacrosse team has changed coaches and most recently, the swim team has changed coaches from Arthur Wang to interim coach Geoff Braun, who also serves as the volleyball coach. 

A little over one year into Jerry Fisk’s role as Fredonia director of athletics, the women’s tennis team is seeing what is hopefully the beginning of the end of Fredonia Athletics’ growing pains. 

The tennis team saw a change in staff after last fall when the head coaching job changed hands from Greg Catalano to Matt Johnson, and the job could potentially change hands again.

“At the Chautauqua Tennis Center in the end of October,” said Fredonia tennis player Sarah Bunk after being asked when the last time she spoke to her head coach was. 

“Oh, that was Halloween weekend. I didn’t go to that,” responded Bunk’s teammate Taylor Marelli. “So I haven’t talked to [Johnson] probably since our last match.” 

“Matt [Johnson] came to us probably about a month ago,” said Fisk. “And said ‘I’m going to try my hand [at] teaching pro in Rochester.”

Fisk went on to explain that Johnson came to Fredonia recently to drop things off.

“We had such a good season and the girls enjoyed him so much last year that . . . I don’t want to move in a different direction if that doesn’t work out.” 

Tennis, being a fall sport, doesn’t have much going on in the way of practicing during the Spring semester.

During the off-season, the tennis team has been doing strength and conditioning practices with Fredonia’s strength and conditioning coach Jon-Ryan Maloney. 

But even if actual tennis practices aren’t necessary during the off-season, recruiting remains a big factor in any athletics program.

There is currently one committed recruit in the incoming class.

“I do remember that Matt [Johnson] went to a recruiting day in Lakewood,” said Bunk. “I’m not sure if that’s where he found this girl, but I do know he tried to recruit and we do have one committed player next season.”

“There’s five officially coming back as far as I know. Which means that we have to get our friends to join,” said Bunk. “[We need] at least six.”

“Six is the bare minimum,” added Marelli. “’Cause that leaves no wiggle room if someone does get hurt or can’t get out of class.”

In order to have a full roster in tennis six players are necessary, but a team can still score and win with a minimum of four if they forfeit certain matches. 

“I’ve been at other schools where we had small roster sizes,” said Fisk. “They’d have to forfeit third doubles and sixth singles if we hypothetically only had five and couldn’t add anybody else. I certainly hope we’re not in that spot but I think you can go with four and not have to forfeit because at that point you can win four singles and two doubles which is enough to win a match.”

Even though the tennis team should be able to score no matter what next season, the situation is less than ideal.

“One of the things we’ve worked hard on is the new recruiting brochure,” said Fisk. “I think it’s pretty special and it’s not like anything we’ve done before. This is like [an NCAA] Division I sort of model.” 

The brochure, which was a tri-fold folder filled with information about Fredonia’s athletics and campus, featured the Blue Devils’ logo, a map and a letter written by Fisk. 

“I think it’s a pretty impressive document that we can send out to a potential student-athlete,” said Fisk. “I think we’re going to bring in student-athletes that want to invest in themselves.”

Tennis, as well as many other sports, are going through tough transitional periods that raises questions of where the department expects to go after the transitions are over, and whether or not these growing pains are worth it. 

However, Fisk is aware of these problems and has a vision for the department’s future. 

“I think we’re on our way there,” said Fisk. “There’s a few words I use: ‘Intentionality,’ ‘accountability’ and ‘sustainability.’ And I think that we’re being very intentional about the expectations. The study hall hours, getting the drug testing in. Now, are we doing those things to be punitive? We’re not. But we’re protecting people’s health, we’re helping them. There are a lot of majors on campus that you can’t graduate [from] unless you have a certain GPA. Well you could still be eligible as a student-athlete without any additional work and never graduate because you couldn’t get your degree in your major.”

“Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” said Fisk. “So I think part of the process was getting all of the coaches on the [same] page . . . And [letting them know] that I was going to work just as hard as they were.”

“I think one of the first conversations [The Leader and I] ever had was ‘Fredonia is known as a party school, do we think it’ll ever not be known as a party school?’ It might have been the first question [The Leader] actually ever asked me,” said Fisk. 

“. . . I think once we work through some of these things and the incoming student-athletes see how serious we are with the Performance Center, the study hall hours, the drug-testing, [the subject of ] this, the officialness and sort of intentionality [with which] we do some of the things we do, the way we do the gala is different than it used to be, and all those things . . . I think new incoming student-athletes are going to see things that are different than [a current athlete] saw when [they] came for [their] visit.”

