Participation Feedback

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Hi All,

I am a Graduate Assistant for Intramural and Recreation at a small division III school in Johnson, VT called Johnson State College. Our school have been having issues with participation. Our highest demand is basketball. All of our other sports are very low attended. Also most of our participants are the student athletes. Do anyone have any ideas or strategies on how to get more student participation. Or any other sports/activities that were successful for their campus other than the traditional sports.

We are a small D3 school, also. We lowered our number of participants for a team. For example volleyball is 4 v 4 instead of 6 v 6, soccer is 5 v 5, flag football is 4 v 4, etc... Also stopped offering a wide-variety of sports and offered our popular ones more often. We have 4 blocks during the school year and with volleyball being a popular activity we offer it all 4 blocks. Also, we are fortunate to have a fieldhouse so for activities like indoor soccer, dodgeball we offer an additional sport in the fieldhouse like bag toss, spikeball that night. You are able to max out a night with sports but also can keep just 1 supervisor watching both activities. Went to the majority of the leagues are open so people do not need a specific amount of males/females. We also started this year where a floor in one of our Res Halls is called the Intramural Living Community. These people pay a certain amount additional in their housing fee and then they can participate the entire year for no additional cost. Campus Rec receives the revenue which is generated by the additional fee. If your highest demand is basketball I would make baasketball available as much as you can. At the beginning of this school year we offered an Intramural Social people stop by for food/drinks learn about what we have and they can sign-up right there. Also, did a Free Agent Meeting took all of the people that had registered on IMLeagues, came to the Social and set up a meeting with them. Just went down the list of sports we offered and asked who wants to participate. Formed teams that night and signed them up. Hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions or need anything additional. I am always looking for ways to increase participation.

I'm at a small D3 school as well (2500 students). I offer 6 sports a year. Most of my participants are athletes, too. I'd say about 75%. Flag football is struggling for me mostly because classes don't end until 5 and practices. Volleyball on the other hand is skyrocketing. It seems like evening sports fair far better than late afternoon ones. Try to schedule indoor activities later at night if you can. I also enlisted the help of the RAs and RCs on campus. The student RAs have to do so many programs a semester and intramural sports counts as a program. We also take students to the state and regional NIRSA tournaments that help drive participation.

Basketballref, can you explain your free agent night a little more?

I set up a free agent meeting each intramural season for anyone to attend that is interested in playing but does not have a team. We go down the list of sports and put teams together. Market this through social media, IMLeagues email, etc... People will sign-up as a free agent through IMLeagues and very rarely get picked up because the majority of time when someone signs a team up they already have enough people.

@Davis228 I am the IM director at an NAIA school in Florida and some of the things we have done in the last two years to ensure student participation is to not have our leagues open to athletes. We've noticed that our school, students are less likely to play if the competition level is higher. So our leagues our open to only normal students. Also, as someone stated above, we have a free agent meeting for every sport and this helps get another 15-20 students per sport to come out for the sports. We have also begun marketing around campus and on social media. We have a student worker who comes to our games and takes pictures of the games and posts them on social media. Another thing that has helped is the fact that I am still an undergrad student on campus so I am in classes pushing the program and marketing it throughout classes and popular areas on campus. I would suggest using some student workers to push intramurals in their classes and inform everyone of the program! Granted we still have a ways to go with some sports, such as indoor soccer, co-ed softball, and ultimate frisbee, but these little things have helped quite a bit.