Although only weeks ago members of the SCC fought each other for more funds, presidents of sports teams have united to petition SGA as one cohesive force.
By Christina Littlefield
Graduate Assistant
In less than a month, the Sports Club Council has gone from a group of confused, frustrated and – well, angry – club sports presidents into a cohesive army of athletes preparing to petition the Student Government Association and assert their identity as a council.
Before SGA wraps for the semester next month, the newly formed SCC hopes to present their constitution and bylaws to SGA, request formal recognition as a council within the SGA constitution and a constitutional guarantee that the council will retain at least the $5,000 allocated to it this fall.
Several of the club presidents within SCC also hope to petition SGA for more money. The sports clubs combined received roughly $7,000 of the $20,000 per semester allocated to Inter-Club Council as part of that council last year. In year’s past, when the money allocated to ICC was around $11,000, sports clubs still received the lion’s share – on average $5,000 a semester.
And so why they are still unhappy with their funding, the sports club presidents say they are glad they are structuring their own council.
“It’ll be awesome,” Crew Club President Joel Dons said. “We should have done it a long time ago.”
Fencing club representative Lee Diaz is working with newly appointed Intramurals Director Matt Kalish to write the constitution and, as a former member of SGA, is their ally to gain more funding. He sees the new council as leading to bigger and better things for club sports.
“Club sports definitely have needs that are different from sports in structure and such and if sports clubs don’t have their own structure it is detrimental to their growth,” Diaz said. “That’s the whole purpose of the council – to help sports club grow.”
Student Affairs Dean Dr. Mark Davis, former Student Organizations Coordinator Nicole Phillips (now the Washington, D.C. Internship director) and former Intramurals Coordinator Curtis Eberts decided to separate the sports clubs from the larger ICC in the summer after numerous sports club presidents complained that they had to submit duplicate paperwork to Student Activities and Intramurals. It was also thought that sports clubs deserved a staff member who could coordinate resources, fundraising and other needs that are specific to sports clubs, Phillips said.
While administrators decided to separate the councils, it was the SGA E-Board who decided how much to allocate from the ICC funds – originally only $2,000 with a $3,000 start-up contingency. ICC Chair and SGA Vice president Giuseppe Nespoli said the E-Board based the decision on the amount given to greek councils on campus — $1,000 each for the Inter-Fraternity Council and Panhellenic — after talks with Student Affairs and Intramurals.
Phillips said that SGA also expected the staff member presided over Intramurals to structure the council and use the money allocated to them to start fundraising over the summer. She stressed that the $2,000 supplement each semester was to be used to fundraise for more money.
“You don’t just take the money and divvy it out and spend it, you take the money and make it work for you,” Phillips said.
Club sports presidents, however, contend that they first need money to play.
The breakdown came sometime over the summer, but Eberts did not implement any structure for the council, Phillips said. He quit two weeks before school started, according to Doug Hurley, the new Student Activities Director who oversees Intramurals. Kalish stepped in from within Intramurals to fill Eberts’ position and has been instrumental in bringing the council together, Hurley said. Davis officially appointed Kalish to the position Wednesday.
Because Hurley and Kalish were both new to their positions, they weren’t able to meet with the sports clubs as a whole until the beginning of October. They had been in talks with many of the club presidents, however, trying to dispel confusion over the new council and the cuts in funding.
SGA offered to take the sports clubs back into ICC for the semester to ease the confusion, but Hurley saw that as a step backward.
“It would not have been more money to go back to ICC,” Hurley said. “I think now we are already seeing the benefit of a council, as we are only dealing with sports clubs.”
Money, however, was the main point of contention. Most of the club sports presidents were excited to have their own council once it got underway.
“From the start I thought the idea of a council was a good idea,” Dons said. “It was just a matter of not being funded.”
The crew club, for example, got about $500 less in funding this semester from SGA compared to the funds allocated to them last fall, according to the 2001 Fall ICC budget.
The biggest fear for the club sports representatives was that their funding would be cut to $2,000 in the spring as the proposal handed out to them at their first meeting stipulated. Nespoli, who authored the proposal, said that their funding will most likely remain at $5,000 because the proposal isn’t written in concrete.
“I think the $2,000 is pretty steep, $5,000 is more accurate,” Nespoli said, adding that sports clubs could petition SGA’s General Fund or Ocean’s 37 I.D.E.A. fund for extra money.
After some contention, the sports clubs decided to divvy up the money allocated to them based on need without looking at dues, which range from $50 to $500 a player depending on the team. Eight of the 14 sports clubs received about 15 percent of their budgets. Of the other clubs, most opted not to ask for funding this semester because they perceived the other sports needed the money more, were self-sufficient for this semester, or, like women’s water polo, took a hit this semester in order to attain more needed funding in the spring.
The willingness of clubs to give up money to help another more in need showed the change of attitude sports club presidents had once they were united solely together. As part of ICC, the funding for each individual sports clubs was the most contested. There was heated debate in the past about what sporting costs constituted an “event.” The ICC regulations stipulate that money only go to events, and sporting equipment and uniforms were often not included.
As part of the Sports Clubs Council constitution, the club sports presidents are setting up their own rules. Ironically, one of them is that no SCC money can go to an event that is not a game – even for the socials that are a required part of Rugby. Money can also not cover coaches, but will pay for uniforms, equipment, referees, league fees and other expenses related to actual play.
Kalish has done a lot of emergency benchmarking to see how Sports Club Council are organized at other universities, such as University of California Irvine, University of California Santa Barbara, John Madison, Virginia and Ohio University.
“By implementing SCC Pepperdine is catching up with a large amount of other universities,” Kalish said.
In addition to the no-funding-for-coaches rule, Kalish and Hurley both want to implement a point system to assign at least a portion of the funding based on how will a sports club meets the requirements to play such as turning in paperwork and doing their own fundraising work. Attaining waiver problems from the club sports has always been a problem.
“Just because you say you want to bear the Pepperdine name doesn’t mean that you should get money from Pepperdine,” Kalish said. “It is the responsibility of the student to take a leadership role in their club and in this organization. If the Sports Clubs Council is going to be distributing this money to everyone then they should be willing to put in the time to make it effective.”
Kalish and Hurley are also pushing fundraising among the club sports, which have already raised $7,000 from funding and sponsors this semester. The 10 submitted budgets, however, are more than $55,000. In the works are a possible SCC car wash, selling Jamba Juice or Krispie Kremes, or putting together a discount card to Malibu businesses to sell.
Although Kalish and Hurley admit they still have a huge learning curve ahead, they are excited about the possibilities for the new council.
“We are just here to support them and help their clubs get off the ground,” Hurley said. “it’s been a frustrating semester so far but I think with the staff resources with them we can do some great things.”
October 24, 2002