Long time lurker alert! I never usually post, someone always gets in there first with exactly what I was going to say. But this time it’s me with the problem!
A bit of background - I run a sports club at the university I attend…it’s a climbing club - we offer rock climbing, hiking and mountaineering. Sports clubs typically have one night a week as a social night, we all go out for a drink and a good chat and geek out about climbing. There are hundreds of interesting and unique pubs on offer in the town and we like to go to new places a lot, and as most of our members live in town and not on campus (which is a 15 min drive away), we have a few regular haunts closest to the area most of us live.
The university has faced funding cuts all over the place since last year and the sports were definitely part of that. One of the things they mentioned was that they would like the sports clubs to hold their socials at the student union bar on campus, as money spent there goes back into the union and therefore the sports fund.
It seems that now, in a colossal dick move, the sports officer has decided to force us to hold our socials there or forgo funding.
“We will now be keeping a closer eye on who is attending on Wednesday nights in the bar…the funding committee will be informed of clubs who have a noticeable absence from the bar on a Wednesday evening, and therefore will affect there ability to receive funding.”
:dubious:
My question is, can they do this? The notion that we are not entitled to funding if we drink elsewhere does not sit right with me. Especially when the funding we have received this year was only slightly higher than the cricket club’s sock budget. I’m not even kidding.
Any advice on how I should respond to this? Do they have the right to withhold funding if a club doesn’t prop up the union bar every Wednesday? There are many reasons I don’t want to, which I leave for now as I can hear my bias creeping in, but for now…any opinions welcome!
Do you really care where you drink? Is the beer that much cheaper or colder off campus? If so, could you possibly have the first round on campus and then move the social aspect to your pub of choosing.
There are reasons. It’s too small, loud and busy. We can’t sit 10 people together, even if you are lucky enough to get a table. They want every club to attend. Even if only the committee members of the clubs went (i.e. not regular members) they would be over capacity.
Also the majority of our members do not live on campus, we would have to travel there especially. Our most experienced and valuable members who have been in the club for 5+ years are not students, and don’t receive any of the ‘benefits’ of putting money into the sports fund.
Really it’s geared towards the competitive sports that hold their practices on Wednesday afternoons (Rugby, netball etc.) that have facilities on campus. As the uni has no climbing wall, we have to go elsewhere. Myself and a few of the older members (not even students) serve as volunteer drivers to get people to climbing walls. If we climb on Wednesdays, we would not get back to the bar more than half an hour before it closed.
Plus I doubt the ale drinkers and beer snobs want to drink crappy lager, even if it is cheap!
Sports are funded by the union, plus they have a sponsorship deal with a company (i.e. company gives them money, all sports teams put their logo on their shirts etc.).
We pay fees to join the ‘sports entity’ for a year, this allows you to join sports clubs.
So everyone pays money, has a logo on their shirt, in turn receives funding for our climbing equipment.
Except we get hardly any money, and now won’t get anything unless we drink at a shitty campus bar, and be part of their extra money making scheme.
I hope that makes sense, it’s hard to explain the way the uni works simply!
Contrapuntal - Lets see, we used to get somewhere a budget of around £600 a year to spend on buying and replacing gear, running trips etc. plus a transport budget which covered use of a uni minibus once a week to a climbing wall and a three trips a term (to climb/mountaineer outdoors). Also space for a stall at freshers fair to sign up new members. The club could run like a club should.
As of this year, there are now no uni minibuses at all and any money you get now you have to apply for and it gets judged by a committee who decide how much to grant you. We have currently asked for enough to replace all gear that needed retiring from the safety check (around £300), and the price of minibus hire for three trips. We have received minibus hire once.
We have sponsors with outdoor shops, but they take the form of discount for members shopping there. So yeah, paying fees (which you have to if you join a club) used to make sense in relation to what we got back. Now, not so much. And we won’t get anything at all unless we won’t drink where they want us to.
Talking to the uni is like talking to a wall. And not even in a good one that you can climb. Seems petty to want to split and become an independent club over something so silly as YOU MUST DRINK AT OUR BAR, but they sure know how to piss everyone off.
