It was a sunny October afternoon, and a team of Boston University athletes was in the midst of its semiweekly practice on Magazine Beach, a stretch of green along the Charles River in Cambridge.
The team? BU Quadball, formerly known as Quidditch.
The team can’t practice on campus because the BU Student Activities Office — an office that provides a variety of support for BU student organizations — does not officially recognize it, even though BU Quadball has played 14 seasons.
“We have to come to the nearest public park to play,” said Cleo Brooks, a junior in the College of Fine Arts and the team’s social media manager.
Being recognized by SAO would mean receiving funding and support, having access to renting space on campus and reaching a wider audience. However, SAO does not provide information on the process of approving student organizations — they only have a website explaining the logistics of starting a new student group.
Student Activities Office staff did not respond for comment.
BU Quadball had previously applied to be a club sport and was rejected. Ethan Dillon, a senior in the College of Engineering and a team captain, said the team was also told that it could not be a regular club because it is “too much of a sport.”
“They said that they don’t have the space, or the funding, or whatever they want to call it,” Dillon said. “We’ve tried a bunch of different options and they all kind of tell us that we don’t fit the mold of what they’re looking for.”
The team’s unofficial status prevents it from receiving BU funding and attending SPLASH, the university’s biannual club fair. The fair features over 450 student organizations and draws in over 2,000 students, making it an important day for attracting new members.
“For the past two years, we’ve tried to get into SPLASH and been kicked out,” Dillon said. “We ended up having to reach people as they’re coming in … but it hurts because we don’t look legitimate.”
The Quadball team is not the only unofficial student organization at BU. CHAARG, a club whose name stands for “Changing Health, Attitudes and Actions to Recreate Girls,” is also unrecognized by SAO.
Madison Lembo, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and CHAARG’s ambassador, explained that the club is a women’s fitness community that aims to show women that “fitness can and should be fun.”
“In order to be considered for recognition, we would need to include the Title IX clause,” Lembo said. “So we couldn’t be an all-women’s group.”
To keep CHAARG a community for women, Lembo said the club has chosen to remain unofficial for now. As a result, CHAARG, like BU Quadball, struggles with funding, student engagement and access to space on campus.
Lembo said being unrecognized and unfunded is “challenging.”
“It does definitely limit our reach,” she said. “If people aren’t seeing us at a table at SPLASH, we’re not really being considered by them.”
But not every student organization wants to become official.
The BU Dog Pound is a group representative of the student section at BU sporting events. Aaron Fox, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and president of Dog Pound, said they never have been and probably never will be a recognized club.
While Fox acknowledged that some of the benefits of recognition would be nice, he said the Dog Pound gets by with its unofficial, “mutually beneficial” relationship with BU Athletics.
He added that if the Dog Pound had a relationship with SAO, it would have to deal with regulations.
“We would get censored pretty heavily,” Fox said, referring to student section chants involving profanity and the phrase “BC sucks.”
Fox said he’s happy keeping the Dog Pound as it is and doesn’t “see a need for SAO.”
“The way it’s run right now is really just a close group of friends,” Fox said. “I don’t know if, at this point, you could really structure it like a club … I think we’re trying to do something different”
However, Brooks said that SAO recognition would improve Quadball’s accessibility.
“What I like about Quadball is how accessible it is,” Brooks said. “But BU is making it hard for us to make it as accessible as possible to students because of how much financial commitment they have to put in and how much of a trek it is over here.”
Lembo agreed that recognition from SAO would benefit CHAARG in multiple ways.
“It would open up a lot of possibilities,” Lembo said. “Just to expand our influence on campus and reserve space at SPLASH or have a club social in a university space to make it more accessible for people to attend.”
