Live your dream on a U of R intramurals team
Intramurals: where everyone is a winner!/ John Loeppky
Keep in shape during the awful semester
Athletics are often a large part of university culture. Well-attended athletic events are a rallying point for the campus community. But, what if you’re not a CIS athlete? What if you’re just looking to live your Kobe Bryant-esque fantasies? Intramural sports are there to fill the void.
The schedule for the winter semester offers the usual fare (five-on-five basketball, soccer, flag football, and volleyball), along with some less common sports like chess and curling. Other sports to partake in are dodgeball and ultimate frisbee, but the newest program is cricket.
Alison Fisher, program assistant for recreation services, says that the sport’s inclusion came because of the wishes of the student body,
“We had some students who had been asking… they met with us, they helped us in hiring officials to make sure we were hiring people who knew the game, and then we did a bit of advertising and we ended up with five teams for the first year, which is awesome.”
The students also helped the intramural office with vital aspects of the sport like figuring out how the rules of the game could be adapted. Fisher says that other sports are under consideration, most notably quidditch and wheelchair basketball, but that the lack of space available, and the costs involved in the case of the latter are “absolutely prohibitive,” though quidditch may be introduced in the fall.
Fourth-year student Kandra Forbes says it was the social aspect that got her to participate in intramurals,
“I wanted to continue playing soccer and meet new people, so I signed up for an Individuals team.”
When asked whether she would recommend intramural programming to others, she had this to say.
“I recommend intramurals because you meet new people, and with games only about once a week, it’s a nice little break from school.”
Keeping track of your intramural activities is easy with the use of IMleagus.com, a website that boasts to have over seven-hundred schools registered. Fisher says that this is a site they have been using for three years and that it has many benefits.
“[It] has saved a ton of staff time and I think it’s really cool for the participants… When you go to your player page you get to see when your games are and how you’re doing in your leagues.”
Even with a large amount of people participating this year, both Forbes and Fisher highlighted ways in which the program can be improved, from the student perspective.
“There needs to be better communication. Halfway through the season, we are finding out about rules we never knew about.”
From the administration’s view, the main challenge is getting the word out.
“The biggest thing we struggle with is advertising and getting students to be familiar with it.”
These efforts have been focused on getting feedback through league evaluations and informal tabling so that the results can be received and they can add to the two thousand students already participating. Anyone looking to participate is urged to go the intramural office in the kinesiology building.
