A new year has welcomed a new semester and at St. Edward’s, that also means a new round of intramural sports. As per usual, indoor volleyball and indoor soccer, along with basketball leagues will be played throughout the course of the semester. However, those will be the only leagues available this semester; the rest of the sports will be tournament-based.

“One thing that we’ve seen a lot of the times is as leagues go on, there’s a decline in participation where people stop showing up because they have a bunch of busy work,” Intramural Coordinator Baxter Coronado said.

But that isn’t the only change to intramurals for this semester. This week, Campus Recreation is hosting video game tournaments throughout the week. From FIFA on Monday, to Mario Kart on Friday in Jones Auditorium, Campus Recreation is finding unique ways to engage a larger portion of the St. Edward’s community.

“It’s something that we thought would be a nice shift in the campus feel with everybody playing video games… We thought this would be a good thing to try and see how many people [would come out],” Coronado said.

While there was a solid turnout the first night for FIFA, a solid turnout throughout the week would not necessarily translate to another week full of video games. However, a pop-up tournament on a random day is not out of the question. Depending on the reactions after this week, Coronado, along with Campus Recreation, will be taking suggestions for games to host tournaments for in the future.

This is also the second semester that Campus Recreation will be charging students individually, as opposed to a flat fee for an entire intramural team. It is a system that has proved to be proactive in making sure that people who want to participate in intramurals, do.

“If you want to play, you pay your fee, you’re good. If you’re team doesn’t want to show up and doesn’t want to play, I will make sure you find a team that will play and will show up and you can play your games,” Coronado said.

Residents who live on campus have the opportunity to play for free, as Campus Recreation has distributed $5 and $10 passes to residence halls for their teams to use.

Other sports available this semester include 4v4 flag football, sand volleyball, kickball and plenty more. The full list of sports and sign ups are on imleagues.com/seu.