The intramural sports department 2021 fall schedule is returning to its pre-COVID-19 programming schedule involving contact sports and activities.
“We're basically going back to what we've seen before COVID,” Jason Harrington, intramurals and sports clubs coordinator said. “We have flag football, full seven-on-seven. We have six-on-six volleyball, and we're gonna have outdoor soccer. We're going to have five-on-five basketball which we haven't had basketball — competitive basketball, any format, in the year and a half since COVID impacted us all in spring 2020.”
Harrington said he already had a great turnout with intramural events so far and he is hoping for engagement to grow as the semester goes on.
“We're looking for a great turnout, we've already had outstanding turnouts in a couple sports,” he said.
Harrington said he already had six men’s teams and six coed teams for volleyball which is not something that happened in the past COVID-impacted semesters.
Harrington implemented pop-up tournaments and on-site signups during the COVID-19 pandemic to boost engagement, which proved to be successful. Harrington said this is going to continue with more pop-up events this semester.
“We’re going to have a couple staples that we just started up during COVID—pop-up tournaments, instead of having online signups,” he said. “We just had table tennis, we had foursquare earlier this semester and we have cornhole and spikeball coming up.”
Foursquare is something that has been proven to be popular Harrington said. He said he plans on holding another tournament later in the semester.
Other pop up tournaments being hosted this semester are eight and nine ball tournaments and badminton.
One current change is the air hockey tables no longer require payments to use. Harrington said there’s been an increase in engagement in the game room because of this and added an air hockey tournament to this semester’s programming Oct. 11 and 12.
For more information about Lamar University’s intramural sports lineup, visit lamar.edu/recsports.