Annual Report Table of Contents
Cardinal Corner Game Room
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Cardinal Corner Game Room We transitioned the management of the Cardinal Corner Game Room to the Department of Student Involvement in July of 2013. We gave them the facility in good order with a high number of experienced work study student staff returning. The game room was a great addition to our department when it originally opened. At that time we were one of only two Intramural Departments in the nation who were administering that type of facility on their campus. It gave us access to a group of students that were not traditional participants of a sports program. Since the inception of “The Game’s on Us” through SGA, the game room has averaged over 40,000 annual users and has become a popular gathering spot on campus. During the year the following groups and organizations hosted functions in Cardinal Corner: Reach Alpha Sigma Kappa Phi Mu Alpha Music Fraternity African Student Union Sigma Alpha Epsilon Sigma Chi Kappa Sigma WINGS, Medically fragile children service group International Student Union Alpha Kappa Psi Business Fraternity Psi Chi Psychology Fraternity Resident Student Association Triangle Information Technology Student Activities Board Golden Key Porter Scholars Upward Bound Phi Delta Theta Summer Wind Band Institute UofL Swim Camp African Student Union Chinese Student Scholars National Association of Black Accountants YMCA Black Achievers UofL Tennis Camp UofL Soccer Camp InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Now in our twelfth year of operation the Health Science Campus (HSC) Fitness Center continues to be popular for the Health Science Campus. The 2013-14 user hours for the HSC Fitness Facility totaled 43,123. What is even more impressive is that number was made up of almost 4,800 (4,795) different students, faculty, staff and dependent members. For a campus the size of the Health Science Campus, that is an impressive number of distinct users. All of our current cardio equipment is out of warranty and is in need of replacing. The strength equipment is original to the opening of the facility twelve years ago. The HSC staff works hard to maintain its good working condition of our current weight training equipment. Our staff is constantly making in-house repairs to weight machines to keep them in service. We continue to inspect the equipment on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule to ensure the safety of our patrons. We are still working out some software issues with the iPad we purchased last year and we are sure it will simplify the HSC’s equipment maintenance and attendance programs. While working through and overcoming the implementation of the new CSI software our department installed this past year, we found that moving forward into the 21st century has been more than welcomed by not only our department’s staff, but by our members as well. The CSI program’s capabilities have helped us resolve many facility access problems. The new program has allowed us to begin a much requested “grace visit” system which has created a much more positive customer service atmosphere at our member check in desk. Most all of our department’s planned CSI phases have been implemented, allowing us to consolidate several separate functions. These include equipment rentals, semester lockers, and facility IDs to name just a few. The ease with which we can now make and renew an ID has greatly increased our ability to help our patrons in a more expedited manner. By bringing all these functions into one localized area (CSI) on the computer, it has simplified the process, which helps to expedite our patron’s needs more quickly. The beginning of this past year continued to be challenging as not only were our custodians being moved or replaced regularly but their supervisors were also being replaced. However, since mid-March 2014, the Fitness Center has had a new custodian and our chronic problems, such as dirty shower walls and floors, dusty floors, and bad smelling restrooms, have been eliminated. The best thing is she asks every morning “is there anything you need me to do?” and if there is, she always completes the task within a couple of work days. It will be important to try to retain our new custodian, as there is a history of moving good people to other areas of the campus. With the transfer of the Assistant Director Debby Woodall to a new position at the new SRC we have moved into a new chapter with our management of the HSC Facility. Assistant Director John Smith added the management of the HSC Facility to his responsibilities. Tim Lynch and Rusty Michalski have been given the day to day operation responsibilities of the center. John conducts weekly staff meetings and is in contact with the facility daily. Our ability to recruit student staff from the Belknap campus has improved dramatically. This is due to an arrangement made with the HSC parking office allowing our Belknap student staff to use their parking permits in the HSC Parking Garage. The arrangement with the HSC parking office allowed us to recruit six new student staff. Our current student staff has six returning members. We lost four staff members, with two graduated and two are going to internships. The continued recruitment of student staff is even more paramount to the success of the center now with the management change.
