For all the students who eagerly toured Middlebury College before committing, you surely heard some version of the line, “It is always possible to start a new club on campus if it doesn’t already exist! You just need ten or more interested members.”
In reality, picture a group of 71 members, including three frustrated juniors, who have been trying to start a women’s lacrosse club for two and a half years. It turns out that the process of starting a student organization is not quite as accessible as the college preaches to its students. Despite our long effort, no real progress has been made towards establishing a women’s lacrosse club at Middlebury.
Our request is simple.
We want to be able to play lacrosse with other Middlebury students who miss the camaraderie and environment that comes with playing a team sport. While we would ideally like to travel and play competitively in the future, our request right now is to be recognized as a club sport by the Student Activities Office (SAO). Our ultimate goal is to establish a space that welcomes students of all skill levels who want to compete, improve and spend time with people who also enjoy the sport of lacrosse. We feel that accomplishing this goal would benefit the Middlebury community by creating a more accessible and casual team environment than the varsity team.
In the fall of 2022, connected by a shared interest of starting a women’s club lacrosse team on campus, we began meeting and completing the application process as directed by the SAO. With such a competitive and well-ranked varsity women’s lacrosse team, we found it hard to believe that there had not already been efforts to start a club team. From the very beginning, we had a lot of student support and eager players ready to get out on the field, which fueled our motivation to get started.
In October 2022, we began the process of applying through the SAO, who encouraged us to draft a constitution, propose a budget and meet with interested players. A month later, however, we met with the SAO, whose previous optimism turned to concern that there was not enough college funding to support an intercollegiate contact-sport like lacrosse at the club level.
Each year, Middlebury students pay $500 towards Student Activities Fees, not to mention an-ever increasing tuition (currently $86,350 including room and board). Why are we paying these specific fees allocated towards SAO if our money is not going to benefit our own interests?
According to SAO, a new organization is allotted a maximum of $1,000 dollars for their first year, and can request more if funding is insufficient. Our cost estimates for a women’s club lacrosse team were $930.79 for lacrosse balls, sticks, eye guards and a shooting guard.
We also suggested a number of fundraisers to aid in the financial burden including various bake sales, reaching out to alumni and implementing membership dues at the beginning of each season. If the SAO was not able to fully support us, we were willing to put in the work to help support ourselves.
After weeks of speaking to other women’s club lacrosse teams in the New England Women’s Lacrosse League and Middlebury athletics officials who all offered advice on safety, budgeting and extra equipment to use, we met with the Student Organization Registration Committee to present our proposal to be a new club. Up to this point, we were met with assurance from SAO and other athletics individuals involved in the new organization process that our preparation was sufficient and we would likely get approval.
However, we were shocked to see that by March 2023, SAO did not give us approval to create a new student organization. They argued that the risk mitigation measures were insufficient and that we were low priority being deemed a three tier sport.
Their dissatisfaction with our proposed safety measures was another example of inconsistent information on their part, as they previously agreed that having volunteer student EMTs from Middlebury and Castleton University would be appropriate safety measures. We even went further by ensuring players sign a release form to promise accountability to participate and throughout all of this, SAO continued to appeal to our offers and move us along in the application process.
The three-tier system only allows the addition of club sports that do not already exist at a varsity level such as crew, equestrian, sailing and quadball. For club teams that were established before the tier system, their status has been grandfathered in and they will keep their club status. With the implementation of the tier system, it is no longer possible for groups to attain club status. Instead, they must be a recreational team, meaning they do not play competitively at an intercollegiate level.
Despite the consequences of this new system being immediate, we have not found this in a handbook or written form. Two other students we talked to had also gone to the SAO to start a club sport, and when they asked to see the policy, they found there was none.
“You can't find it anywhere. There's no handbook. There's a policy that we’ve never seen and it's not available for us to see anywhere. It's really frustrating,” one student said.
It is disappointing that so many eager Middlebury students have faced the same frustrations with the process of starting organizations on campus. The time that goes into filling out endless forms, back and forth emails that end with no results and tracking people down in departments all over campus is exhausting. To us, and other non-varsity athletes, the goal is clear, but the process is convoluted. There is no successful, prescribed path of starting a club, besides the initial constitution and risk mitigation. What started with a simple ask has become a never-ending, exhausting battle. We have become tired of the disappointing answers. When we started this process as first year students, we were filled with excitement at the fact that we could really start a club lacrosse team. The joy, competition, grit and team culture that many of us experienced in our younger years is at the core of our mission. Throughout this process, we have interacted with so many others who share similar memories and values that they gained from lacrosse. We strive to bring these qualities to Middlebury in the form of a club lacrosse team.
As current juniors, this process has begun to feel like a chore. How did something so simple in practice become a complicated mess of legality, bureaucracy and unresolved appeals?
In the pre-Covid years, Middlebury had a strong junior-varsity program, including teams that did have varsity counterparts. In the fall of 2019, the JV program was cut due to a change in NCAA medical guidelines and because it had been difficult to create routine schedules. The backing from varsity teams and coaches has had little to no impact on the SAO’s decision, despite having a significant impact on the clubs’ abilities to function thanks to their generous donations of equipment and gear.
Going into this process over two years ago, we were well prepared to work with the SAO through the challenges and obstacles that approving a women’s club lacrosse team would present. However we did not imagine that the process would be quite so inefficient. From our perspective, we thought the meetings with the SAO and Student Organization Registration Committee were successful and that the school was likely to approve the club, with some modifications. After month-long delays in waiting for email replies from SAO, we cannot help but wish that the club sports system at Middlebury was more accessible.
Still, we think that it is important to recognize the efforts of the SAO and do not mean for any of our grievances to be geared toward any individual. Rather, our frustrations lie in the structural faults that have prevented us from forming a club based around an incredibly basic idea: providing a space for girls who have carried their love of the sport with them to college and want to continue the community and competition they once found in lacrosse.
At a school like Middlebury, it is common that many students played some level of sports in high school or before, and we have met many students who have expressed interest in playing a club-level sport. We believe Middlebury’s community would benefit with the addition of a women’s club lacrosse team. We are not asking for thousands of dollars, brand new uniforms, or the highest end equipment, but rather the support and recognition to gather on campus and play lacrosse a few hours a week.
Our unofficial group of girls continues to grow in interest, with so many eager players excited to continue playing lacrosse in a competitive field, yet as upperclassmen we still cannot offer much without club approval. We will continue to research ways to make this goal happen, but the chances of becoming an official student organization do not seem like more than a pipe dream unless some measures drastically change within SAO.
