Pitt club sports meet to discuss field availability

Pitt’s club sports teams met with the Student Government Board Monday night to prepare for an… Pitt’s club sports teams met with the Student Government Board Monday night to prepare for an upcoming meeting with Pitt’s administration regarding access to varsity fields.

Representatives from 12 club teams attended the meeting to discuss their inability to access fields in the Petersen Sports Complex. Currently, these facilities are reserved for use by only varsity sports teams.

The teams were supposed to meet with Pitt’s Athletic Department today, but Board member James Landreneau said he postponed the meeting in order to discuss the best approach to meet the clubs’ needs. The clubs will meet with the Athletic Department within the next two weeks.

Ray Ludwig, the president of men’s club soccer, originally spoke to the Board last month about the game-space issue. He said the meeting provided the clubs with an opportunity to become aware of each others’ dilemmas.

“We want to unify for a group effort,” Ludwig said after the meeting. “This meeting showed that this could definitely gain some ground.”

Currently, men’s club soccer is forced off campus during its home tournaments, even though Pitt has two soccer fields in Oakland. The Ambrose Urbanic Field is reserved for varsity sports, and the Cost Sports Center fields, the club’s practice area, do not meet tournament regulations.

In order to host tournaments, men’s club soccer must rent Founders Field, which is a 20-minute drive from campus. The rental costs the team about $1,200 per day of use.

“We have to host games off campus,” Ludwig said. “We want to bring people to our campus.”

SGB member Ryan Gayman said he helped organize last night’s private meeting in order to reach a general consensus of the groups’ needs before they meet with Pitt’s Athletics Department.

“It was nice because we had an extremely meaningful, mature discussion about the needs of each other,” Gayman said. “We were able to hear the needs and now take those needs to the administration.”

Pitt’s Athletic Department would not comment after the meeting. Athletic Department spokesman E.J. Borghetti referred any requests for comment to a statement that the department issued in mid-October. The statement said that when Pitt began construction for the Petersen Sports Complex, the University and the Athletic Department decided it would be used for varsity sports only.

“This [varsity usage] includes not only intercollegiate contests during the competitive seasons, but also team and individual workouts during the off-season,” the statement said. “As a result, the facility has year-round usage and cannot accommodate groups or individuals outside of the University’s varsity sports programs.”

Harrison Fisher and Adrian Shodi, the co-presidents of Pitt’s men’s club water polo, said the team cannot hold tournaments on campus. They said that they have asked for permission to host matches on campus for more than three years. Although the University allows the team to practice at Trees Hall three times a week, the water polo team cannot host events there.

Shodi said that when one of the team’s away tournaments was cancelled last year and “the commissioner of the tournament asked if [Pitt’s club] could hold it, it was like a joke.”

Instead of hosting matches at Pitt, the water polo team must travel to other schools, such as Villanova, in order to play in tournaments. Shodi said that it costs the team anywhere between $350 to $450 to enter away tournaments.

Fisher said allowing the team to host tournaments would also be a financial boon. Because the team would receive some profit from registration fees, it wouldn’t have to rely solely on SGB allocations,

“We’re really only asking for one weekend a semester,” Fisher said.

Fisher said that the meeting showed that the club sports teams are “a unified voice and everyone is really ready to get this settled.”