Sports
There are few times in anyone’s life that they get quite such a good opportunity to become involved with activities other than work, families and DIY as when they’re at university. Either they’re too busy, they don’t have access to the facilities, they’re too expensive, or they don’t know anyone else who’s interested.
As a student, none of these excuses is valid.
And, while this is true for just about anything, it’s perhaps truest of all for sport.
Student sports are some of the best in the world.
Every four years the World Student Games come around. Britain usually does pretty well (better than in most international sporting competitions) and many of the competitors are the same as those who turn up at the following Olympics.
UK universities, meanwhile, compete against each other every year in competitions and leagues in every sport imaginable.
Many of our greatest sporting heroes competed at university level before going on to greater fame. To name but a few: Harold Abrahams, Steve Backley, Sebastian Coe, Ted Dexter, Phil de Glanville, Tanni Grey, Gavin Hastings, Nasser Hussein, David Moorcroft, Victor Obogu, Matthew Pinsent, Steve Redgrave and David Weatherall.
And it’s not as if they only became good once they’d completed their studies. Will Carling, for instance, went straight from captaining his university rugby team to historic success captaining England’s.
Out there now are tomorrow’s gold medallists and, as a student, you get to play alongside them or perhaps against them or, even, be them.
The Varsity Boat Race is a highlight of the national sporting calendar and it is genuine students tugging at those oars.
These levels of achievement are pretty ordinary in many of the UK’s universities.
But what if you’re no champion?
These very high standards are no more than the tip of an iceberg of health and fitness, with some of the submerged parts being more used to sit-downs than sit-ups.
At most universities even the worst athlete, the most feeble wimp, can participate just for fun.
Different universities have different policies — sometimes it’s not even a matter of policy, it just turns out that way — but as often as not the emphasis is on sport for all rather than on sport for the bionic.
Sports are not necessarily a blokey thing either. Sure, there are the rugger buggers and the oarsmen oafs, but women’s sport is taken as seriously and played as competitively as anything the boys get up to with their funny shaped balls or when they shove their oars in.
What makes students so good?
Apart from the fact that there are so many of them (nearly a million students in the UK) and many of them are at an age of peak performance, it’s largely down to opportunity.
Many universities have vast tracts of land rolled, mowed and painted all in the name of sport. They have sports halls like airplane hangars and athletics tracks that would be the envy of most sizeable towns.
Loughborough University — renowned for its sporting prowess, not to mention its sports-based courses — has five-star facilities that include four sports centres, two gyms, a dance studio, two swimming pools, seven squash courts, two floodlit all-weather pitches, an all-weather athletics stadium, acres of playing fields, the Dan Maskell tennis centre, multigyms, a martial arts dojo, badminton courts, plus equipment and playing areas for table-tennis, basketball, netball and many, many more. Locally, there are also opportunities for everything from watersports to pot-holing, riding to rambling. And all of them are absurdly cheap.
Loughborough’s facilities are among the best, but it’s far from the only university with enough sporting muscle to snatch, clean, and jerk even the laziest couch potato into activity. And often there’s no charge at all.
For every sport, there’s a club or a team of like-minded enthusiasts ready to rumble. But you can’t play every sport at every university.
If you’re goofy for golf, for instance, don’t apply to City University, where the facilities in general aren’t bad — but being based in Central London, they’ve not been able to provide access to a golf course.
You’d be better off at St Andrew’s, which not only has a cheap course for students, but you’re within putting distance of the Royal & Ancient Club and where golfing glory can even earn you a scholarship.
Although there are the likes of Loughborough and Sheffield, whose amenities put the fun into funding, there are also places like Bath Spa University College where the tennis courts were turned into a car park, and Abertay Dundee with only a fitness room to call its own, and where students otherwise have to rely on what the town can offer.
If you’re the sporty sort or, indeed, if you’re ever motivated to move a muscle, the huge difference in levels of sports facilities should play a part in bringing your favourite university to the top of your personal league.
Last updated on: 30 April 2008