Program Overview The Intramural Sports program saw unprecedented growth this year with increases of over 20 teams in Volleyball and Basketball. This year’s Basketball League was the first time that the program has seen over 100 teams competing in a league. Our mix of new events along with well-managed league sports helped to keep students interested in our program. Being accommodating to student’s wishes with the Intramural schedule every year has gone a long way to keeping students engaged in our events year in and year out. We welcomed two new Undergraduate Assistants to the staff this year. These two new Undergraduate Assistants joined our five returning Undergraduate Assistants to complete our staff. This meant that we had a very veteran staff which made running events a lot easier. It is always a luxury to have returning staff from year to year, especially in years when we have a young group of officials like we did this year. We continued using both our Facebook and Twitter accounts, which made communication with participants much easier. Facility space continued to be a challenge for our outdoor sports this year. We ran our outdoor fields to their maximum capacity throughout most of the year because of the large growth we saw in our outdoor events. Facility space was not an issue indoors with the opening of the new Student Recreation Center. The new building allowed us to run three courts of Volleyball and Basketball every night and allowed us to accommodate all of our extra teams. It was because of the open communication that exists within our department that we were able to pull this off without any issues. This year we also launched our new on-line registration system, ran through IMLeagues.com, for all Intramural participants. Having previously launched it for our Fraternity and Sorority participants helped to make the campus wide release a lot easier. There were very few kinks with the launch of the system and we envision it going smoothly in the future. With the introduction of the Student Recreation Fee, we made the decision to eliminate Intramural team fees. The only events that we still charge for are: Canoe Regatta, Bowling Singles and Doubles, and Putt-Putt. These events still carry a fee because they are held off site and carry a facility rental fee. All-Campus Points Championship This year all three points races were decided with four or five weeks still left in the semester. The organizations that were able to put together consistent performances all year ended up beating out all of the other competitors. The Fraternity Division had two organizations that separated themselves from the rest of the pack early on. These two organizations competed all year with both finishing first or second in almost every event down the stretch. This year’s point’s race was won by Beta Theta Pi by over 160 points over Sigma Phi Epsilon. The Campus Division saw a few very competitive teams but we saw one organization rise above all others this year. The winning organization always made sure that their participants showed up to all scheduled events and usually signed up more than the needed number of participants in order to guarantee better results. This year’s Campus points champion was Beta Theta Pi. The Women’s Closed points race was decided with a couple of weeks left in the school year. This year’s winner was competitive in every sport and was usually one of the last teams alive in every sport. Delta Zeta won the point’s race by 125 points, over Zeta Tau Alpha, for their third straight championship, which resulted in the Women’s Closed Qdoba Cup being retired. Sportsmanship As with every year the department strives to encourage sportsmanlike acts while enforcing rules set in place to discourage unsportsmanlike conduct of the participants. Many protocols have been put in place to make participants aware of the standards the department has set for sportsmanship. Participants must sign a sportsmanship contract and are read a sportsmanship statement at every game prior to taking the field in order to remind them of their pledge to remain good sports. Ultimately the department would like to have zero ejections over the course of the year. Unfortunately this year we had nine ejections, with two occurring in Flag Football, Floor Hockey, and Soccer, and four occurring in Basketball. All of the ejected participants were dealt with in a firm but fair manner. Our hope is that after participants are ejected once that they will not have any more issues on the field during Intramural play. Intramural Handbook The 2013-14 Intramural Handbook continued to be a valuable tool for the participants. This handbook gave participants answers to a lot of their questions and allowed them to become informed participants. The handbook serves as a measure of checks and balances for the participants in order to be certain that the Intramural program is upholding the responsibilities set in place in the handbook. The Intramural Handbook will continue to evolve and adapt to the changing time the same as it has over the many years since first being developed. Officials This year was a little challenging at first with officials. We saw a lot of our officials graduate last year and we had to train a lot of new officials in every sport. The challenge that we had at first turned into a very rewarding year. Once these new officials had some live game experience they never looked back. Even the participants were impressed with the way this crew improved over the course of a season. The Intramurals Sports Department is excited with this group and the seemingly limitless potential they have as sports officials. Championship Nights The Intramural Sports department has made it a point to create exciting events when possible for not only the participants but the spectators as well on “Championship Night”. We also had great championship nights in Flag Football and Basketball holding those events in our facilities. We held the Flag Football Championships on the Intramural Field and the Basketball Championships in the new Student Recreation Center. Both were well-attended by spectators and had a feel of something bigger than just an Intramural championship. Not everyone can say they played in a major Division I sports venue like the students who participated in the Swim Meet and Track Meet. Thanks to a great working relationship with the Department of Athletics our participants have been granted these opportunities. Intramural Sports Awards This year was our 27th edition