Not everybody can participate in all intramurals. According to Simpson Intramural’s eligibility policy, “members of intercollegiate teams, whether varsity, junior varsity or freshmen, are ineligible to participate on an intramural team from that sport or an associated sport for the entire academic year in which they participated on the intercollegiate team.”

Nicole Darling, assistant director of Student Activities and director of Intramurals, explained the policy.

“Basically if you play the sport, you can’t play intramurals,” Darling said. “Unless you’re a senior and graduating and it’s after season, you quit and won’t be playing in that sport ever again at Simpson or if you are kicked off the team.”

A member of the Intramural Council summarized the policy in the same way, also explaining why the policy is in place.

“As of right now, there are very few policies that actually hold athletes out from participating in intramurals because the main thing is to get as many students active as possible,” junior Reed Weston said. “But there are a few cases in which people who play in actual collegiate sports want to play intramurals in that same sport such as soccer and indoor soccer and football players couldn’t do flag football. We hold them out of their own sports because they could just put together teams that would be pretty strong.”

The policy is in use to keep athletes from putting together teams that would have an unfair advantage over other teams.

Issues have been raised though because of this policy. Freshman Chris Bassler ran into some problems with this policy. He tried out for the Simpson soccer team

Intramurals policy confuses students

during the two-a-days two weeks before school started, but decided not to play, as did his roommate freshman Max Schlatter.

“Max and I wanted to get a [soccer] team together,” Bassler said. “Since we were on the [collegiate] roster this year and might actually go out next year we couldn’t play. Even though it wasn’t for sure and we had already quit the team and hadn’t played at all, we couldn’t play.”

Darling said this a common complaint.

“We do have issues, mainly with soccer,” Darling said. “The reason this comes into play is because our soccer season is different time of the year than the regular soccer season. And that is where our eligibility issues come in. People are questioning if they can play or not. The handbook says that if they are on the roster, listed at all, they cannot play intramurals for the 2005-06 year unless they are graduating and their season is over.”

This meant Schlatter and Bassler couldn’t participate in intramural soccer because their names were on the roster for the Simpson soccer team.

“I thought it was kind of ridiculous because I knew some basketball players who had quit that year and some were on the team that had played,” Bassler said. “Some football players played flag football and got away with it, so why couldn’t we?”

Eventually, both got to play on an intramural soccer team. However, Bassler feels the rule should be clearer, accessible and should let more people play.

“I think that they should make it more accessible,” Bassler said. “But I also think they should (let) more people in. I understand that to a certain degree it’s about letting people who don’t play collegiate sports play too. But I’m in the offseason right now. I don’t have anything else to do and I just love to play. It seems like if she’s trying to keep us out, intramurals are more about winning and giving other people chances to win instead of letting people play, which is what it is supposed to be about.”

Weston believes this love of playing and socializing is what generates these issues.

“I would say for the most part, it’s not that [Simpson athletes] want to abuse [the policy] but they would have friends that want to participate and they feel they want to be a part of that,” Weston said. “A lot of intramurals aren’t about winning, it’s about being social and staying active with people you want to be around.”