Intramural flag football move to West Campus sacked

The intramural flag football games scheduled to begin today will not be played at West Campus due to construction. Instead, the games will be played at Walter B. Williams Park.

“We were going to play here on West Campus, but (the fields) won’t be ready until sometime in October, so the games will still be at Walter B.,” said Andy Hudgins, Coordinator of Intramural and Outdoor Programs.

The flag football games have been played at Walter B. Williams Park in the past, but the plan was to install lights at the fields at West Campus and move the games to campus this semester.

“Over the past summer, they started the project to put the lights up,” Hudgins said. “They have all the light poles up, all 16 lights. They just have to finish some wiring and put some more concrete on the ground and then clean up.”

The driving force behind the decision not to move the flag football games to campus is safety.

“They won’t let us have (the fields) because it’s dangerous right now,” Hudgins said.

Keeping the games at Walter B. Williams also impacts the number of teams that are able to participate in flag football.

“We had to limit the number of flag football teams,” Hudgins said. “We were going to have 80, so now we are going to have 62 just because we have less space and less time.”

Walter B. Williams Park is used by many organizations other than GC&SU, which makes it difficult to schedule games.

“If we played at West Campus, we could schedule as many games as we want,” Hudgins said. “If we play at Walter B., we schedule around other youth football leagues and baseball leagues, so that kind of hurts us.”

Flag football is the most popular intramural sport, and many students are upset that the games will not be played on campus.

“It’s a pretty big bummer,” said junior Joey Barnett. “As a student, I feel it is going to be a big inconvenience. It makes me wonder what was going on all summer.”

Hudgins understands the frustrations felt by the students.

“Most of the students are discouraged because we have had the fields for two years now, and we haven’t had the opportunity to use them at night,” Hudgins said.

Other students are not as concerned about where the flag football games are held.

“I don’t really have a problem with it, but I can understand why people are upset about it,” said sophomore Daniel Moore.

Moore doesn’t like that they have to cut back the number of teams participating, but he is glad just to be able to play flag football.

“Without the lights you can’t play at night, and if they scheduled games during the day during classes you would have even fewer teams,” Moore said.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 16 2005. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry