CHAMPIONS OF CHALLENGE WEEK
AHEAD OF OUR ANNUAL CHALLENGE WEEK, WE SPOKE TO 6 YORK CLUBS TO FIND OUT WHAT SPORT AT YORK MEANS TO THEM.
HERE'S HOW THEY ANSWERED.
TANISHA
Sports president for York SU
“It is impossible for me to talk about mental health without mentioning sports. But I wish people understood the impact it can have on a life.
“Since I was a child, the only thing that kept me going was sports. Be it tennis or basketball, cricket or pool, every time my own mind - and other people - were against me, sports was all I had. Sports has always been my safe space, and I owe my entire existence to it. Yet for the most part of my life, I barely got any support for it. ‘Focus on your studies, you’re fat, sports isn’t for you’ was one of the many, many comments I heard from teachers, peers and family. Being kept away from the one thing I loved most, the thing that helped me the most in my darkest times, took an even bigger toll on my mental health.
“I chose York as the place to fulfil my dreams, and in August 2020, at 17 years old in the middle of a global pandemic, a very scared, yet very passionate Tanisha came here. My first few months here were incredibly tough. I wasn’t able to have the ultimate ‘uni experience’ due to Covid, not able to play sports, and I was thousands of miles away from everything I had ever known.
“Luckily, I had amazing friends who saved me, and helped me get the right help. This is when I got in touch with York Crisis, where I got diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It felt like an awakening, like all the pieces of a puzzle were falling right into place, and everything made sense.
“Talking with professionals helped me to confirm and embrace that playing sports was a kind of therapy for me too. It was my ‘happy place’, where all my worries and stress dissolved. What helped me even more was seeing other people believe in me, not laugh when I talk about mental health or sports, or when I very prematurely said that I would be the Sports President for the University of York one day. I am forever grateful to those friends, to York Crisis and to Open Door because, since seeking their help, I have never looked back.
“It took me 17 years and moving halfway across the world to be accepted in a sporting community and to get my mental health on track. York taught me that sports is for anybody and everybody, that it is a safe space where my passion and skills matter more than what I look like. It taught me how to live my truth, and to make sure no one else has to struggle to find their space in sports.
"It taught me how to break down stereotypes and stand up for the people who don’t have a voice. Sports and mental health go together, and I owe my life to it."
ARCHERY
Archery powerhouses Floss and Emily explain how the sport shaped them.
"Challenge Week is an opportunity to provide what we've promised already. That the sport can be open to everyone, and that cost doesn't need to be a barrier for students to take part."
“I always really loved archery as a kid, but I never got to do it other than on the odd holiday. I was basically raised on fantasy and loved any archer character. It was a long term obsession that I got to try it, but I didn't really expect to be able to get into it ever. I didn't even know the university had an archery club when I applied, so finding it was so exciting. I've never been more ready to throw myself into something completely and utterly.
“I use archery as sort of a stress relief. But also it's just fun, and it's introduced me to so many people. It put me in a role model position that I didn't believe I belonged in. Personally, archery is the only sport I've ever been good at, and it's an unbelievably accessible sport. Quite a lot of our club is disabled in some way. It's not easy to be incredibly good at archery, but it is easy to do archery.
“We recently changed some of our costs in order to try and help fund the club. But we really, desperately do not want to make archery inaccessible, because so many of us wouldn't have been able to get into it if we made it more expensive.”
- Floss, Coach and Member of the Archery Committee
"I tried archery while I was in school and I really loved it. I'd told my parents, I wanted to give it another go, and luckily I have a really good archery range quite close to me. I did archery for 3 years until COVID got in the way, so when I saw there was an archery club up here I thought 'I absolutely want to get back into this.'
“Anywhere across the country you'll find archery is a really welcoming place, but especially at our club. We have so many different people from all backgrounds and everyone's super friendly.
“A lot of people hear about archery and think, ‘that's going to cost a lot of money’, because you’re using a weapon to compete in the sport, and it's a big setup. We want to keep it open to absolutely everyone. We actually charge a lot less for our membership than a lot of other societies. We also take on almost all the transport costs, all the entry fees to minimize any cost to the members.
“All the costs are going up for transport and everything like that, and we don't want to have to put that on our members. So, Challenge Week is an opportunity to provide what we've promised already. That the sport can be open to everyone, and that cost doesn't need to be a barrier for students to take part.”
- Emily, Member of the Archery Committee
"Anywhere across the country you'll find archery is a really welcoming place, but especially at our club. We have so many different people from all backgrounds and everyone's super friendly."
CHEER
President of York Hornets, Molly, shares how Cheerleading defined her time at York.
“I never would have guessed before starting university that I would be so involved in something that I knew basically nothing about."
"Joining cheer was very spontaneous; I didn’t even know that they had a cheer team here at York. My housemate and I did the tryouts on a whim, and just wanted to be social members. But as soon as we joined we just got engulfed in this world of cheer, and I've loved it so much.
“I’d never done that before, it was so foreign to me. It was the first time I’ve moved my body like that, but it was so much fun.
“I have so much passion for the club, I love it so much. We have a real mix of people who take part, from dancers to cheerleaders who have done it their whole lives. And I love watching all of those people come together and work so hard, put together routines and go to competitions and just smash it. We are a really talented club, we’ve got such talented athletes. Everyone works so hard, and everyone wants everyone to succeed.
“I’ve been on the committee for two years now and I’m president! We get lots of dancers and gymnasts involved too, we’re quite well-linked as a three. I've been a part of the club for 3 years and it's been such a massive part of my university experience. When I graduate this year the hardest part is going to be not being able to be on Hornets anymore.
“When I started at York, I came here to do a different course, and I hated it, it wasn’t for me. But I was like “I can’t leave, because I've started Cheer and I love this.”
“If it wasn't for joining Hornets, I probably would have dropped out and started again instead of changing courses. It's such a credit to how important that sports camaraderie is, and finding a real passion for sport or a club. It just changes your whole experience of university."
“I ran for President because I just loved the club so much, and I wanted to be able to give back. And now I've managed to get a graduate job that I would never have gotten if I hadn't done this role because you go into interviews. And they're like, ‘so tell me about a time when you've had to lead a team’ or ‘tell me about a time when you've had to deal with a stressful situation. How did you overcome that?’.
And if I hadn't done cheer, I would have nothing to say that was relevant to the last 3 years apart from ‘oh, I did a group project that was a bit difficult’. But actually, when you're part of a club and society, and especially when you're part of a committee, it makes you stand out more because you have real life experience dealing with stressful situations. - Molly
WOMEN'S CRICKET
Katy and Grace explain how they're hoping to empower women in the sport.
“I played cricket when I was younger, but I stopped when I was about 12 years old. I actually decided that I hated it and would never, ever play it ever again. So I didn't come to university with the intention of joining the cricket team, but looking back it’s the best decision I made - I don’t know what I’d have done without cricket.
“As a club, we accept any ability which I think is very rare. So we're very big on realising that there is limited access to cricket growing up. We also work with Her Game Too, which is a charity that promotes girls in sports.
“We try to raise awareness that cricket is a sport that girls don't always have access to. There's a lot of times you'll rock up to games and other clubs can't come because they can't fill a team. I know clubs who have had to drop out because they couldn't keep the women's cricket team going, and it’s hard to see.
“Our first challenge for Challenge Week is an International Women's Day celebration. So we're getting all of us together, playing lots of different activities, and just celebrating the fact that we are women in sports together.
“The money that we get from it we can use to better ourselves, and then take that into the community. So we can improve training, we can get more access, we can get more umpires, we can get more pitches.
“Then because people feel better within themselves and their cricket abilities, we can push people to do coaching. We're very into getting girls through coaching qualifications. It means that then we can go beyond what we're doing now, we can go and coach girls in cricket. We wouldn't be able to do that without the money from Challenge Week." - Katy
“We're in the club at a very sort of critical time in women's cricket. We've been established as a club, I believe, about 10 years, but have only had about 15 members for 4 years, and now we’ve got 30”
“I started playing cricket when I was 8. But as I got older, I was the only girl in an all boys team. It was a bit of a weird dynamic and at that age, I felt a bit intimidated going to bat. So I stopped playing for about 5 years. But then the women's team opened up and I got involved with it again.
“We are seeing growth in numbers with women playing cricket, and we've had a few partnerships with a few different schools where we've been playing matches against them. They're making cricket an option for girls to choose at school, because for me it was very much the standard that boys would play cricket - there wasn't a women's team at school.
“We’re just trying to get everyone to have a go at playing cricket. It’s an accessible sport from beginner level to advanced, especially for women and non-binary people. We’re working with local schools to go out and give coaching to people, giving confidence to young girls who are playing cricket to hopefully giving them a bit of a foundation for what it's like to be a woman in a male dominated sport” - Grace
BOAT CLUB
Georgiana, president of Boat Club, dives into how she's creating an inclusive culture around the sport.
