Let me begin by congratulating The Nerd Team on their basketball and academic successes. Their love for the game and for teamwork shines clearly in the articles published recently in the Gazette.

That said, I’m writing to express my dismay over the July 24 article “Nerd Team stands up for little guys,” regarding their efforts.

The Nerd Team squad consists of players from “high academic institutions” in the Ivy League, such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton.

Portraying anyone who attends these prestigious schools as “the little guys” comes across as wildly tone deaf to the true “little guys” in our culture, especially when one of The Nerd Team’s reported biggest rivals is Blue Collar U, which a reader might surmise to consist of players who may not have attended college at all. While I understand that the context of that reference was specific to The Nerd Team’s perceived standing as student athletes who care very much about academics, the depiction reads as disingenuous, at best.

The most upsetting part of the article was the coaches expressing how much they enjoy working with “High IQ players,” a phrase used not just once, but twice, in the piece. I find this viewpoint problematic in multiple ways, the largest of which is the implied assumption that anyone not a part of the “high academic world” must not have a high IQ. Yes, folks who are admitted to these schools are academically successful, which is an aspect of being a “High IQ guy,” but as The Gazette’s AP article of July 26 (“Investigation into Harvard’s legacy admissions underway”) reports, “ … wealthy students were twice as likely to be admitted to elite schools compared to their lower- or middle-income counterparts who have similar standardized test scores.”

Assuming anyone outside of the Ivy League wealth bubble must inherently have a lower IQ than those inside it is blatant classism at work. (It would also seem to correlate to an underlying dose of embedded cultural racism, as BIPOC students tend to be over-represented in lower- or middle-income families, but I do not assume to be an interpreter of the BIPOC community’s experience.) Just to preempt the argument: I am aware that Ivy League schools do provide scholarships to a portion of their students, some of whom are from lower-income households. That is not at issue here.

Considering the ever-increasing wealth disparity in this country, including in our beloved western Massachuestts (have you looked at the bloated cost of homes and rent in our area lately?), it’s important to recognize wealth/class bias. Even in something as innocuous as a story about a basketball tournament, classism is incredibly pervasive in our culture.

Please know that I have absolutely nothing against The Nerd Team or any of its players. They seem like decent people. I do, however, find the elitist worldview expressed in the article very troubling. Perhaps others do as well.

Christy Grecsek lives in Sunderland.

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