Swimming activities in the pool of the sports pavilion of the UMA. /
The University justifies its decision in the increase in student users of the facilities and the space needs for the new degree in Physical Activity Sciences
Users of sports activities offered until now by the University of Malaga in its pavilion on the Teatinos campus regret that the institution has decided to suspend this offer for non-university students from next year. The complaints have come from the groups that judo or Functional Training, some of the activities suppressed from the next course for non-university students.
Users learned of the UMA’s decision in person, when they went to the Sports service to renew their credentials, and through mobile messages.
Miguel Heredia, one of these users, explains that they have been doing Functional Training for about ten years, or ‘Functional Training’, one of the affected activities. “Suddenly they completely restrict access to them if you are not a member of the UMA,” he lamented.
Another user, after 15 years practicing sports at the UMA, says he feels sad to see how «loyalty is penalized, how the values of sport are lost, how they want to break that UMA family that has been generated year after year. During the pandemic we have been there when the university community was at home, we have kept the pavilion alive. Sports have done good for the elderly over all these years, and the youngest have been instilled with the values of respect, tolerance, teamwork,… and all this from the 2022/23 academic year there will be no more”. Belén Hernández, with her son practicing judo, also regretted that “from one day to the next” and through an SMS they found out that she will not be able to continue going to the facilities of the Teatinos campus.
In the catalog of activities for the 2022/23 academic year published on the UMA website, many of the activities ‘only for the university community’ appear and others expressly indicate ‘new registrations only for the university community’.
supply readjustment
The Vice-Rector for Students and Sports, José Francisco Murillo, explained that this is a “readjustment” of the “extensive” sports offer at the UMA, but that there are many other activities that remain open to non-university students, such as athletics, paddle tennis, swimming or futsal, among others.
According to the vice-rector, during the last two academic years a series of measures have been deployed with the purpose of increasing the participation of students in physical activity and sports: free sports card, lower prices, flat rate for those who wish to participate in more than one activity, free for students with the lowest levels of family income. “All this has allowed us to increase the number of students who use our sports facilities with some regularity, going from 200 student users to more than 2,000 in this time,” he says.
On the other hand, this next academic year the new degree in Physical Activity and Sports Sciences will begin to be taught, which requires “a significant increase in material resources and spaces dedicated to the development of this new degree”, clarifies Murillo Mas .
However, the vice-rector assures that the University of Malaga “remains committed to the social responsibility that it assumes as a public institution”, but that “it must prioritize the activity it carries out based on the meaning of its own existence, which is none other than that of the comprehensive education of its students. The university cannot assume the functions, related to physical activity and the health of citizens, that correspond to other institutions », he points out.
