By Brittany Burke
As it stands, the CCSU club teams and the regular clubs are clumped together. This means that club teams such as ice hockey, rugby, lacrosse, baseball and equestrian follow the same rules when it comes to base budgets as clubs such as the Latin American Student Organization, the car club and the construction management club, which makes requests difficult for both the team and SGA.
However, this could all change if newly elected Student Government Association Vice President Liz Braun has anything to say about it. As part of her platform, Braun had the idea to separate club sports from the rest of the clubs.
“Right now I’m planning on giving [club sports] their own process, because right now the paper work they have to fill out, it caters to the general clubs on campus and the team club that has league dues and equipment and uniforms, that’s completely different,” said Braun. “So the first thing would be to fix up that to make it [easier] for them, then hopefully I’d like to separate it so when we’re doing the budget process, it’s more like comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges.”
While running for vice president, she and SGA president-elect Eric Bergenn reached out to the respective club teams as a way of getting feedback and help in trying to polish her idea. She has traveled to the Newington ice rink to speak with members of the ice hockey club following a pickup game, worked with the men’s lacrosse club in formulating a base budget to enhance the team’s ability to get the money they need to cover next year’s expenses, while also corresponding via e-mail with the other club teams.
“I think it’s a really great idea,” said Bergenn. “The way that budgets are requested is very specific and it doesn’t cater at all to the need of club sports teams, but it seems to fit all the other clubs pretty well. So to come up with a creative way to give them something to actually base their budget request and line items on would be helpful for both club sports teams and the senate to decipher what fits into what line items the best.”
Braun’s idea, while still in its early phases, will eventually see an overhaul of the way in which club sports fill out budgetary requests. This will also allow for the club sports to have a separate budget to request money from.
“I definitely want to break [the budget] apart, possibly give [club sports] their own pool of money, it’s definitely going to be tough to get it past the senate, but that’s definitely my plan and creating more fundraising opportunities for the sports clubs and working that into their budget,” said Braun.
“A lot of sports clubs come to us and ask for the full amount and they don’t take into account in their request member dues and fundraising, so this semester I worked with lacrosse club and created a whole new budget incorporating their fundraising and member dues and it ended up cutting their request in half and making the SGA more apt to giving them the money,” said Braun. “I’m going to work with them and teach them how they should present their budget and how it’s going to differ from other people’s budget.”
Braun’s idea will show more understanding for the club sports more so than the SGA policies have in the past. Unlike other clubs, the team sports need money to pay for league dues, uniforms, game officials, away game transportation and facility dues.
“It’s very hard for us to go through budgets for sports clubs because it’s hard to fit things into office supplies or conferences for sports clubs so to give them an opportunity to talk about instead of bringing into entertainment, putting on games and sports equipment, instead of supplies it would make things much simpler for both sides,” said Bergenn.
Despite the extra costs, club sports are grouped together by the SGA, which is what Braun would like to change. While Braun would like to try and implement her idea in time for the next base budget requests she still has to get the changes past the SGA senate.
“It’s something that could happen fairly quickly, but it is something that the senate may want to discuss, however, I mean it’s something that could happen quickly, but there’s no base budget requests until the end of next year whether or not we want to incorporate that into next year’s contingencies is still up in the air,” said Bergenn.
The idea to separate the two entities came to Braun after spending time helping to create the men’s lacrosse base budget.
“I know that whenever the base budget process would come around the captain of the lacrosse team would come in and he’d happen to be in when I was in,” said Braun. “We’ve had hour to two hour long discussions of how we could make his budget better and it just never worked out because I didn’t have enough support from other people and they didn’t have enough support from other people, so it was kind of just me and him working together.”
“I’ve always had this idea that the sports clubs weren’t getting as much out of it, and of course the whole thing with the hockey club asking for rink fees, it was just tough and it was just [Senator] Ashley Foy helping them out, and nobody else,” said Braun. “So I just think it would be easier if it was separated in the first place so they wouldn’t be compared to LASO…I just want to help out the clubs who don’t get so much support from us because we give certain clubs a ton or support but we sometimes miss out on others.”
As of right now the sports clubs and regular clubs remain on the same plane, but Braun plans to continue formulating her idea over the summer months with the help of the captains from each of the prospective teams.
