Director of intramural sports Mallory Hiefield on why students should join an intramural sports team
For students who can’t commit to the near-daily practice schedule of Division III sports, Pacific University’s intramural sports are a spirited and inclusive alternative. The Pacific Index caught up with Director of Intramural Sports Mallory Hiefield about how intramural sports work, what students should do if they want to join, and why every student should take advantage of this fun opportunity!
The Pacific Index: How do intramural sports work?
Mallory Hiefield: Intramural sports are meant for students at the university to make sports teams and play against [each other]. We also have our DIII sports and they compete against other schools in our conference. This fall, we actually just finished up sand volleyball, spikeball, and ultimate frisbee. It’s unique because this is friends making teams, maybe different clubs making teams, and people can sign up as free agents to join a team.
The Index: How do students sign up?
MH: There’s a website called imleagues.com. Students will make an account with their Pacific email, and they usually have a team captain create a team and add members. Or, you just sign up for a sport. Typically there is a registration period. Pretty much all our leagues for this year just closed . . . it’s per semester. This Sunday, we started playing indoor soccer, football, and volleyball. They’ll have about four or five weeks, and we play on and off two weeks of playoffs or championships. The winning team gets a t-shirt! Students love, love, love the t-shirts—they get pretty competitive. There will definitely be more sports coming up in the spring. We will have basketball, football… we’ll do a bunch more things in the spring. But we are also going to do some one-day tournaments like spikeball or kickball—you might’ve seen some of those kickball flyers in your dorm. [There will be] a one-day spikeball tournament on November 17, and that’s different because when you sign up, you’ll need to commit to one day versus having to commit to six to eight weeks of playing.
The Index: Are intramural sports co-ed?
MH: We have different leagues. Some are co-ed, some are men’s only, women’s only, or we have an open option where gender doesn’t matter.
The Index: Can students create their own intramural league?
MH: If there was a sport that we didn’t offer that students wanted to play, and we had the equipment, I’d be like, “yeah, let’s put on a league and see what happens.” Spikeball was a new intramural we started recently.
The Index: How are intramural sports different from the DIII sports at Pacific?
MH: It’s pretty different. For intramural sports, some teams just show up to their game. They commit maybe two hours a week. But for the Division III sports, the teams are practicing almost every day for a couple hours. And they have games that they travel to, so they put in a lot more hours. Most of [the intramural teams] don’t necessarily need practice outside of competition, but some do.
The Index: Why should people play intramural sports?
MH: I think [everyone] should play because it’s just something fun to do with your friends. It’s a good mental break, too, if you’re really focusing on school and studying. You can tell yourself, “Okay, I’m gonna go play volleyball for an hour.” It’s a good social thing for a lot of people, and one of my goals—especially for the spike ball tournament coming up—is I really want to try and get some more underclassmen involved because I’ve noticed there’s a lot of returners and people who know what’s going on. It takes a little bit longer for the first-years to catch on to intramurals.
— Jeyuri De la Cruz
Leave a Reply