of the annual Intramural Sports Awards. This year’s Awards Banquet saw another large turnout at the George J. Howe Red Barn. We continued the tradition started last year of giving out official’s awards in honor of Dale Orem, Lou Frankel, Frank Nuxoll, Alfred Smith, Tony Crush, and James Breeding. We also named the Rookie Official of the Year Award after Chris Brawner this year. Qdoba sponsored our meal for the fifth straight year. As is the tradition for this event various students and organizations were recognized for their achievements throughout the school year. This year the awards were heavily discussed among the intramural staff to ensure the top candidate would receive each award. Ellis J. Mendelsohn “Mendy” Awards Female Shelby Lawson – Delta Zeta Male Josh Lamping – Sigma Chi Sports Club Spencer Wise – Rugby Other Departmental Awards Dale Ramsay Sportsmanship Award Kappa Delta Outstanding Male Chair Award Jordan Adams – Sigma Phi Epsilon Outstanding Female Chair Award Catherine Greenwell – Zeta Tau Alpha Outstanding Sports Club Rugby Club Lou Frankel Softball Umpire of the Year Matt Ryan Dale Orem Flag Football Official of the Year Morgan Allen Frank Nuxoll Volleyball Official of the Year Luke Guhy Alfred Smith Basketball Official of the Year Ryan Long Tony Crush Soccer Official of the Year Mark Cranston Chris Brawner Rookie Official of the Year Shannon Sloss James Breeding Official of the Year Annie Fugate Most Improved Fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha Most Improved Women’s Closed Zeta Tau Alpha Most Improved Campus Points Beta Theta Pi IM Service Awards David Proffitt Curtis Monroe Jeremy Bibelhauser Intramural Council Each year the Greek organizations along with other campus organizations elect one or two members to represent their organization at all Intramural Council meetings. These council meetings provide our department with a way to talk directly to the organizations and for the organizations to talk directly to us. The council members have an opportunity to make changes to the Intramural schedule, address any issues that might have occurred during a sport, and know about upcoming events. As in years past, this year’s council consisted of a very dedicated group of individuals who took it upon themselves to help with decision making and provide a voice for the students. These students had a great impact on the program this year by making insightful suggestions and working with the program to provide the best experience possible. Council members had an added responsibility this year with the launching of our on-line registration system. Changes Implemented for 2014-15 After council recommendations and with the opening of the new Student Recreation Center the Intramural Sports Department has made several changes to the Intramural Schedule for next year:
Recommendations Continue to develop partnerships with outside corporations to provide the best experience possible for the participants of the program. Continue to develop ways to recruit and retain sport officials. Aggressively market the program to a very tech-savvy student body. Implement new events in order to use newly-available programming areas available in the Student Recreation Center. Continue to implement use of the on-line registration system for the entire campus.
With the continued association with Nelligan (now Learfield Sports Properties) Sports Marketing, our marketing program continues to evolve into two distinct operations. One is marketing in the sense of program promotion. The other is the sponsorship area. From a marketing standpoint, our annual marketing project planning meeting continues to serve as a master plan development project for the upcoming year. This is of particular importance because every program area is involved with the development of the project calendar and it gives each of our program areas a chance to assess how they can impact the operation of all other program areas. We make a concerted effort at promoting our various programs and facilities. We also are very involved in revenue generation from a marketing standpoint through membership programs. We have more corporate partners than we have ever had before. It will be critical for us to maintain the current relationships given the changes in the University’s sponsorship regulations. This year we completed 49 different marketing projects. The projects included every program area and featured many instances of “cross promotion” that included more than one program area. Marketing has become a cornerstone of our department. Reach Television We have made significant strides in our use of our digital monitor system. With the opening of the new SRC, we changed from Visix to Reach. The Reach system allows us to have all the reservations in the center scroll on the right side bar which is a great feature. All of our members coming in with racquetball, golf, or squash reservations, as well as all the classrooms and group exercise programs populate the bar as well. It makes quite a difference in our customer service and was not available on the Visix system. We are averaging close to 30 announcements on the system at any given time. Each announcement runs 10 seconds before advancing to the next one. We have made very good use of the system for all hours of operation changes, upcoming programs and events, building features etc. Summer Orientation Orientation was a great success for us last year. After several years of moving around on the schedule in times and locations, we found a set up that works very well for us. Being in the Life Science breezeway during the late afternoon snack break gave us the opportunity to talk to a lot of people in a short time. It was without question the best orientation we have ever had. It is exciting to know already that we have the same set up this year. Web Page Our two web pages had almost 80,000 visitors and page visits making it two of the more active and utilized pages of the University. The average visitor to our site visits almost 4 pages per visit and spends almost 2 minutes on site. Those are all very solid numbers in the realm of IT analysis. Overall, we had a quarter million pageviews. That is an outstanding number for us. This represents an increase of over 6,000 users on our department web page. One thing we are learning is that the page is viewed by many high school students and programs like ours are becoming more important in the collegiate choice process than before. Most students we talk to at various Orientation activities tell us they have already visited our pages and know something about our program. Our new design served us well but with the upcoming launch of Plone 4, we are back to square one and having to design another new page. After opening the new SRC, we took down the construction/features web site. That site had featured rotating photos on the front page that were changed regularly to track the actual construction process. It also contained information on the history of the project, contents of the new center and artists’ renderings of different facility areas as well as the outside of the new building. That site had served its purpose and we thought was actually drawing traffic away from our department site which is why it was taken down. Intramural Web Site: Visits – 55343 Pageviews – 155939 Duration – 1:45 Page per session – 2.82 Unique Users – 19283
