@Supervisor136, @White, and @McCauley,

Greetings from Lawrence. Hope everyone is doing well.

Our policy at the University of Kansas is identical in the sense that student athletes may not participate in their related Intramural Sports event. As far as past NCAA Division I athletes go, our policy is the following:

• Intercollegiate team members who are ineligible to compete at the varsity level are not permitted to take part in the Intramural Sports event related to their intercollegiate sport. Examples include but are not limited to redshirt status, greyshirt status, scholastic ineligibility, and suspension.

• Any individual who was a member of a team in any NCAA Division I sport shall be ineligible to participate in that related Intramural Sports event for a period of one (1) calendar year following their last NCAA Division I participation.
  Note - We don't concern ourselves with the eligibility of past Division II, III, JUCO, NAIA, etc. athletes.

We do allow intercollegiate athletes (1 year) and professional athletes (2 years) to petition for immediate eligibility. This provides us the autonomy to handle such instances with sensitivity to all. I can elaborate on this petition and it's origins if you would like, just shoot me a message.

Hope it helps.

ROCK CHALK

Jon Randle
jonrandle@ku.edu

Harden153,

Can you explain what you mean by "Open Leagues"? Do you mean no gender requirements or restrictions?

Jon Randle

@Parliament

You're always going to have this battle. Unless it is grossly inappropriate, the team captain will always defend his/her choice of team name.

I went to a session at a conference once that touched on team names and how they lead to inclusion or non-inclusion, how they attract/detract females, etc.

We used to ask ourselves, "What would the chancellor of the university say if he/she opened the campus newspaper, and smack dab on the front page in bold letters is 'SUCK MY DITKA WINS IM CHAMPIONSHIP' ".

With that mentality, we have censored more team names than you could ever imagine, but it is done so with the integrity of our participants, program, department, and university in mind. Hate being the "bad guy" but I think it is a worth while battle.

We have taken it as far as to put all team names through Urban Dictionary - if anything and I do mean anything comes up, we censor it. I can't get called to the principal's office for having a TEAM SMITH or TEAM HARRISON. I definitely can for the DITKA one though.

Straight out of our Policies:
The Intramural Sports program reserves the right to censor any team name that is vulgar, offensive, derogatory,
or otherwise deemed inappropriate.

so vague enough that it can be applied to anything =)

Jon

I echo Burkhart.

We too only use the Free Agent feature of IMLeagues. We do not keep an internal document or require participants to come into the facility to be added.

In the past, we have attempted to create teams from people listed on the Free Agent list but ran into a number of problems:

1. Not all schedules match up. Even though 10 people are on the list, not all 10 can play Thursday @ 7:00p.
2. Free Agents were looking for different competition levels. It was hard to place this one team into one specific division.
3. There was no captain, thus no responsible party. Nobody knew anyone on the team so there wasn't the camaraderie that encourages attendance and participation and fun.
4. Tons of forfeits.

One thing that a previous institution has done (UIowa) is host a Free Agent Meeting. There, participants can meet each other for the first time and someone can step up to the place and serve as a captain.

Another remedy I learned from UKentucky is still create the team, but put a staff member such as a Supervisor or GA in charge of the team. They can serve as the "captain" for this team. Typically these teams are comprised of freshmen or new students who aren't familiar with the program, so having a staff member be their coach/captain will provide them with a go to person who is familiar with the program. Who better, right?

Good luck to you and your program .

JON RANDLE
University of Kansas
jonrandle@ku.edu