The men’s soccer game a few weeks ago drew about 3,000 fans, and while there wasn’t the hooliganism that a soccer game attracts when it’s called a “football match,” it was certainly an entertained and raucous crowd.

Even in the two plus years that I’ve been at Harvard, the sports culture at this school has changed drastically.

Basketball is responsible for a lot of that, and certainly winning the Ivy title didn’t hurt.

I really do believe that there is a demand among Harvard students for sporting events. But I also think that this desire is often superseded by either an inability or a lack of motivation to go to a noon-time start.

For the majority of the student body, I would think that the primary force driving attendance to any sporting event isn’t the game itself—it’s the community.

And in that way, sports serves as one of the very few events that can really unite the campus.

We see it every year at Harvard-Yale. To a lesser but still notable extent, we see it at other games, especially in basketball.

And more and more, we are seeing it at other functions as well, like the night games for soccer and football.

There is still clearly room for growth and improvement. But the athletic community is clearly moving in the right direction.

—Staff writer E. Benjamin Samuels can be reached at samuels@college.harvard.edu.