Congrats to Corey Bitzer 
She is featured in the Chicago Tribune!
Beyond the varsity drag
Barry Temkin
April 16, 2004
Corey Bitzer competes like Michael Jordan and spends up to 20 hours a week pursuing her love for sports.
Yet most people wouldn't consider her a real college athlete.
A real college athlete, after all, plays for a real college team against other real college teams in front of thousands of real college fans. Bitzer, an Indiana University senior, competes in obscurity on intramural teams.
That relative anonymity ended when Sports Illustrated on Campus featured her in its April 8 edition with a cover story extolling her as "The Greatest Living (Intramural) Athlete."
The story is a funny and flattering look at the hectic life of the 22-year-old former Naperville Central basketball and softball star, who has been named Indiana's female IM athlete of the year as a junior and senior. It's also a subtle reminder that there's life after high school sports, even for kids who were good enough to have played on "real" college teams but decided not to.
Bitzer was that good. She started at point guard for Central's pre-Candace Parker basketball team and was, basketball and softball coach Andy Nussbaum says, the best defensive shortstop he has had.
The 5-foot-4-inch Bitzer could have played intercollegiate basketball, probably at the Division II or III level, but she wanted to get the best education she could while sampling the activities a large university offers.
"I wasn't sure if I would try to play basketball somewhere or just go to a big school and not even try to walk on, just be a student," she says. "So I wanted a place that offered a variety of other things too."
Bitzer did try out for the women's basketball team as a freshman. She made the squad but began to realize participating in a Division I sport would devour her free time and offer little playing time in return. She left the team that October.
"It would have been basketball, homework, bed," she says. "My parents said college is the best years of your life, and I didn't feel I'd enjoy them as much.
"I just wanted to do other things."
She didn't, however, leave basketball with a smile.
"I was crying," she says. "Basketball had been my life to that point. It was a really tough decision."
Bitzer's first foray into the intramural world was in coed basketball. Her team, the Diaper Dandies, won the league title.
That spring she joined the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority, and her intramural career really took off as she signed up for one AGD team after another.
Her pursuits have included bowling, cycling, flag football, floor hockey, running, soccer, softball, Ultimate Frisbee, volleyball and Wiffle ball. She has competed in at least 40 IM events, winning 13 titles in seven sports.
Bitzer is so competitive she had a contest with a college friend to see who could grow the best avocado, so it's no surprise she participates in coed IM sports when she can because guys present more of a challenge.
She usually doesn't train for her sports. The exception is Indiana's famed Little 500 bicycle race, for which she lifts weights and rides during a good portion of the school year.
She had not biked competitively before college but won the women's individual time trial last spring and hopes to lead AGD to the women's team title April 23.
"It's pretty clear she has taken advantage of what a Big Ten university can offer," Nussbaum says. "She actually has gone out and done what she said she would do, and then some."
The result has been a calendar that runs out of space, like when Bitzer hurries from a women's softball game to a coed contest in the same night.
"If I have a rare day off, I'm bored out of my mind," she says.
She certainly deserves the recognition the SI on Campus article has brought her. The reaction, Bitzer says, has ranged from hearing from people she hadn't talked to since high school to signing copies of the magazine for a Sports Illustrated collector.
She realizes she probably isn't the No. 1 IM athlete in the country but is proud to be singled out for her achievements.
"It's cool that people are recognizing the things I do and the sports I play and how much effort I do put into the things I do," she says.
Bitzer will graduate next month with a degree in sports marketing and management. She wants athletics to be a permanent part of her life as both a vocation and avocation.
"I don't want to sit behind a desk all day," she says. "I like to be out and be active."
She will leave Indiana with no regrets about the intercollegiate athletic road not taken.
"At first I was unsure if I had made the right decision," Bitzer says, "but since my sophomore year I haven't looked back. I've met so many cool people and am having a great time.
"I think it's hard to beat my life now. I wouldn't want to live it any other way."
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btemkin@tribune.com
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