Hi, my name is Miriam Amrani and I am running for the position of Sports officer because I love sport and I see this role as an opportunity to improve SOAS sport by developing student inclusivity. SOAS sport is a great place to meet new people and try new things so I want to get as many people involved doing what they enjoy!
I have experience in sport at SOAS being a player and being Women’s football co-captain. I also play for the netball and basketball teams. In these roles, I have learnt the way that sport is run and the core demands required of teams, players and captains. I have also seen some of the issues such as it being difficult to get involved later in the year, lack of information on teams as well as the large responsibility put on captains which can be a real challenge. I believe that the skills and information I have on these issues make me an ideal candidate.
Beyond this I want to get more of the student body involved in some form of physical activity and appeal to people who aren’t necessarily interested in organised or competitive sports too.
If elected I would aim to:
- Increase inclusivity and overall involvement in sports.
- One way I aim to do this is by having a student meetings to directly ask students what they want and how we can provide for them. Some examples of non-competitive sports have been suggested including yoga and Zumba classes.
- Another is to continuously make opportunities to get involved in sport clear to busy students, with emails and up-to-date information online.
- Have regular socials including regular dry socials and womxn’s socials doing different activities that can appeal to different people including trampolining, meals and bowling.
- Sport should be a place for everyone to feel part of the SOAS community and we should appeal more broadly to more students.
- In this area I would also like to increase the amount of charity work associated with sport. Last year sport helped raise money for Uniboob Breast Cancer awareness and I would be eager to get more of us involved in fundraising.
- Improve the structure of teams to more evenly spread the workload of team management from captains.
- Setting up full committees for each team will be an effective way of taking some of the pressure off captains who are also busy students (eg. President, Captain, Vice-Captain, Social Secretary).
- Have clear and concise communication with committees regularly.
- To keep everyone up to date on events including a captains’ meeting at least every term.
Thank you for reading my manifesto and feel free to get in contact with me to ask my any questions about my ideas by contacting me at 650175@soas.ac.uk. Also if you have any other ideas that I haven’t mentioned I am eager to get as many other students involved and included within SOAS sports so I’d be happy to sit down to discuss other ideas.