Students at Teddy Hall have been banned from participating in crew dates, following a series of embarrassing incidents.
Reports include stories of students stripping and stealing from different colleges whilst on dates with other sports teams.
Teddy Hall’s new sports representative, Marie Gorman, had emailed Stephen Blamey, the college dean, to request permission for a crew date to take place. In his response he told her that due to “sporting social excesses,” socials would be forbidden for all members of Teddy Hall sports teams.
Dr Blamey wrote in the email, “let me take this opportunity to warn you of a further pouring of cold water on sporting social excesses: ‘crew dates’ are to be banned, both in-coming and out-going…This is in response to the unruliness that such events so often give rise to,” The document was later circulated among students.
The captain of the college rugby club, Feargus Murphy, admitted that “our crew dates can get out of hand.”But he added, “banning them per se is not the right move. Sports teams going out for a curry together, onto a club – I can’t see a problem with that.”
One student at St Edmund’s said that the ban was mainly down to the behaviour of the college Rugby team at recent social eventst’s.
“At some point last year (our) rugby team got fined for stripping and trying to steal expensive crockery from St. Johns. Then last term the boys’ rowing team got kicked out of Trinity for doing pretty much the same thing,” she said.
An Ex-Captain of the St Edmund’s Hall rugby team said the dean was within his rights to put a stop to the socials, “the dean is obviously very against bringing the college into disrepute.”
He also admitted the team, including him, “behaved badly” at last year’s infamous St. John’s crew date after which they were fined.
The former sports representative for the college Caspar Le Fanu said that although crew dates had officially been banned, the idea of social events between sports teams was not over at Teddy Hall.
“Similar things will be going ahead under a different name, like ‘dinners’. They’re just not called crew dates,” he said, adding that the college authorities would find it hard to crack down on them.
The Ex-Captain of the rugby team agreed, saying: “You can’t stop them…there’s one this week.”
Dr Blamey declined to comment.
