Intramural sports are a true staple of campus life for many students at Fairfield. They offer a quality social space, a means to stay active and a place to pursue the sports students love in a low stakes environment. These low stakes, however, often come with unintended consequences.
The “nomad” in intramurals is a player who plays for multiple teams in one sport throughout the season. They’ll bounce from one team to another until playoff time, when they’ll have to pick a team and stay with them. For most in intramurals the competitive advantage this provides is negligible, but intramural volleyball player Sarah Dorgan ‘26, went so far as to say, “without [a nomad] our team would’ve forfeited half our games!”
Despite the prevalence of these nomads in past years, just a few weeks before the season intramural coordinator Ethan Godfrey announced they would no longer be allowed. The new rule stated that, “Players can only play for their team and their team only.” This news was startling to a lot of teams who relied on nomads to fill out rosters as well as to those students who used the nomad rule as an opportunity to play more games than they would normally be scheduled to play.
Andrew Jameison, a junior and first year Intramural Sports Advisor, clarified that the rule was aimed at keeping to a system where, “you can play in multiple leagues but you are one team and you’ve gotta stick to that team.” Furthermore, he gave some insight to the genesis of the rule, saying that handling nomads, “kind of makes it chaotic on the management side of things.” Management is not something most students think of when they’re preparing for their intramural season, but these games actually require a ton of work behind the scenes. Jameison noted the importance of keeping track of things like injury waivers as players moved around rosters and the prevalence of forfeits in intramurals where teams simply don’t show. There is a lot of prep work that the over 100 person intramural team puts in behind the scenes to make this all possible, and it’s easy to see how nomads could throw a wrench into these processes.
Above all, Jameison said the rule was about “fairness and equity” for all athletes in all leagues, and not about restricting play. In fact, Jameison encouraged students to “play as much as you want, we welcome that… but balance is what we were aiming for.” But if not as a nomad, what are the other options for playing extra games?
On top of these new rules, Godfrey’s email also contained the exciting news that new leagues would be added during this intramural season. New options for engaging such as the new men’s and women’s volleyball leagues and CoRec flag football are giving students a chance to get as many games as possible and play with as many teams as possible. There are still restrictions on playing in both A and B leagues, but other than that Jameison encouraged students to “play as many sports as you want.” Engaging with these new leagues could be the solution for nomads who move to add games to their schedules, but are not a perfect patch for all present issues.
Truthfully, there will be no definitive answers as to how effective these changes will be until the end of the season. Knowing if forfeits drop, if competition rises, and if the new leagues are as impactful as we hope will give us the true answers on this change. For now, we can only speculate that the many students who played as nomads and the many teams who needed nomads to function will be in an awkward situation entering this season. The intramural managers clearly have the student’s best interests in mind by making this change, but it may begin to feel much the opposite to many who have relied on this system in the past.
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