Simson Garcia | Sports Editor
Join the club or jump on the bandwagon. Whichever it is, there’s a club worth joining in celebration. The Wolves’s flag football club has just won the regional championships, and now look to face the best of the best in the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association (NIRSA) Championships, held in Pensacola, Florida on Jan. 5 through 7.
It was the regional championships, played from Oct. 27 to 29 at Washington State University, that punched their ticket.
“No one thought of us as having a real team, so we came from nowhere,” said senior business major Matthew Cornish, captain of the club. Being that Western is a division II school for instance, coming from a small town, they were to be pitted in a competitive field that included clubs from a couple of division I schools, meaning schools that are bigger and from larger cities, whereby highly-skilled athletes are more likely, in number, to be accessible to those respective clubs.
For perspective, there were three clubs that were from Washington State and two clubs from Eastern Washington, both DI schools. Also competing were two Central Washington clubs and a club from Blue Mountain Community College of Oregon.
Cornish, who has been playing flag football his whole life, said, “Me and my roommate right now played all over the west coast. And when we came (to Western intramural tournaments held by campus recreation) we won the fall and spring tournament championships going undefeated. That’s where I got the idea of trying the regionals after putting together a team to see how well we’d do. So I took a few players from there, and then I held tryouts.”
He recruited a new quarterback, gathered a few former Western football players and current rugby players to fill out the roster and created an all-star of a team to face the competition that loomed ahead of them.
Before anyone knew it, they went 3-0 in pool play. Then it was time to seed teams in the tournament via most points scored during pool play. When Cornish and the Wolves saw who was number one he said, “You know what, we should go against them and see how good we are.” That number one seed, a Washington State club, had put up a total score of 130 points against its opponents’s 20. That was, until the Wolves came howling.
In the first round of the tourney, the Wolves put the bark to bite defeating one seed Washington State in double overtime by a score of 46-39.
Then they played a Central Washington club, and beat them 28-6 to advance into the finals. In the title game, they were matched up against another Washington State team, beating them in overtime 21-20 and declared their regional title.
According to Andy Main, the assistant director of intramural sports at Western who has around 15 years of experience with club and intramural sports, a win of this magnitude from a school like Western is “rare.”
“In the world of Campus Recreation this is a rather significant accomplishment. A school as small as WOU rarely wins these types of tournaments. It’s usually the bigger schools,” said Main.
Cornish is also an intramural supervisor who works for campus recreation and is now investing much of his time and money to get the Wolves to Florida to likely then play even bigger schools, another rare occasion according to Main.
“This was the first time the school has ever put something like this together,” said Cornish. To be able to play in NIRSA, Cornish, while simultaneously getting the team in order, had another list of to-do’s stating, “I had to sign waivers from the school and waivers from NIRSA in order for us to get registered to play.”
“I had to collect insurance information from everybody … I had to make sure everyone was enrolled with a minimum of six credits in order for them to participate in this tournament.”
Since club teams don’t get the same kind of funding compared to the football or basketball teams, a lot of the funding lands on club recreation and the athletes who coordinate teams. In other words, “some money can come from the incidental (fees) committee, where they can offer grants to club athletes like Cornish,” Main explained.
But the other portion falls on the athletes like the Wolves flag football team, who won many battles to get there and are now hopeful it pays off.
“I’m focusing on doing what I can to help this team get to Florida,” Cornish said. “We have to do a bunch of fundraising in order to get to Florida. Most of the money we’ve got is half our budget used for airfare, which the school was able to provide their portion for, and the other half is for the rest (hotels, food etc.).”
Part of such fundraising is provided through Cornish’s gofundme account online where he and the Wolves are grateful of any donation.
“If you were to donate money towards our cause it would mean a lot because coming from a small school we have a chance to compete with bigger schools and prove we have what it takes to be national champions. I appreciate anything that you can offer towards our trip,” said Cornish.
Contact the author at journalsports@wou.edu
