Campus Recreation takes over Powder-Puff
Competitors in Tuesday’s Powder-Puff tournament at Utah State University said they found the annual event to be more fair and competitive now that it is under the auspices of Campus Recreation.
“I’m mostly excited that Campus Rec is running the event so that the Intercollegiate and Club Sport Athletes eligibility requirements will be enforced for all teams playing,” said Krista Steed, captain of The KD Ladies, one of the Powder-Puff teams that competed in this year’s tournament.
Two years ago, USU Traditions had full control of the Powder-Puff tournament, like the other homecoming week events. This year — although technically under the USU Traditions charter — Campus Recreation managed Powder-Puff.
USU Powderpuff women play their final game for Homecoming Week Tuesday September 24, 2019. The Orange team defeated the Blue team.
With Campus Recreation in charge, requirements that limit the number of extramural athletes on intramural teams to three applied to Powder-Puff.
This new rule forced the breakup of the victor of the past three years, a team made up of players from the USU Women’s Rugby Team.
Before the tournament, Madison Cecil, the captain of Balls Deep, was optimistic about her team’s prospects without their rivals, the rugby team, able to dominate the field this year.
“We have been in the championships for the past three years and never won,” Cecil said, “so we are hoping this year.”
Balls Deep ended up losing again in the finals, this time to the Golden Retrievers, 18-36.
“It was a change just so that way it mirrors more along the lines of what our intramural program is,” said Amanda Bray, the assistant director of competitive sports at USU. “It’s kind of a level playing field and everybody’s able to join in and have fun.”
Other teams did not have strong feelings toward the change.
“I’m indifferent only because I have never played in the Powder-Puff tournament before so I would not know the difference,” said Lucy Kimball, captain of Frat w/o the Bros. “But from what I have heard from other girls, Campus Rec is making some good changes that should make the tournament more fun.”
Braden Tomlinson, vice president of athletics and campus recreation, was hopeful for this year’s competition and the future of the program.
“I actually think it’s better,” Tomlinson said. “Traditions did use referees and sign up through Campus Recreation and that was part of the reason to why we chose to go with them. They already had experience doing it last year.”
“It will be nice having Campus Rec running the event so that all the refs have the same training and understanding of all the rules,” Steed said
“We had a bunch of random people ref,” Tomlinson said. “It just wasn’t as professional. It wasn’t as organized and I wanted to make it so the girls had the best experience they could. We decided in order to do that we just go with an organization that was already trained on how to do those things.”
Gold Digger team captain Tiffanee Bird confirmed that Tomlinson’s efforts for this year did not go to waste.
“The reffing and set up will be very professional,” Bird said. “I feel like the team sign-ups were already better and I’m excited to see this event be improved upon every year.”
Another improvement to the competition was moving the preliminaries to Legacy Fields.
“We just did preliminaries on the quad and the quad’s not really a regulation size field,” Tomlinson said.
The preliminaries were moved to Legacy Fields last year, as Campus Recreation began to take some responsibility of Powder-Puff.
With participants and organizers satisfied alike, it seems that the change in host will stick around for years to come.
—william.bultez@aggiemail.usu.edu
@willistheginger