Student Union’s Sports Club Board will likely be reinstated after a multi-year hiatus.

Since Sports Club Board (SCB) disbanded several years ago, many students and coaches have felt the need for a unifying body to address common concerns among sports clubs. SCB intended to be an advocacy group as well as a governance board for 42 sports clubs—comprised of about 1,200 students—and to foster a relationship between sports clubs and SU.

SCB’s constitution was recently approved by both Senate and Treasury, meaning that SCB is on track to become an official entity of Student Union with the consent of SU Executive Board. Junior and Speaker of the Senate Brian Adler expressed excitement for SCB’s potential in uniting various sports clubs on campus.

“Sports Club Board [will] serve to advocate, organize and build a community for the sports clubs on campus. They will be fighting for the issues that the sports clubs care about,” Adler said.

Although many undergraduate students have not heard of SCB, it is not new to campus.

“We are bringing SCB back as a Student Union entity, and we have updated the rules by which SCB will operate. We have defined what membership looks like, what each [SCB exec] position will do and what [SCB’s] purpose is,” Adler said.

According to Adler, there are three steps in the confirmation of SCB. The first two are the approval of the constitution and leadership by Senate and Treasury, respectably. Both passed SCB’s proposal and statutes unanimously, and both confirmed senior Isabelle Trier as SCB’s incoming president. The last step will be getting confirmation from SU’s executive board.

According to Trier, sports clubs currently lack unification, even though their goals are similar.

“We don’t have a great sense of community between different sports clubs. Additionally, we realize that we do have a lot of problems that we all share,” Trier said.

One major problem that SCB will face is SU’s pending travel policy, which will define how, when and where sports clubs can travel for games and tournaments.

“Treasury and the University are working on building a coherent set of rules for how clubs can go about travel, how they are insured [and] how far they are able to travel. Unlike most universities, we actually did not already have rules in place. Essentially, travel was a free-for-all where students could travel however they wanted to. The University is trying to fill those issues,” Adler said.

Despite the complexity and ambiguity of the SU travel policy, Director of Sports Clubs Sean Curtis is hopeful that SCB can help facilitate discussion and agreement between sports clubs and SU on the travel policy.

“We are hopefully giving some insight to Student Union on how we can make this a travel policy that works for our groups,” Curtis said.

SCB will also have to address issues regarding facilities, shared storage and an emergency fund so players do not have to pocket the costs of any travel. But according to Curtis, SCB will deal with fewer financial and more policy issues than the previous iteration of it did.

“This is really different than the Sports Club Board in that past [which] dealt more with finances and budgets; we’re not really involved in that as far as allocations go,” Curtis said.

Trier explained that her main goal is to help solve problems and address concerns in clubs.

“I will be taking all the concerns and ideas that sports club leaders may have and going to the appropriate people to figure those out,” Trier said.

Both Trier and Adler conveyed the importance of SCB’s presence on campus.

“Sports clubs are really important at a place like Wash. U. where academics are so rigorous. It’s really important to have that type of outlet and to have a community not only with your own sports club but [also] within sports clubs so that we get as many students interested and participating as possible,” Trier said.

“I think it’s crazy that we went a couple years without having one. We have such a large body [of sports clubs] on campus who are all doing similar things but are interacting very little with one another. They all share similar problems and similar challenges on campus,” Adler said. “I think the new Sports Club Board is filling a void that unfortunately existed from a couple years ago. I am excited to see that [sports clubs] will [receive] the advocacy and representation they deserve.”