Club sport dilemma: Just let them play
By Ben Tate
Club sports have been a controversial issue at Santa Clara for a long time. I have been involved with Associated Students all four of my years at Santa Clara, and not a year has gone by that I haven't heard mention of an issue involving club sports.
Last year's Club Sports Task Force was created to discover how the existing club sports could best be supported by the university. Prior to the task force, club sports were primarily supported by individual player dues or contributions and discretionary funding from Associated Students; a system that was not able to provide the consistent and adequate resources needed to properly support the club sports.
The task force concluded that the best organization to support the club sports was Campus Recreation, a division of the Athletic Department. A new full-time position within Campus Recreation would be needed to handle oversight of the club sports, as well as $40,000 in funding to support the teams.
As the editorial in The Santa Clara, "A Call to Action for Associated Students," stated two weeks ago, Athletics didn't buy it, and the implemented changes were half of what was recommended. Instead of $40,000 and a full-time club sports director, it allocated $20,000 and a half-time Assistant Director of Campus Recreation.
This latest issue of duplicate club sports (sports that have a NCAA intercollegiate counterpart) is just the latest in the saga of the Athletic Department's resistance to fully taking in club sports under its umbrella of responsibility.
As this column is being written, efforts are being made within AS to produce another task force, whose responsibility will be to discover if it's possible to have duplicate club sports at Santa Clara, and, if so, how to support them. The growing sentiment within the organization is that this is a useless endeavor.
Why is another task force useless? Because the answer is already known: Yes, it is possible to have duplicate club sports at Santa Clara, and the best method to support them is under the Campus Recreation division of the Athletic Department. The Athletic Department would have you believe that this is not a viable option, and so they say a task force is necessary to determine the best course of action.
Why is it not a viable option for duplicate club sports to exist under Campus Recreation? Athletics has given several reasons why duplicate club sports should not exist at all, including that the public might "confuse" the club sports with their NCAA counterparts. I'm not going to waste precious space making fun of that excuse because I'm quite certain everybody is already aware of how ridiculous it is.
However, Athletics' main reason for the non-existence of duplicate club sports is a lack of resources. It claims there is neither the space necessary for teams to practice (without giving up time for intramurals) nor funding necessary to pay someone to do the required financial aid checks.
Several of the prospective club sports teams have already offered numerous practice space alternatives, all of which are entirely plausible.
And what about funding? We attend a university that costs roughly $45,000 a year for the average on-campus student, a university that is building a $95 million library and a $48 million business school as part of its $350 million fundraising campaign and a university with a nearly $600 million endowment as of Sept. 2006. Yet the Athletic Department still claims to have its hands tied -- it simply doesn't have the funding to support duplicate club sports, they say.
This answer is unacceptable.
The Athletic Department has the responsibility to meet with those in Santa Clara administration who hold the purse strings and find the funding to support these club sports. Why does the Athletic Department have this responsibility to the students? Because without us, it would not exist. There would be no athletes on the field, on the court, on the course or in the pool, and there would be no Ruff Riders in the stands.
All that is being asked of the Athletic Department is that it finds a way to allow passionate, talented student-athletes to compete for a university that they are proud to attend. These students could have easily joined independent clubs, but instead they fight to compete under the Santa Clara name. What does this say for our school if they are not doing everything in their power to make this happen?
The rest of Associated Students and I will continue to do our part to advocate for these students and the broader Santa Clara community, but it's time for Athletics to step up to the plate.
Ben Tate is a senior economics and political science double major. He is a senior senator on the student affairs committee.