Jamie Zavitz is certainly no stranger to Earlham College.

Both his parents attended Earlham. He was a student-athlete for the Quakers in the 1980s and graduated with a BA in history. When he took his team to Richmond, Indiana, this past weekend, however, his role was not as a student, a legacy, or a player, but rather as a teacher, a mentor and head coach of the Olney Friends School soccer team.

Anyone who has spent time on Olney’s campus over the past four years knows Zavitz embraces these roles, and his coaching philosophy and sportsmanship were on display when his team faced off against Scattergood Friends School in their biennial matchup. Every two years, both teams converge upon Earlham’s campus for a friendly contest. The winning team even leaves the field with a trophy named the QUARK, which stands for Quaker Universal Athletic Rivalry Kup.

The name, however, is a bit of a misnomer. For Zavitz, it is difficult to call the occasional game with Scattergood a “rivalry” in the conventional sense. “It’s mostly for fun. It really is. It’s a chance to go and see Earlham College. The game itself is almost inconsequential,” said Zavitz, who has now coached twice against Scattergood at his collegiate alma mater.

Olney was victorious and returned the QUARK to Barnesville — it had spent the previous two years in West Branch, Iowa, after a 7-3 loss to Scattergood in 2013 — but it was what happened off the field that really set the tone for a memorable weekend. “It was a complete success. The game was very competitive, a lot of fun,” said Zavitz. “It was very rewarding to watch the students from Scattergood & Olney interact so well in such a short period of time. The Scattergood faculty are very easy to work with and excellent at what they do.”

Olney head coach Jamie Zavitz is an alum of both Olney Friends School and Earlham College.

The sentiment is shared by many of his players.

While the team is generally respectful of all opposing squads, Olney team members were especially complimentary of their peers at Scattergood. The two teams not only played soccer on Sunday, but also got to interact on campus and stay at the West Richmond Friends Meetinghouse on Friday and Saturday nights. The weekend helped establish a real bond between students from both schools.

Zack Lowentritt, a junior who normally plays goalie, was one of two Olney players who donned a white jersey and played in the field for Scattergood, whose roster numbers were compromised by player injuries. “It was really easy to integrate,” said Lowentritt. “It was like we just combined our schools for the weekend.”

Sophomore Rowan Fahl-Matlack also enjoyed the interaction between the teams, finding it particularly interesting to mingle with students from another Quaker boarding school.

The similarities in school size, student interests and a rootedness in Quaker values led to a comfortable social atmosphere for both schools according to Julian Sun, an Olney senior. “They’re really open like us. Our schools are similar. It was like we’ve all known each other for a really long time even though most of us had just met.”

For much of the “rivalry,” which began about twenty years ago, each team would alternate turns driving to the other school’s campus. The decision to play at Earlham came several years ago. Playing at a college with great athletic facilities somewhere in between Iowa and Ohio made a lot of sense. Earlham also happens to be a popular matriculation point for students from both schools.

When asked why he and so many others affiliated with Olney have chosen to study at Earlham, Zavitz believes Olney’s educational philosophy, as well as that of traditional Quaker education on the whole, is congenial with the college’s.

“Earlham does a good job of continuing at a much more in depth level a lot of the values we have here,” he said. Earlham’s liberal arts curriculum allows students to study a wide array of subjects while challenging them to explore intellectual territories outside their comfort zones. “You have to be exposed to a variety of ideas to be truly insightful,” said Zavitz, who also teaches sophomore humanities at Olney.

For Ipsi Castillo-Morreira, a junior from Monte Verde, Costa Rica, Earlham also seems to embody the type of community atmosphere she has come to enjoy at Olney. “I love that it is small and how the community is. It’s just like a bigger, fancier version of Olney,” said Morreira after visiting Earlham for the first time. “I’m actually thinking about applying there. That’s definitely the kind of place I want to study.” Morreira is spending a semester at Olney as part of a student exchange program with Monte Verde Friends School.

Zavitz had nothing but positive things to say about his alma mater, where some of his former teammates and coaches are still actively involved with both the men’s and women’s soccer squads. “Earlham is in good shape. The fields, the facilities — our kids were appropriately in awe of both the performances of the student athletes playing soccer and the facilities we were fortunate enough to take advantage of,” said Zavitz. “When an institution has the inclination and the time and the resources to take care of the facilities, it’s a real pleasure.”

He also expressed great appreciation for Micah Brownstein, who assists with coaching Olney soccer and helped facilitate many of the trip’s function, the West Richmond Friends Meeting, which housed both schools for the weekend, and the Earlham admissions department, especially Senior Associate Director of Admissions Susan Hillmann de Castaneda. “Susan, at 10:30 on a Friday night, was outside this church waiting for us. It turns out it was her birthday. But she felt so strongly about this as a member of the Earlham Admissions team to make this happen,” said Zavitz.

 Olney takes the field again on Thursday, October 15th at home against Harrison Central.