If you’re a member of a sports team at university, the BUCS leagues and championships are central to your sporting and often university life. But it doesn’t attract the attention of many who are not involved with university sport, with some students not even knowing what BUCS is. We’ve surveyed students at UoN about their involvement with our BUCS programme.
What is BUCS?
“We have over 110 teams competing in BUCS leagues”
BUCS – British Universities and Colleges Sport – is the national governing body for Higher Education sport in the UK, which has an aim to create the best university sport in the world. To you and me, they are the organisers of competitive university sport leagues, along with hosting championships and national events. Their tagline is that they desire to ‘enhance people’s lives through sport by adding value and enabling people to reach their potential’.
Our university has 18 sports in BUCS leagues, those being split into 1st and 2nd teams, with popular sports having as many as six teams. Sports are then split by gender, along with some solely having mixed teams, and others having mixed teams alongside the gendered teams. These different squads within sports means we have over 110 teams competing in BUCS leagues throughout the academic year.
As well as sports specific leagues, there is an overall league that totals all the points a university has received and pits them against other universities. We are currently 2nd, 129 points behind Durham and 153 points ahead of Loughborough.
What do our students think?
“Only half of the students we spoke to have attended a BUCS match”
50% of the students we surveyed said they do not follow any of our BUCS teams throughout the academic year, with the other 50% following the progress of one team, either because of involvement in the particular sport or an interest in it. A little more promising, over 65% of students did know that we finished in 4th place in the overall BUCS league last year.
However, only half of the students we spoke to have attended a BUCS event, with 35% of these having done so because they were taking part in the event. The overall consensus we received was that the university could do a better job at advertising BUCS league matches and upcoming events. Some of the suggestions we received included having posters around campus with BUCS information, especially in David Ross and Jubilee Sports Centre, as well as more social media activity.
Why is BUCS worth your time?
BUCS is an exciting way to be involved with sport at university if you are not involved in a team, and it’s free! Our teams could always use extra support and matches are usually on a Wednesday afternoon so your timetable won’t clash with them. If you are interested in being more involved, fixtures and results can be found here: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/sport/performancesport/bucs.aspx
League tables can be found here.
Get yourself down to a BUCS match and find out why our university has been voted Sports University of the Year!
Zoe Burgess
Follow @ImpactSport on Twitter or like the Impact Sport Facebook page for more updates and information on how to get involved.
Featured image courtesy of UoN Sport via Flickr.
