The intramural program at CU is a great way for students to meet new people and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
CU offers students a variety of different sports, and registration for intramural teams happens four times a year.
“We probably offer about 15 different sports. We’ve added a different twist on the sports too. For soccer, we’ve always had indoor and outdoor, but now we just offered a three-on-three tournament, which was great,” said Annie Mulvany, an intramural coordinator at CU.
Some of the more popular sports offered through the intramural program are basketball, soccer, dodge ball and flag football.
“We have a limit on the number of teams, so we max out,” Mulvany said. “Basketball always fills, dodge ball always fills, soccer fills, flag football fills. In terms of popularity, those are probably are most popular sports.”
But basketball and dodge ball appear to be the most popular sports offered through the program.
“We do four sessions of basketball (a year), and each time we will have 112 teams. Dodge ball we run twice a year and that fills at 80 teams both sessions,” Mulvany said.
The intramural program is subsidized through student fees, but a team fee is collected in order to keep the program on its feet.
Maintaining sportsmanship is an important aspect of the program as well. Teams are rated on a scale of one through four, where four is the highest sportsmanship rating.
“What we do for sportsmanship, each team is rated in each game. It’s rated one through four and you have to average a 3.0 to go onto the tournament,” Mulvany said.
The program would be able to expand a little bit further if there were more fields and facilities at CU.
“In terms of fields and facilities, we use every space available that we can,” Mulvany said. “So our programs may be able to be little bit bigger it we had more space, but I don’t know.”
The intramural program offered at Colorado State University is very similar to CU’s program.
“Part of tuition goes to the recreation program at CSU, so we get a percentage of that, which I have no idea what that is,” said Kyle Taylor, an intramural coordinator at CSU. “Then also for a league sport, we charge $40 per team. We also do special weekend tournaments and those are normally a $10 fee.”
CSU has a chain-of-command system where sportsmanship is maintained for the program. A rating system is also involved and players can protest rule interpretation.
“We have officials, then above them are supervisors and above them are coordinators. The officials do the best job they can keeping games fair,” Taylor said. “We have supervisors that are on the fields there every night, double checking everything, dealing with issues, making sure that everything goes smoothly.”
