When growing up, many children of all ages and genders will watch television and see athletes like Michael Jordan or Mia Hamm and want to emulate them.
This is a lofty goal, for not everyone can be a professional athlete. Not everyone can even play in collegiate sports.
According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s website, only 6 percent of high school athletes, male and females, will go on to play division one sports.
This is where intramural sports come in.
Brandon DenHartog, assistant director of recreational services who began working at FLC in the fall of 2003, said intramural sports have evolved greatly since his tenure at the school began 13 years ago.
Jason Templet II, intramural and club sports intern at FLC, said intramural sports has changed its membership fee to a one-time fee of $10. This does not matter if you play one game or if you play 50 games, it is still only $10.
Templet and DenHartog agree that this change is hoping to encourage more participation in the intramural sports community and hopefully get more students to engage in intramural events.
“From the time that it started a while ago, before I got here, traditional sports ruled,” DenHartog said. “Your flag football, basketball, volleyball, and soccer for intramural sports. The way that it’s been evolving now is that more and more intramural sports programs are adding more events to their calendar. Yard games like corn hole, washers and that sort of thing and also video game tournaments.”
If students get engaged on campus with other people who go to the same school as them, they are more likely to stay at the school and do well in their classes because they are happier as a whole, DenHartog said.
“As we are progressing and there is more technology being involved like smart phones and all of that kind of stuff, we are trying to get events going that we can reach out to other folks that may not come over to the student life center but can play a FIFA video game tournament or something along those lines,” DenHartog said.
DenHartog and Templet both feel that intramural sports are great for the community and are beneficial to the students.
“Intramurals is a good way for students to get involved and stay physically active,” Templet said. “It is also a great way to make new friends and have fun in a competitive environment.”
DenHartog said if he could improve intramurals in one way it would be to get more participation from students. His goal is to get every student on campus competing in intramural programs in one way or another.
“This year we are closing in on 400 unique participants,” he said. “They are playing in sports and events two times a week, and I believe that we have had almost 2000 participations and that is huge. We haven’t even had our big indoor sports like indoor volleyball or five-on-five basketball which are our most highly participated sports.”
DenHartog anticipates that the number of unique participants could eclipse 700 and that the total participations could eclipse 6000. This is huge being that 700 unique participants is about 20 percent of the school’s population.
“You can engage in the sport recreationally or competitively,” DenHartog said. “We have had teams that show up to soccer each week in a different costume. I don’t think that they ever won a game that entire season but man they enjoyed being out there.”
Matthew Roy is a full-time student and is a scholarship football player at FLC. He can be contacted at mtroy@fortlewis.edu.