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Data Basement
September/October 2006
Photograph ©Mark Ostow

Much of Yale’s 154 years of sports history can be found in a basement room in Ray Tompkins House, the headquarters of the athletics department. Inside ranks of file cabinets and on top of every available surface are trophies, game films, the records of most Eli sports teams since 1852 and of 140,000-plus varsity athletes, and countless memorabilia.

The films are being moved to the library’s climate-controlled storage facility, and there are plans to make most of the information available online. But for now, whenever a researcher, reporter, classmate, or relative calls for data, archives assistant Geoff Zonder knows where the facts and figures are buried. “It’s arranged the old-fashioned way, alphabetically and chronologically,” says Zonder, who started working in the basement in 1992. “I took a mess and organized it.”

More or less.  

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