Responses

Hi Anon,

Thank you for your suggestion. We do recognise that this is an issue but unfortunately there is not currently a simple solution.

For context, the Sport and Wellbeing membership that all players are required to have to access facilities and compete in intramural sport goes directly to Sport and Wellbeing. This money goes entirely on the running of the sports facilities, with a small contribution made to SUSU to pay for the staffing costs of administrating the intramural leagues. Joining an intramural league is entirely free and optional for any student with Sport and Wellbeing membership, and as such there is no budget available for SUSU to pay for referees since we don't receive any income from IM. For us to provide a match official just for the 180 football fixtures in an IM season it would cost us £4,500 - the only realistic way to source this amount of money would be to introduce more charges on the players which would make the league less financially accessible. Additionally, we would have to take on an extra administrative burden of contacting qualified referees to attend all of these fixtures. Finally, SUSU's policy for our affiliated Athletic Union clubs is that we do not pay for any type of officiating and the cost of this has to be covered by membership fees so it would be unfair for us to begin doing this for IM fixtures and not AU fixtures. Essentially under the current model and without any budget we are unable to offer incentives to referees.

I have spoken to the intramural committee and relevant staff recently to try to address this issue.  This year we trialed a deposit system and deducted money from teams that failed to attend their referee assignments. This has helped to some degree, but clearly we need to do more to ensure the consistency of refereeing. I have floated the idea of deducting league points, but I need more feedback on how well this would be received and whether or not it would be too harsh or have the required impact on fulfilling assignments.

I would welcome and all suggestions from the teams competing in the IM leagues on how we could address this issue and I recommend talking to your team internally as well as talking to other teams in the league to see if you can come to a collective agreement on the best option. If you would like to discuss this any further please email me at aupres@soton.ac.uk.

Best wishes,

Steve Gore, VP Sports

Friday 27th Jul 2018 3:01pm

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  Friday 27th Jul 2018 1:18pm