At last night's Student Council meeting, the Athletic Affairs Committee unveiled plans to create a Virginia Club Sports Council to offer "organization, centralization, advertisement and logistical support" for University club sports teams.
The new entity maybe called a "council," but the VCSC is not a legislative body and thus cannot enforce rules or pass resolutions. Rather, it is a branch of the Athletic Affairs Committee and is intended to help promote club sports and offer general assistance to these organizations. The Committee hopes to host workshops for club sports about how to fundraise effectively and secure regular transportation. But to operate most effectively, the VCSC should consider advocating reform to the appropriations process.
Club sports, unlike varsity sports, do not receive funding from the athletic department. In addition to fundraising and charging dues to members, many club teams use Student Council appropriations to help offset their costs. But although most of the University's 800 contracted independent organizations can project their yearly expenditures with relative accuracy, appropriations procedures can be more difficult for club teams. A student magazine, for example, may have contracts with printers, other partnerships and monthly bills, all of which usually can be budgeted for in advance. The major costs incurred by club sports, meanwhile, usually come from equipment and tournament registration. Bids to participate in such tournaments often come throughout the year and do not always leave a significant amount of time to collect the needed funds for travel, lodging and so forth. In the past, teams in this situation often applied for reimbursements through retroactive spending. But after Newcomb Business Services suspended the practice altogether in November 2009, many groups were forced to forfeit their places in tournaments because they could not secure the necessary funds to register.
Although the termination of retroactive spending requests was a challenge for many student groups, it placed a larger burden on club sports teams than on most other CIOs. Addressing this mismatch between appropriations protocol and the needs of club teams would be a useful first order of business for the VCSC.
One possible approach would be to create a more flexible system in which Council approves certain line-items in these budgets as they go but still allows club sports teams to participate in the normal rolling appropriations round for more predictable expenses. Alternatively, Council could hold more frequent appropriations hearings for groups that do not operate like the typical CIO.
Regardless of the particular solution, club sports need funding to play, and the current appropriations policy is too rigid to accommodate all types of student groups. The VCSC can use its influence to help club teams change the way they are funded. Council has made an effort to implement clear and consistent policies in the past to ensure fairness, and adopting a similar standard in this case would help to ensure all organizations can benefit comparably from student activities funding.
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