Sports Officer

Louis Gosling

Vice President for Sports

He/Him

As VP Sports, my role is primarily to represent and support our student-run clubs within the SU, in co-ordination with the full-time staff in the Membership team.

I am also responsible for setting the strategic direction for sport within the SU, and as such I work closely alongside Warwick Sport, others at the university, and other key organisations such as BUCS to achieve the best possible sporting experience for our students.

Course:
History & Politics BA - graduating this year

Hometown:
High Wycombe

Fun fact about me:
I had a cameo in Heartstopper! I was in the rugby team

My role and what I hope to achieve this year:
As VP Sports, I hope to engage with our students and student clubs better: 

• I don't think we do a particularly good job of engaging with our students and sports clubs at the moment. We aren't visible enough, we haven't always communicated well, and many of our clubs have a negative view of our capacity to support them.
• We're hoping to make steps towards improving our student engagement this year, the top lines of which are: ensuring a good quality of service in our interactions with them; displaying a more public partnership with the team at Warwick Sport; improving our visibility by making sure that we 'take the first step' instead of expecting our clubs to do it themselves; and reforming our communication methods to make sure they're more two-way and better targeted.
• Hopefully (🤞) this will allow us to better build the relationships and structures that allow us to secure student buy-in for the strategic plan and allow us to bring our clubs with us on the difficult conversations that will be involved (such as on moving away from individual club logos to a more cohesive identity, for example).

Broadening the reach of sport within the SU:

• I want to showcase sport's ability to crossover with other departments and officers to ensure that it's seen as more integral to the SU's wider operations and processes, and not as something that can kind of take place separately to the rest of the SU
• As such, the plan is to work closely alongside other officers and teams at points throughout the year to help sports be seen as a vehicle through which other issues can be tackled. For example, I'd love to work with our voice team to improve the already excellent sports member voting figures at our Spring Elections; and to help them engage better with many of the 13,500 students who engage with some form of SU or University led active programme at Warwick.

Reinvigorating the SU's relationship with Warwick Sport:

• Making sure we communicate more fluidly with Warwick Sport and share our platforms more regularly. This includes all the partnership workshop stuff that is currently underway, but also making sure we demonstrate a proper 'handshake' both to the rest of the SU and to our student body. Our students fundamentally do not care about the SU-WS split.
• Nowhere else does the SU operate so closely and intimately with a university department - the partnership in sports is a unique arrangement. As such. we cannot effectively support our students and our sports clubs without an effective partnership.

Promoting an enhanced sense of community around sports:

• Exploring how we can make BUCS Wednesdays a bigger more 'shiny' event that brings some more eyes on to sport at Warwick.
• Coordinating around our big events, in particular Varsity. Will they, in their current form, help us get to where we want to be?
• Showcasing the excellent work and results that take place better. This is both sporting and non-sporting (we know, for example, our clubs do a lot of charity work, but we don't have a figure for how much. 5 mins research got me to £32k, but I strongly suspect the true figure is around the £40-50k range).