So you pay fees which get you a shirt with a logo and hardly any money for equipment? Sounds like you should divorce yourself from the university’s system, stop paying fees (pay dues to your own club instead), and enjoy meeting at the pubs you like.
Is there any particular reason not to disassociate from the “sports entity?”
Think the OP is in the UK. If he was in the U.S., he might have a stronger argument. Here, the drinking age is 21, most undergrad students are underage, and conditioning the allocation of school funding on consumption of alcohol prolly isn’t gonna fly with the school’s Directors/Regents.
Given that most of the clubs meet on campus, on Wednesdays, then I actually don’t think this rule is unreasonable. It’s a convenient location anyhow so they’re not asking people to jump thru hoops. And really, if you have a bowling league sponsored by a bar then you’d go to that bar after the game, you wouldn’t go out of your way to go somewhere else every single week.
Your team is an exceptional case, you’re already across town, so I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask for some compromise – you’ll come to the pub social every other week, for example. But the fact that some of your members are not students shouldn’t be a factor. It’s a school club, it’s not reasonable to expect the rules to bend for the convenience of members that are not students. As mentioned you are free to break off and start your own club if that better suits your members. You can always start a “Student section” or something, with it’s own leader who deals with the university.
The only thing that seems off is saying that the social is required, it’s not acceptable for everyone to skip beers and go straight home every week. But it your case it doesn’t sounds like you mind having to go to the pub, you’re just upset about which pub you have to go to.
Oakminster - Yep UK here, so drinking age is 18. Although it is funny how we were told at the start of the year to not host every single social centred around alcohol. “You could go ice skating!”
Also I’m a she
sugar and spice I agree with what you are saying, and I can see the logic behind it, teams practice on Wednesdays, afterwards go and support the uni bar and therefore yourselves etc. And it’s true, we are going to be in a pub that night anyway. What I’m objecting to is not our presence in the pub (although that is pretty inconvenient) but the compulsory regular attendance required to receive any funding at all, in spite of the fact the money given to clubs is not from the profits made at the union bars, but from the fees we pay and from a large sponsorship deal the sports entity has with an outside company. The bar profits are just extra profits for the union, and we don’t seem to be seeing any of it.
The reason I mention the non-student members and the rest of us who don’t live on campus is the club wouldn’t run without them. Although it is school club, I cannot ignore the non-students. I have qualified doctors and people with 10+ years of climbing experience, and I’d like for them to stick around! They are invaluable when it come to teaching new people how to climb and learn the ropes(ha). You don’t have that level of expertise from the undergrads who have been climbing less than a year mostly. We don’t have a coach like football etc. do, we rely on experienced members to teach climbing skills to whoever wants to learn. And the only way we can get to a climbing wall to do that is to drive, and those with cars do not live on campus (campus residents are not allowed to keep cars). Now they have scrapped the minibuses, and won’t give funding to hire them, I have to rely volunteer drivers, who apart from myself, are all non-students.
I’m really 50/50 about the whole thing, for the reasons sugar and spice mentions, but also Gary T sums up my thoughts pretty exactly.
If you’ve got enough members to fill up a whole bar/pub, collect 15 quid from each of them. 15 x 40 = your 600 pound budget, and you can drink wherever you like.
I suspect you may not have considered the rather more costly benefits you get from associating with the university that don’t show up on the balance sheet, viz. liability insurance.
One of the many problems with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Natch!, why not just get a couple of members of the club to say they’re Teetotalers/recovering from alcohol misuse and therefore do not drink and are uncomfortable having a social meeting in a pub?
I looked into this, although we are members of the BMC (British Mountaineering Council) through the university, this does not automatically give us insurance for climbing/mountaineering. Although as members we can purchase our own insurance. Membership to BMC is about £15 a year though, and the keenest climbers usually have their own membership.
The other insurance we had with the uni covered us when travelling to/from anywhere, if we were in a uni minibus, which have been scrapped. Gah.
