U of M intramural sports and clubs coordinator, Matthew Gerardy, has stated that the intramural program provides students with opportunities to socialize and build a sense of community, while also promoting physical activity and stress relief.
“It’s just a great getaway from school — it’s a nice break. It’s [also] a great opportunity to socialize and make new friends,” said Gerardy. On top of this, he added, “it’s obviously great in terms of getting physical exercise and taking a lot of stress off, and it’s just a good way to build community here on campus.”
“Intramural sports is a program for students, staff and faculty. It’s mostly played by students,” Gerardy said. “It’s not competitive in the sense like Bison sports, but it’s basically students making their own teams and we set up a league for them. We hire students as referees and officials and timekeepers and they essentially just play out a season every term, with playoffs and a champion rewarded at the end of it.”
He listed the various games included in the program’s lineup. “This term specifically, we have intramural soccer, [basketball, volleyball and hockey]. In the past, we’ve had different sports, but it depends on interest [and] our facility time. For instance, we used to run a sport called intramural inner tube water polo in the pool, but unfortunately our pool is closed down so we couldn’t run that this year. We’ve tried to run different sports like touch football, [and] we used to have intramural archery tag […] but this term we’re down to four sports.”
Gerardy outlined the duration of the intramural programs, saying there is a fall term season from the first week of October until the first week of December and a winter term season from the end up January until the first week of April.
Gerardy explained that there are two ways students can register for intramural sports. “You either register as a team captain where you make your own team […] You recruit your own players and you enter a team that way. Or, if you don’t maybe know anyone or you don’t have enough people to make a team, you could register as a free agent and basically we take all the free agents that register and we put them on a team together.”
Gerardy said intramurals take place “Mondays through Thursdays, generally in the evening, but for intramural soccer specifically, it plays in the afternoons because we play out at the soccer complex, which isn’t owned by the U of M and that’s just the only available time that we have.”
He highlighted the motivation behind the program. “It’s to offer more opportunity for students to continue to play sports. A lot of students play sports in high school and they want to stay competitive [but] maybe they’re not good enough to play at a level like Bison sports […] Intramurals is just a great solution for that, where they could still be competitive, they can still get active and play the sports that they love and that they loved playing growing up. And again, it’s just a great opportunity to make friends.”
More information can be found at umanitoba.ca/community/sport-recreation/recreation-services/rec-clubs-intramurals.
