How very unspartan September 4, 2006
Posted by mwj as twu. trackback.Recreation services has been seen by the suits of Trinity Western University as a bastard child for too long. The club teams, intra-dorm sports and general fitness programs provided for the student body have been undermined and devalued in favour of a small group that we have given far too large a slice of the pie. The six Spartan teams at TWU have received an inordinate amount of attention over the past seven years, and it’s time to re-evaluate and recognize the impact that this imbalance has had on the rest of campus.
In 1999, Trinity opened its arms to Canadian Interuniversity Sport, the top tier of competition at universities across the nation, and the Spartans were born. Concerns were raised then over the impact that this would have on campus - could a small student body and even smaller campus provide the resources necessary to make us champions at the highest university level? Despite this concern, the decision was made to go ahead, but with the promise that an impact study would be conducted after five years of the Spartans to determine just what the consequences would be.
Rec. Services receives about eighty thousand dollars each year… that’s about $3.60 a student.
Seven years have passed, and TWU has certainly proved that it belongs in the CIS. With four medals so far, our athletes have put Trinity on the map and in the history books. Particularly memorable was the victory of the women’s soccer team against McGill in 2005, which brought home the gold and made the Spartans CIS national champions for the first time.
Less forthcoming, however, has been the impact study that was promised when these teams first arrived on the scene. Where did the resources come from to grow these teams? Who has had to give up the space, money and personnel to cultivate the “complete champion” approach that has proved so successful? Without any study we can only guess at the impact these teams have had, but it does not take much to identify one area that has been conspicuously neglected since the Spartans arrived on the scene.
Rec. Services has borne the brunt of CIS expansion at TWU. While the Spartans enjoy brand new equipment every year, everyone else is relegated to hand-me-down basketballs and soccer jerseys. The Spartans get non-stop access to the North field, all the time, which has been reserved for them alone. The rest of the 3,000 students here have to play games and run practices on the rugby field and that strange plot of land that doesn’t quite qualify as any particular type of field beside it.
And perhaps the most damning statistic is that Rec. Services receives about eighty thousand dollars each year to divvy up between the 2,900 or so students that can use what it has to offer: that’s about $3.60 a student. The athletics department, on the other hand, gets $2.2 million to spend on the roughly one hundred Spartans: they get $22,000 each. In other words, any given athlete actually has seven thousand dollars more spent on them than they would pay in a given year, presuming that they actually pay to be here at all.
Let me finish by clarifying that this is not an attack on CIS sports at TWU. I love watching the Spartans, and I understand the logic that says big teams draw big bucks, although I don’t think that equation computes quite the same way north of the border. What I am saying is that as a student who does pay to be here, I would like to know a lot more about what sort of impact our six Spartan teams are having on this campus. If it is true, as I suspect it is, that the rest of us are being crowded out, overlooked and under-appreciated because of a reckless commitment to attaining CIS gold, we must open up the discussion on how to cut back, re-prioritize and recognize that our money and space is for all the students, not just the select few who make it to the big leagues.
The rest of us have been learning to live like Spartans for years, tightening our belts when the money’s not there and going without when we have to. It may be time for our athletics department to do the same.
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