Comments on: £46 million but still no sports centre

By: student

student — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:11:14 +0000

obviously don't play sport of any kind

By: M Raleigh

M Raleigh — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:12:24 +0000

1) Money has to be prioritised – if we are to compete internationally with universities like Harvard and Yale with more money than sense we can't be wasting it on an activity that it essentially subsidiary to the main academic goal of the university.

2) The college system that we have in Cambridge means that a significantly higher proportion of students can get involved in competitive sport than any other Uni. At somewhere like Bristol if you want to play rugby or row, you're going to have to make the uni squad.
The lack of a sports centre is indeed reflective of the break up of sports funding on college level – maybe what is needed is simply greater centralisation of this? If you were to add up the total amount of money that goes into sports across all the colleges, and values of rugby fields, boat clubs, boats (Which cost an awful lot of money, average price for just one of those eights that most colleges have several of can be at least 20,000) i’m sure you would find that Cambridge actually has a substantial amount of money invested in sport. However, if you were to centralise you may lose some of the vitality of college competition

3) The Majority of students aren’t really too affected by the fact that we don't have a sports centre. If sport is your priority you simply made a mistake applying to Cambridge (Loughborough would have been a better bet)

By: Wizard

Wizard — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:54:41 +0000

The sportsmen and women do pretty well here. There's loads for them to take part in (even if the facilities aren't the best) and they are generally among the most popular students. At the end of the day we are an academic university, not a sports college.

By: Brains and Brawn | THE TAB - www.cambridgetab.co.uk - All the latest Cambridge University news online

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:25:06 +0000

[...] have blazed across The Tab this week as the University and Trinity College splashed the cash. Cambridge announced the next great 800th year [...]

By: Grammar Nazi

Grammar Nazi — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:03:42 +0000

Make your mind up about the apostrophe. If you want to end up working as a sub for Murdoch you’ll need better editing skills.

By: Uni Insider

Uni Insider — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:12:44 +0000

As the University sort above me has said, there’s no point in criticising the uni for building a new centre for Material Science. Because HEFCE’s picking up the bill, it’s a no-brainer for the university to build it on somebody else’s dime, and free up lots of city centre real estate.

And here’s the rub – if the sports centre advocates had any sense, they’d be looking at the uni’s rather more important plans to move all the humanities departments which currently inhabit the Mill Lane site to a new building on the Sidgwick site, freeing up masses of prime land along the Mill Pond for a lucrative redevelopment. The uni has already started planning this redevelopment, and by all accounts it’s going to make them an absolute mint.

Surely the sportspeople of Cambridge would be better off demanding that some of this cash is ploughed into sports facilities? Not that I give a toasty fuck – all sport other than French cricket is a boneheaded waste of time, and the money could be much better spent on a health spa in the UL. This back isn’t going to rub itself.

By: Joshi Eichner Herrmann

Joshi Eichner Herrmann — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:40:09 +0000

David, the story is very clearly NOT The Tab accusing the university of a misuse of funds (the fact that it is HEFCE funding is in the penultimate paragraph)

It is a story about how the announcement of this project has prompted the 800yearswithnosportscentre to call again for a public commitment to the sports centre and demand more urgency in the search for funds for that facility.

I’m confident that no-one at this univeristy would expect sports funding from a body with ‘Higher Education’ in its name!

By: David Lowry

David Lowry — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:14:11 +0000

As a member of the University Council and signatory to the report authorising the construction of this building, I would like to point out that HEFCE, not the University, is funding this building, and that HEFCE is not a body which pays for sports centres.

To present this as an either/or situation is factually incorrect, and I think that to condemn the University for building educational projects with money intended for that purpose is wrong.

By: Toby Franckensteinous

Toby Franckensteinous — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:19:25 +0000

It’s just dissapointing that the the university can’t see that uni life is about giving a rounded education and sport is crucial to this by giving life skills that are far greater than cambridge! but alas, sadly they are simply striving to attract new students when really it is the current students who make cambridge the place that it is today and blend it for the future….

By: Johnny

Johnny — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 16:54:43 +0000

I agree with Roach, this university should do much more to find the funding for the sports centre.