When someone competes in a music competition, there’s no equity based on their natural predispositions to any given instrument. If someone naturally has good ombiture, they get to play a wind instrument. If someone has long fingers, they get to play the piano or stringed instruments. If someone has a good internal rhythm, they get to play percussion. If you can play an instrument well, you get to compete with everyone else. Saxophone players aren’t made to run a mile before they compete if their ombiture is too good, and long-fingered pianists aren’t forced to use pianos with oversized keys. If you’re lucky enough to have a natural advantage, judges won’t use it to barre you from competition, or even deduct from your overall score. Even if you’re lucky enough to have perfect pitch, an advantage that allows you to tell every note that’s being played without a reference, you just get to compete like everyone else. 

    Caster Semenya doesn’t have that luxury.

    She’s a two-time Olympic champion in the 800m run, and she has a naturally high level of testosterone. Following multiple hearings and reviews, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which acts as the governing body for international track and field, says she has to either take hormones to lower her level of testosterone or run in events that are longer than the mile. According to the rulings, her natural level of testosterone gives her an advantage at events between 400m and the mile, so she’s currently barred from those events unless a future decision rules in her favor. That means that she might not be able to compete and defend her 800m title at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. She’s tried to run the 5,000m race to continue to compete internationally, but her time was a mere 16:05 compared to the 15:22 standard required to even compete in the world championships in Doha this year – let alone the necessity to be among the fastest in her home country of South Africa to make their Olympic team. 

    It’s not like Semenya has been running unheard of times either. She doesn’t even have the 800m world record. Her best time across the distance is 1:54.25, good enough for a national record to be fair, but still about a second off of the world record of 1:53.28 set by Jarmila Kratochvílová of West Germany in 1983. Less than a second might seem like not much of a time difference, but across 800m it’s actually a lot. The event is basically a sprint for two laps on a track, and it requires an immense amount of raw speed to become elite. It would be challenging for someone off the street to run one lap, or even half of a lap, at the pace of the world record. Semenya is close to the world record, but it’s not like she’s demolished it, or even run times that put her races into question. 

    Essentially, Semenya is just a really good racer. Of course she’s still really fast, but her wins boil down to an ability to strategize and kick (close races faster than they’re started) her way into victory. Nobody’s ever questioned Mo Farah or Eliud Kipchoge’s or Steve Prefontaine’s legitimacy as athletes because of how often they win. In fact, they’re celebrated for it. Kipchoge had two time-trials specifically tailored to him so that he could break the two hour barrier in the marathon. Nobody has ever questioned whether he has an unfair natural advantage just because he’s won 10 out of his 11 career marathons. Nobody claims that his legs are longer than everybody else’s, or that his lung capacity is too naturally large. He’s simply regarded as one of the most dominant athletes of all time, and other athletes just have to find a way to reach his level. And the thing about kipchoge is that he does have the record in the marathon – and when he broke it, it was by over a minute. Still nobody told him that he can’t run alongside his fellow elite athletes in international competition. Because of his dominance, the distance running community has effectively celebrated him into a league of his own.

    The IAAF is taking Semenya’s natural talent and asking her to reduce it to make it a closer race between her and the rest of the middle distance field, but she hasn’t done anything so out of this world as to warrant that. They’re essentially asking her to hinder herself to tighten competition, when we celebrate male athletes who dominate their fields just as much as she hers. They’re asking her to compete on an oversized piano because her fingers are too big – to play with earplugs in because she has perfect pitch. 

    Some might come at this from the angle of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) and wonder why she’s allowed to compete with heightened testosterone levels when other athletes aren’t allowed to take hormones to bring themselves up to her level. But athletics doesn’t discriminate based on an athlete’s natural build. It only discriminates when an athlete changes their physique using unnatural methods. Semenya was born the way she is now, and doesn’t take hormones to improve her performance. It’s also worth noting that Semenya isn’t transitioning, either. She was born a female – just one who happens to have a heightened level of testosterone.

    The IAAF is actively trying to hinder Semenya from being dominant across her preferred distance. She showed up to the music competition and the judges told her her fingers are too long. They said she has to either play on an oversized piano or pick an entirely new instrument. And if she can’t get them to change their minds, she won’t be able to defend her title of Olympic Champion.