DTH Columns

Sept. 15, 2004 — Club sports: Making a splash

I was in the middle of Fetzer Field at Fall Fest when I lost my fifth consecutive group of friends in five minutes or less.

Scanning the bustling crowd, trying desperately to spot someone I knew, a posterboard sign caught my eye — UNC Underwater Hockey Club.

"Underwater hockey," I thought. "What, pray tell, is underwater hockey?"

To sate my burning curiousity, I moseyed over to the table, where a laptop computer was being closed.

"Was that a video?" I asked the bespectacled student behind the table.

"Yeah, I'll show it to you."

He opened the laptop to reveal what looked like a bunch of pasty tadpoles with fins and masks pushing a blob across the bottom of a pool.

"Just for reference, how competitive does this get?"

"This is a New Zealand-Australia match from the World Championships."

Thoroughly stunned that underwater hockey actually had championships, I signed up for the mailing list and wandered off, wondering about the state of club sports and how Chapel Hill could field an underwater hockey team.

While the verdict is still out on the viability of underwater hockey — a fledgling group headed by graduate student Danny Monroe — club sports are a thriving sub-culture on the UNC campus, with 53 teams and more than 2,000 students participating.

Keeping a community of that magnitude organized and successful is a tough job, and it falls on Sport Club Director Stacy Warner.

Warner oversees all the clubs and keeps track of the paperwork that accumulates when 2,000 students sign travel and release forms.

She also has the unenviable task of working with the UNC Sport Clubs Council to dole out funding. The budget needed for the men's crew team alone costs more than her allotment for all 53 teams combined. She aids clubs in organizing fund-raisers to offset the difference.

However, Warner's job does not involve managing the day-to-day operations of each team. that responsibility falls onto the shoulders of these dedicated student-athlete — a term that shouldn't be in question.

The teams, which range from Tae Kwon Do to sailing, practice as many as four times a week. They face limited facility access to boot because they share the same fields with varsity and intramural sports.

Sebastian Gibbs, president of the SCC Executive Council and a three-year member of the men's rugby team, said that his team occasionally has been limited to practice after the last intramural game of the day — at 11:30 p.m.

The rugby team has made such sacrifices in order to reamin competitive with varsity teams and has done so with spectacular results, making it to the Elite Eight of last year's national tournament before falling to eventual champion California.

However, Gibbs is quick to defer the attention to other teams' successes.

"Lots of clubs enjoy national success, but they are not able to broadcast that they're the best," he said. "I'm going to find out what they've achieved and shout it from rooftops for them."

While Gibbs is off bounding across the skyline, let's make a more concerted effort to support our fellow students. Try to show up to events and make donations to fund-raisers like those 24-hour rowing marathons in the Pit.

Like Gibbs said, "Everyone at UNC knows someone in a club sport. I guarantee it."