Obstacles with Sport Clubs

Two weeks ago DeStress week was organized by the CEU Student Life Office. The goal of the initiative was to reduce the amount of stress that students are experiencing because of their examinations and upcoming finals. While they did a good job overall, they forgot one very important thing - that the best way of tackling stress is with sports! Unfortunately this lapse is not an isolated event, and in fact CEU has generally not been proactive about creating good conditions for students to exercise.

Case in point…

I organize a volleyball and soccer club for the students of the Department of Public Policy. At the moment it is already the end of November and we still do not have regular time slots for the clubs in the gym. This issue remains unresolved because the Student Life Office states that the CEU Sports Center is another institution, and the CEU Sports Center states that it is not possible for them to orchestrate regular time slots.

This means that we must go to the Sports Center and book a new time each week. You can hardly imagine how frustrating that is! Usually by the time I go to book sport times for the clubs, most time slots have already been taken. Even when something is free, it is almost always on a Friday, when most students do not have class. Moreover, the booking system only allows you to schedule one hour per person, per week. So if I want to book two times for two different clubs in a week, I am prohibited from doing so, even though the bookings are for two entirely different groups of people!

At first, I tried to be persistent and booked one time for one club, and asked somebody else to book another time. There are however many negative implications from this policy. For example, as mentioned before, you can book only one hour per week in the gym. If you have played volleyball before, you understand that one hour is hardly sufficient for a training. Volleyball is a technical game that is not so intense and before you start you need to have a good warm-up. So with this system, it is impossible that the volleyball club can function properly.

Besides that, I cannot still understand why is it not possible to book times for Mondays and for Wednesdays. The Sports Center always states that it is full, so there are really just three days available for booking. When the Sports Center is opened from 15.00 to 21.00 it means 6x1 time slots are available during one day. For the whole week it means 18 time slots. It is just unrealistic that these 18 time slots are always full and it is not possible to give regular time slots for the sports clubs.

How should our clubs then function?

Recently someone from the Student Life Office saw that I have organized a volleyball club and contacted me. He asked which days of the week we were playing, and at what time.  I had to state with an embarrassment that we do not really have regular times, and explain to him that our club is not really functioning at the moment – all because of these policies!

For me and many of my friends here, sports are an important part of our lives. Exercise is also one of the best ways of reducing stress from our intensive studies. Unfortunately at the moment sports clubs cannot function properly because of the vague and unclear booking system that we have. It is pointless to encourage students to join and establish different clubs when the conditions for sustaining these clubs are not created.

Karl Haljasmets, Public Policy, Estonia

Picture: http://www.courtsportseugene.com