Photo: Senior Cooper Stanweight from Darien, Connecticut is developing strategies to deal with mounting losses and hopelessness.
Colorado College’s (7-22-4) failure on the ice has resulted in widespread campus dissatisfaction. As the Tiger’s featured athletic program, men’s ice hockey continues to falter during the 2016-2017 season. An internal campus survey shows that “horrible Hockey” caused widespread (63%) campus dissatisfaction. In response, college officials have created coping strategies for students to deal with the mounting losses.
The school has adopted the Seven Stages of Grief model and provides students with coping strategies to address these different stages. A workshop manual suggests how students may feel as they pass through the various gates.:
- SHOCK & DENIAL– “CC has a hockey team? What! We’ve lost 12 in a row to DU – that sucks!”
- PAIN & GUILT– “I went to the ceramics lab Saturday night”, Sigh. “I should have gone to the hockey game!”
- ANGER & BARGAINING– “My parents aren’t paying $66,000 per year to be treated like this. Maybe we can make medals for everybody and we can all wear them around campus!”
- “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS– “People call us kittens instead of Tigers. I feel like a lonely little kitten and marginalized – with no Kitten friends”.
- THE UPWARD TURN– “Wait just a minute…kittens have soft fur and we love to be petted…We get catnip, too – that’s kind of like weed for cats isn’t it?
- RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH– “Just so everyone knows, I now self-identify as a Tiger. I am a big Tiger, yellow and black, with sharp claws. Grrrrrrr.”
- ACCEPTANCE & HOPE– “Everyone knows that real Tigers aren’t good on ice…but I’m alive. And mom and dad are taking me to Maui for my graduation present.”
Colorado College students psyches will be put to the test starting Friday, March 10th when the Tigers travel to Denver to face the red-hot Denver Pioneers for the NCHC hockey playoffs. The CC Tigers will be trying to avoid their 13th and 14th consecutive losses against the Pioneers.