With a second quarter of intramural sports coming to a close and spring intramurals on the horizon, I decided to see what changes students would like to have made to the program.

Using an informal poll of students (with results only slightly more accurate than those of the Washington State governor race), I probed students' wildest intramural fantasies.

Not surprisingly, most change requests had to do with the spring quarter sports, where softball, which uses a literally soft ball, and indoor-lower-gym-pseudo soccer serve as the main intramural sporting attractions.

Nearly everyone I polled/nagged said they would prefer real softball or baseball to the current mockery of our national past time. Outdoor soccer, as opposed to the current indoor "soccer," received an even greater amount of support in my respected poll.

The main problem with changing these sports for the better is that there are no plans for changing Wallace field for the better, nor does SPU have the room to do so. Wallace field is too narrow for soccer, and even regular softball would land more balls in the canal than Barry Bonds hits into McCovey Cove, steroids or not.

As one pollee, who wishes to remain anonymous, observed: "Basically, I want the intramural sports we have now without the crappiness." A keen suggestion to be sure, but how can this "crappiness" beavoided?

It seems the only option would be to move soccer and baseball/softball to new fields. The obvious problem arising from this idea is the cost of using an off-campus field to accomodate these sports.

Maybe the new tuition hikes have caused students to abandon all hopes of ever getting out of debt, but the vast majority of the students polled who wanted to see these sports were also willing to pay a little extra for a better experience. How much extra is yet to be determined, but the desire to play is there for many SPU students.

But changes to current sports are not the only thing students want to see. Many participants wish to see new sports added to the intramural fray. One such ingenious intramural addition brought to my attention was the elementary favorite: kickball.

Everyone polled after this suggestion agreed that kickball was the missing link in the SPU intramural evolutionary chain. This suggestion led to another suggestion that includes a rubber red ball: dodge ball, an intramural that Seattle University has already adopted and one which I featured in an article fall quarter.

It is too late to change any intramural sports this year. Spring quarter will still feature those neon-yellow soft balls and possession battles for the soccer ball against those padded pillars in the lower gym.

Yet there is hope for change.

If you would like to see current sports changed, or new ones added, contact the intramural department at hkellogg@spu.edu.