OUSA is allowing the Squash Club and its 86 Facebook group members to make $bank$ on something that all students pay for.
Since the only people that look at the OUSA budget are the Executive, Critic, and total nerds, it is likely that you don’t know that your student services fee goes towards maintaining buildings that the majority of you will never use; the Squash Courts are one of them.
The Squash Courts eat up thousands per year and counting. The cost for this year, $18,090, might just be a drop in OUSA’s bucket, but it is a roughly 38% increase from 2017’s $13,050.
For a comparison, in 2018 the budget for the OUSA Clubs and Societies building, which all students can access for free, was cut by $34,000.
The Squash Court costs would be justifiable if they were free for OUSA members to access, but they aren’t.
A google search for OUSA Squash Court bookings lists the Squash Club’s “UniSquash” website first, through which students can book a squash room for $6 an hour. The money goes directly to the club, not to OUSA. The website does not tell you this, nor that students have the option to book via OUSA, where the income goes to OUSA instead.
Even if you did want your money to go to the people who pay for the courts’ maintenance, the cost is higher at $10 an hour through OUSA. Meaning that OUSA actively goes out of its way to ensure that the Squash Club, not itself, gets income from the courts.
Alternatively, you could join the Squash Club and have unlimited access to the squash courts! For a very reasonable $80 yearly membership fee.
According to OUSA, the average yearly income it makes from the Courts is $500. That’s just 50 hours worth of squash playing, in total, for the whole year. And probably from people who would have opted to go through the Squash Club if they had known it was cheaper. Damn.
Look. The Squash Courts certainly aren’t the only questionable OUSA expense (*cough* $63,000 on an Aquatic Centre you probably haven’t heard of *cough*), but considering the costs that go into it, and then where the income from the Courts go, it does not strike me as a sustainable, or even useful, investment for our student union.
I’d say OUSA could offset this by making the Courts free for students a few days a week. But, then again, who the fuck plays squash?