“If you had told me like when I was 16 that I would be the second female president that has ever been of the Boat Club, that I would’ve trialled for Team GB, I never would’ve believed you.
“When you come to university you’re quite young, but you grow up quite quickly. I think York has been fantastic for me to grow up and try things. I think I've just really come out of my shell.
“There’s a huge amount of time and effort that goes into the Boat Club, it has such a sense of community. It's a group of people who aren't perfect, but they try really hard. We all give up our time and our energy; my committee tends to give about 20 hours of their time a week.
“York isn’t a place where people typically arrive already knowing how to row. What our boat club excels at is teaching people to love rowing. That’s something I’ve really focused on as President: creating and fostering a culture where people love the sport. Because if you love it, everything else follows naturally.
“We were the first society at York, so to celebrate the 60th year of the Boat Club a few years ago, we started our first Challenge Week to raise money
“We run on significantly less funding than the teams we compete against - some of them have millions in funding and paid coaches. We don’t. The money raised will go towards getting more coaching hours for our rowers.
“No other boat club that I know of uses their boats as frequently as we do. Out of the 150 hours of daylight a week, we row for about 70 of them. So any extra donations help refurbish our boats, some of which are 30 years old and falling apart due to constant use.
“Roses is something we are heavily involved in, with our annual boat races against Lancaster. We get the local community involved, everyone comes down, and it’s a lot of fun.
“All the men’s squads, all the women’s squads, the development teams, the novices, and even a staff eight take part. It’s quite a wholesome event. Because there are quite a lot of races, you get to see more action compared to the Oxford and Cambridge race, which is a long-distance event. Our race is only a kilometre, lasting about three to four minutes.
“What our boat club excels at is teaching people to love rowing. That’s something I’ve really focused on as President—creating and fostering a culture where people love the sport. Because if you love it, everything else follows naturally.”
BALLROOM AND LATIN
Emma and Mia tell us how they found a family of friends through dance.
“I'm in my final year now, and I’d say this year has been my favourite. I hadn’t really been part of other societies in my other years here, but after I finished my placement year, I felt like a fresher again, and wanted to meet new people.
“I'd experienced a bit of dancing before with my granddad - he taught me to dance. So when I went to the taster session for York Ballroom and Latin Society (YBLS) this year, everyone was really welcoming, and I just felt like I would fit in. I'm really glad that I joined the society, because they’ve become my main group of friends.
“At YBLS, no one judges you. You feel like you can practise and do things wrong and people will just help you out."
“As I'm in my final year, the modules are getting more challenging, but it's good to just look forward to going dancing in the evening and having a break from work at some point. Doing exercise and socialising is the best thing to do really in that time. It's almost like you're exercising but you're not having to think, oh I need to go and exercise. You’re doing something fun, and moving your body without really thinking about it.
“Challenge Week is so important because as a society we need the money to keep it going and obviously make dance accessible to anyone.” - Emma
“I wanted to try something new for my 3rd year, and I fell in love with Ballroom and Latin. Since then I've just been part of the most amazing dance family. It's brought me so much happiness.
“You go to competitions together, you travel together, and then before you know it you've made a family and it's the best feeling in the world.
“Dance has always really helped me with my mental health and like wellbeing. I use it to express myself and my emotions, it’s a very healing thing. YBLS for me is just like the epitome of what it needs to feel happy and fulfilled. It feels like such a loving place and it's really helped me with my mental health because no matter what you achieve, everyone celebrates it.
“Dance feels like an antidote, like a medicine. If I'm overthinking or worrying about things in life, I'll go to dance. It's an escape from your university work or whatever you're worried about, even just for a little while.
“With YBLS you choose how committed you want to be and are celebrated for whatever you can bring to the table. Even if you're just starting out like I did in September, you're still celebrated for where you are right now.
“Challenge Week is really important for YBLS because it raises money for us to be able to subsidise things like competition fees, transport for competitions, things like that.
“Without the club subsidising the fees, it wouldn't necessarily be financially accessible to a lot of people like me, who may come from a lower income background, or be the first in their family to attend university. - Mia
"Everyone should be able to take part in a sport if they want to. It shouldn't matter how much money you have or what kind of socioeconomic class you are.”
Taken by Rebecca Humphrey (YBLS Photographer)
Taken by Rebecca Humphrey (YBLS Photographer)
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