The one and only time I’ve been to Kenyon College—Ohio’s oldest private institution (established 1824) tucked neatly atop a hill in the micro-village of Gambier—it was to see Velocity Girl play in 1996. If memory serves correctly, They Might Be Giants were the headliners of the school’s annual spring festival. I don’t remember much. I do remember meeting a handful of kids from the East Coast with massive cassette collections of Dead and Phish boots, who were also well-versed in the indie rock I was digging at the time. There was a guy who kept bragging that his dad wrote for Rolling Stone and another who spoke loquaciously about his upcoming cross-country trip which would be the basis of his “modern update of On the Road. David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech there at one point before his death. The place was sacrosanct for the upper-class bourgeois looking to give their children the ultimate in liberal arts educations, but those prodigal sons and daughters wanted to treat it like some bohemian summer camp.

How does it all relate to Sports? Well, not much besides the fact that the quartet who claim to be “friends first, band second” met and blossomed while attending Kenyon. There’s also the fact that their sound harkens back to a time when Velocity Girl, or perhaps the Blake Babies, would have the cache to play to enthusiastic crowds the world over. Maybe it’s the just the law of recycling, but this particular girly ’90s nostalgia, also found in bands like Columbus’ All Dogs and Boston’s Speedy Ortiz, has become the current rage, and Sports sound adept in resurrecting those vibes. Unlike those aforementioned groups, Sports inject a slightly brattier, almost riotous energy into their demo. “I Liked You Best” being the best of the bunch, actually comes across as punk, albeit with slam-book poesy and a rec-room abandon that belies the ambiguity of restless kids jamming in hopes of escaping their cushioned co-ed collegiality or post-grads perfectly content existing in that bubble, never wanting to break from the jangled simplicity. Either way, it’s a comforting jangle that may even suggest those thousands of Yips’ CDs clogging up used bins for the last 15 years are finally serving a purpose.