Saloufest 2012.. Need I say More!

So here we are, one semester down and all left slightly confused as to thinking, where’s it all gone? But looking back in terms of the AU we’ve had a really successful first semester! Starting off at our bazaar in freshers week, right through to 673 of you signing up to come to Salou with us at Easter! In and amongst we sold out the AU ball in record time, had a really successful naked calendar, and our BUCS performances are still going strong! A big thanks from myself to everyone who has got involved so far, and again I encourage those who haven’t to get involved!

I’ve had quite a busy first semester but the main thing I’ve been focussing on is collecting evidence and ideas in order to create a feedback paper regarding our on campus sports facilities. It has been born out of growing frustration from a number of students, regarding access and condition of facilities, especially when compared to a high number of Institutions we regularly compete against.

It is not to say we have poor facilities either, in fact we’re very lucky to have all of this on campus, and we’re even luckier to have floodlit 3G provision, something a lot of University’s would kill to have. However the main problem is our facility was built for 5000 undergraduate students, and we now have nearly 15,000. The paper makes a number of recommendations to the University, for how to combat problems students are facing, they are:

Short Term –
• Work with clubs to ensure that correct and suitable equipment is available within the sports centre.
• Provide portable floodlights for members to make use of the grass training grids on an evening.

Short-Medium Term –
• To place a temporary structure over the outdoor courts to quadruple our indoor capacity
• Commit to increasing the size of the fitness suite (gym)

Long Term –
• Hold a review of the success of the Short and Short- Medium term recommendations, in order to gauge whether permanent upgrades are required.

These recommendations were submitted to a University Committee, and I am now writing plans alongside the University to submit them into the budgeting and planning rounds. For me the two most important points are to purchase portable floodlights, and to place a temporary structure over the outdoor courts.

Portable floodlights would enable our teams to train more regularly and on the correct surfaces. Currently they all share a very hectic 3G schedule, which see’s increasing community reduce, reducing our clubs training time. A structure over the outdoor courts would have a massive impact on our indoor capacity, meaning we have more space for student access to train, to play matches on Wednesday afternoons, clubs would not have to share hall space, and it would provide an increased space for our participation programmes ran by the University. This idea has come from York University’s ‘Sports Tent’, which many of you may have seen, or will see at Varsity this year! It is an excellent flexible space, that we would also hugely benefit from.

I sincerely hope the University act upon this, so we are not left trailing when it comes to facility provision. When students are paying £9000 a year to come to Hull we need to make sure our provision is better than it is currently. I also hope as students you can all get behind and support my ideas, by posting on our Facebook page (HUU Athletic Union 2011-12) or using the Twitter #tag #huuAU.

A side from that I’d like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and look forward to seeing you all back in January, ready to hit re-freshers hard!

Ash
VP Sport
A.Armitage@hull.ac.uk
@Ash_Armo