“There’s something for everyone” takes a very literal meaning at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) Intramural Sports Program.
Intramurals at UTA are housed in the Maverick Activities Center (MAC), which opened in March 2008. The MAC inherited a nearly half century old intramural program and has grown with the school.
Drew Barfield, the assistant director for Intramural Sports, said the program now offers 13 sports in the fall, 13 in the spring, several summer and winter sports, and a plethora of individual sports. From flag football to volleyball, basketball to softball, and even inner tube water polo and wheelchair basketball, the varied offering draws quite a bit of attention.
“We kinda split it up,” Barfield said. “We add dodge ball and sand volleyball in the spring. Outdoor soccer’s in the fall, indoor soccer’s in the spring. We kind of throw in a little variation.”
The program attracts 1,800 to 2,000 unique participants each semester, but that doesn’t include the number of people who play multiple sports. “We just track how many different students use our programs, but anecdotally we know that our participants typically, I would say it’s a very large percentage of them, play on multiple teams,” Barfield said. “While it’s 1,800, they’re playing twice a week or even three and four times a week.”
For students who aren’t interested in physical sports or large teams, individual sports are offered. Tennis and racquetball of course make the cut, but so do online games such as poker and Fantasy Football.
“While playing videogames is not something that promotes health and wellness and being active and moving, we do those things in our building,” explained Barfield. “So if that gets someone in the building that would not otherwise come over here, and then they feel compelled to use the fitness facility, then I think that that’s a good thing.”
Something else that makes UTA Intramurals unique is the way they conduct playoffs. Every team goes to the playoffs, regardless of their record. “The teams that have won more than half their games go into one bracket, and the teams that won less than half their games go into another bracket,” Barfield said. “And that’s been received very well. We put in full last year and then this year we continued it.”
Barfield said they’ve also recently done away with a playoff policy that said students had to play with a team the whole season to participate in the playoffs. “Anybody can be added to the roster at any point in the season as long as they’ve not played for any other team,” Barfield explained. “So even if you get to the championship night which is played on a Wednesday, but you played on Monday nights and now you’ve got three guys on your team that work Wednesdays and they can’t get off, if you can go find somebody that has not played yet you’re at least going to be able to avoid a forfeit.”
After working out almost every kink in the system, the only issue now is scheduling. With a campus full of very busy students, it’s sometimes difficult to satisfy everyone and keep all the leagues separate. “We’re really good about understanding things like residence halls and Greeks having the same people on the same teams,” Barfield said. “We know what works. We know we cannot offer Greek basketball and Greek flag football on the same day.”
