BUSA Blues for Oxford?

A quick question for you: what links Edinburgh, Nottingham and UWIC? Answer: according to the BUSA league table, they’re all better than Oxford at sport. Of course, Loughborough is in first place on the BUSA table, closely followed by Bath and Birmingham, both universities renowned for sporting success; perhaps it would be unfair to expect Oxford to beat any of these three. But when did Edinburgh and Nottingham become excellent universities for sport?

And do you even know what the letters UWIC stand for? (University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, for those of you who, like me, didn’t know). Why is Oxford University worse at sport than six other universities? Should we be happy at being seventh out of 149 – and, what’s more, five places above Cambridge – or should we have a right to expect Oxford to be better?

First things first, though: how is the table compiled? Well, the British Universities Sports Association takes all the results from the biggest competitions in BUSA-accredited sports, allots points accordingly and the universities with the most points come top.

All fine and dandy, you might think. But, of course, not all sports are included: among the forty-nine sports included are Tenpin Bowling and Ultimate Frisbee, but Dancesport, a sport in which Oxford excels, is not recognized by BUSA.

According to Mark Brian, Head of Sports Programmes at BUSA, this isn’t BUSA’s fault: "When new sports want to be considered for accreditation, they have to put forward a paper to us and then there are criteria they have to reach – they will then be considered on a case-by-case basis. A group from Dancesport hasn’t yet come forward."

But then there’s the problem of how the sports are weighted. 66154.5 points are awarded overall, but sports aren’t given an equal allocation of those points: Football is given the most points, with 5886 overall, while the most minor sport, with only 60 points, is considered to be Fives.

Out of those 5886 points given for Football, how many do you think Oxford got? I’ll tell you – six, for coming fifth equal in the Men’s Shield competition. In fact, in the 2006-07 season Oxford got far fewer points for Football than it did for Women’s Boxing (twenty out of a possible forty).

Rowing, meanwhile, although it is arguably the highest calibre and most important sport in Oxford, ranks quite lowly on the national stage: it is allocated just 1900 points, fewer than fifteen other sports, including Golf (2336 points) and even Table Tennis (2265 points). Mind you, BUSA has given it far more points this year than it had last year, when it had fewer points than Cycling, Sailing, Water Polo, Canoeing and Rugby League, all of which it has now overtaken.

Mark Brian told me why BUSA now puts more weight on Rowing: "At the top end of the team programme there’s a very good standard but in the Individuals Competitions, competitors who may be of world status were only getting three points. We’re trying to recognize the standard of individual competitors, and so sports like Rowing have benefited fairly significantly from this year’s restructuring of the league table. The points allocated to the Regatta are now 1090 points, whereas football’s Knockout points are only 925 points [the other points are all won from how well teams do in the leagues]."

So, is Oxford happy with its ranking? According to Kate Filochowski, Sports Federation President, the answer is yes: "This was another very, very strong year for us. We came fourth last year, but we always knew we weren’t going to do as well this year after the restructuring [of the way in which sports are allocated points by BUSA]. We always aim to punch above our weight, but it’s not realistic to hope to beat Loughborough, for example, or other sport-specific institutions – they’ve got specific sports departments, sports scholarships and that sort of thing. At Oxford we don’t have sportspeople first and foremost, but scholars and academics, and still we manage to come seventh – it’s pretty awesome, really."

The Sports Federation President is happy with seventh place, then – are Oxford sportspeople happy too? Well, in any case, a lot of them are being acknowledged by BUSA: out of the 49 BUSA-accredited sports, Oxford gained points in 34, including Windsurfing, Pool and Korfball – it certainly seems as if Oxford has breadth and depth.

Even so, there were fifteen sports in which Oxford failed to win any points. Mainly this is because more minor sports have fewer points to give away and therefore often only the best four universities get any points, whereas in football more than twenty-four universities can get points for the same competition, never mind the same sport; sometimes, though, this is for more prosaic reasons – as Rob Dixon, Vice-President of the OU Trampolining Club, told me, one member of the Trampolining team made it through to the BUSA National Finals but didn’t go because nobody else from Oxford was going.

So, apart from turning up to competitions, is there anything else Oxford can do to improve its student ranking? According to Richard Howell, Sabbatical Officer at Bath University Students’ Sports Federation, not very much: "Well, Bath’s success is very much a long-term thing – it didn’t happen overnight. Bath’s a young university – only forty years old – but it’s always focused on sport as an aim, and the Sports Department and the Federation work together to achieve the best results we can."

But he did have one piece of advice for us: "At Bath we’ve got reresentation in almost every sport, and we encourage participation in diverse sports, even trying to send individual competitors in sports where we haven’t got a university team." Considering Oxford doesn’t field competitors in all of BUSA’s 49 sports, perhaps this is something we should be looking to: anyone fancy competing in Tenpin Bowling?

We shouldn’t place too much importance on the BUSA league table, though – as Kate Filochowski told me, "BUSA isn’t everything for us; other competitions and national leagues are just as important."