Pageviews – 102489 Duration – 1:49 Pages Per Session – 4.22 Unique Users - 8027 Nelligan Sports Marketing/ Learfield Sports Properties Nelligan Sports Marketing was bought out by Learfield Sports Properties. The name has changed but our relationship continues. We continue to push the envelope nationally via our relationship with our local marketing representatives. We still know of no other intramural sports department that has professional representation from a firm like Learfield that is usually exclusively tied to an athletic department. It looks like everything we anticipated about our relationship with that firm is coming to fruition. Learfield is very connected to the Atlantic Coast Conference and is a national player in terms of sports marketing. It is especially gratifying now to look back to when we decided to get into marketing/sponsorship with little to no knowledge about it and then to see us doing something ahead of everyone else in the nation. With the agreement we have entered into with Learfield comes a whole new area of sponsor program compliance. John Smith has a regular meeting with the Learfield representative responsible for our program to ensure both our compliance and to investigate potential corporate partners. Our partnership with Qdoba could not possibly be going any better. There is still considerable buzz around campus about the coupons and overall sponsorship. Jaime Cryan has taken over as Regional Director of Marketing for Qdoba, and has attended a number of department functions to promote our partnership. We have established good relationships with several other corporate agencies and continue to develop these purposefully. We are positioned well to increase our corporate partners with the development and opening of the new SRC. We have entertained a number of possible partners with tours of the center and information about marketing opportunities available. In addition to the Learfield-related marketing, we have been working closely with Glenn Gittings from the Vice President of Student Affairs Office in procuring sponsorships for the new Student Recreation Center. We were able to do a partnership with Toshiba Business Solutions that provided 46 flat panel televisions and a large copy/business center for the SRC office. Advertising Banners Banner locations have been turned over to Learfield per their agreement with the department. With the opening of the new SRC, we have eliminated indoor banners and instead use the REACH digital TV system. We still have several corporate partners who utilize outdoor banners but they are very few. Most have opted for the indoor digital messaging system. Graphics Art Student We recognized a need to improve our graphic ability within the department. We have many tools for the promotion of programs, events and services, but lacked the artistic talent to develop original posters, digital media slides and other means of promotions. We hired a graphic art student to handle that part of marketing for us and it has made a tremendous improvement in that area of our program. This student develops posters and other visual promotions for us on a weekly basis. The projects of his are much attractive than the canned art that we would typically use. Alumni Memberships The alumni program is doing well. We moved all of our memberships to the new CSI software platform last January. The system is working well and has moved our ability to process memberships to a higher level. We now have a much higher level of flexibility than we had with the previous system and will be able to customize our membership programs in many new ways heading forward in the new SRC. Our rates were adjusted to more closely compare with the student recreation fee. Alumni are paying slightly more than current students. Our renewal rate remains strong and we continue to work with the Registrar’s Office in promoting the program to every graduate of the university. This year we were able to distribute almost 5,000 pieces of information to current graduates. This is important as we are coming into what should be the peak time of students who paid the recreation fee prior to the opening of the new SRC. Those students are eligible to receive 6 months of membership (free) for every semester they paid the fee prior to opening. We want to make sure and include that information on the materials we are able to distribute through the Registrar’s Office. Dependent ID Validations This program continues to be popular and appreciated by students, faculty and staff. In a period of time when cost of living raises are small, benefits cost more and more, and general inflation eats up more of everyone’s discretionary income, a real value like this is a very strong public relations tool for our department. We have had a strong response from families at the Health Science Campus Fitness Center and have more intentionally marketed the program to families on that campus. We released information through the UofL Today email feature at the start of each semester. As with other membership programs, our rates for dependent IDs have changed to reflect the student recreation fee. Summer ID Validations The summer validation program allows students to use intramural facilities over the summer if they were enrolled in the spring or can show proof of registration for the upcoming fall semester. This is very popular with our students as so many of them live in the Louisville area. In addition to being a good revenue stream to us, it is a good value and appreciated service to those students. To be consistent with other membership programs, the fee was changed to match the student recreation fee. |