Written by Dylan Webb, Sports Editor
The NCAA National Committee has released their list of sports programs that will receive NCAA accreditation for the 2019–20 athletics season. Among the notable additions to SFU’s already strong slate of NCAA-competing programs are the school’s Quidditch team, its board games club, and — to the surprise of some in the athletics community — a pile of dead rats that was found in the Burnaby campus student residences.
While SFU now boasts an even broader range of NCAA-accredited athletics programs, the Men’s Ice Hockey team was omitted for the eighteenth year in a row. It’s unclear what the hockey team might do to secure the institutional backing required to make the jump to the NCAA, other than switch sports altogether or become a heap of deceased rodents.
Following the accreditation announcement, reports surfaced on social media of a rowdy group of incensed athletes loudly occupying Convocation Mall. While the cause of the riot was initially unclear, a handful of students, barricading themselves in the W.A.C. Bennett Library, shared live tweets of the proceedings. The posts referred to puck-shaped holes in the Maggie Benston Centre windows and anti-SFU chants echoing off the concrete walls.
Shortly after the National Committee’s accreditation announcement, a press release from the pile of dead rats indicated that, though the team of rodents possesses multi-sport athletic abilities, they will compete in the Division 2 GNAC rat basketball conference.
“While the NCAA did give us the option of fielding soccer, basketball, and ice hockey teams, we’ve settled on the Division 2 GNAC rat basketball conference. We’ve chosen not to ice a rodent hockey team due to embarrassment for, and fear of backlash from, the SFU hockey community,“ a spokesperson for the pile of dead rats said in a follow-up interview with The Peak.
On the heels of the NCAA’s accreditation announcement, the SFU Board of Governors released its newest budget update. The document indicates that while the board’s annual transfer to the SFU Hockey club will hold steady at 12 secondhand bath towels and one three-day-old fruit platter per annum, it has indeed allocated funds in its yearly budget for a new rat basketball arena. Their new arena, like most other buildings on campus, has an expected completion date of January 2038.
