“It’s a way for freshmen or transfer students who maybe don’t know a lot of other people yet to get on a team.”
OSU Campus Recreation’s Intramural Sports program launched a Web site that allows students to register for sports and receive e-mail and text message notifications about their teams and playing schedules.
Intramural Sports Coordinator Jason Linsenmeyer said the Web site functioned for individual and dual sports this past August, but it has expanded to cover team sports like flag football and soccer.
Students interested in golf and bowling will need to register in the intramural office to pay extra fees because they are held off campus.
Linsenmeyer said a Facebook application will allow about 10,000 students who participate in intramurals to access their team schedules from their Facebook profiles.
“We are just trying to stay current with technology and what the students are using,” said Campus Recreation Director Kent Bunker. “The old way of registering was fine but being online is more convenient.”
Peyton Reaves, a management information systems senior, developed the Web site and said he thinks new features will be added over the next few years as technology develops.
Linsenmeyer said the Web site allows students to access their teams’ schedules and rankings and see information about their opponents in addition to registering for sports online.
One of main features of the Web site is the online free agent draft, which has been online since 2007, but will see increased use because every team will be online, Linsenmeyer said.
“It’s mainly for students who don’t have a team or don’t know many other students,” Linsenmeyer said. “It’s a way for freshmen or transfer students who maybe don’t know a lot of other people yet to get on a team.
“If we have enough, we can even put together a free agent team here in the office.”
Linsenmeyer said team captains can access the free agent draft page and look for players who want to play a certain sport in a certain league. If a team captain selects a player, the system generates an e-mail to the player asking if they want to accept the invitation to join the team.
Reaves said the idea for the Web site came to him after he had worked for the program for a few months.
“We realized a need for improvements to the intramural program, and I knew a lot of it could be done online,” Reaves said. “We were trying to cut out some of the busy work with registration and scheduling and I think we’ve done it.”
Bunker said he thinks the Web site will be successful but Campus Recreation will have to evaluate in the future to see how it affected student participation in the program.
“We’ll have to see how it goes,” Bunker said. “We’ll have to compare this year to the previous year and go from there.”
Reaves said he thinks the system could evolve to include more features as technology develops.
“We got a lot of things out of the way this first time,” Reaves said. “There is always room for improvement, whether it will be some sort of mobile technology or whatever, we can always improve things in the future.”
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