Illustration: Henk van Ruitenbeek
Merijn Moerland,
Chair of SWU Thymos ‘We really need the second sports hall and to pay for it we aren’t principally opposed to raising the price of the sports rights. Here in Wageningen we have the cheapest sports card in the Netherlands. It will still be cheap even if the price goes up. We’ll be getting considerably better sports facilities in return, so to us a price rise seems only logical.’
Stefanie Simon and Sharon van den Akker,
both MSc Management, Economics and Consumer Studies ‘Raising the price of the sports card doesn’t seem like a bad idea to us. It doesn’t cost much now, but it does give you access to lots of sports. We’ve previously studied in Utrecht and Nijmegen and the sports cards there were much more expensive, while you didn’t necessarily get any more for your money. We’d find any price up to a hundred euros acceptable. Hopefully it will mean we can take more courses; they currently fill up really quickly. And Stefanie plays volleyball for WaHo. She gets exactly 90 minutes a week to train, which includes time for setting things out and putting them away. That’s really tight. If the new sports hall meant WaHo got more space, we’d be happy.’
Ward Nijland, 1st year BSc Biology ‘No, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I always come here to work out and very occasionally I use the swimming pool, but I’m never in the sports hall. So I am not happy with the plans to hike up the price of the sports card. Personally, I’m pretty fanatical about sport, so I’ll be buying the sports card next year whatever happens. But since I won’t be using the new sports hall, but will have to pay extra for those facilities, I will be pretty annoyed if this arrangement is chosen any time soon.’
Karlijn Luiken 1st year BSc Plant Sciences ‘I wouldn’t have any problem with a rise in the price of the sports card, because after all we’d be getting a brand new sports centre in return. Hopefully with more favourable time slots so I don’t have bounce hockey matches that are still waiting to start at 11 p.m. But everything must stay affordable. If the price of the sports card suddenly shot up, I would certainly think twice about buying a new sports card. Perhaps it would then be smarter to go running outdoors on your own instead. In Wageningen the sports card is cheap compared to other cities. This mustn’t change because sporting activity provides a healthy distraction between periods of study. It would be a pity if students were to stop doing sport because the price of the sports card was too high.’ 
Sivan van Leerzem, MSc International Development Studies ‘I’m a member of Argo, so I have to buy a sports card. I also go to the gym now and then, so it’s not entirely for nothing, but really I see it as being a standard part of my Argo membership fee. I think many people buy a sports card for this reason: because they belong to a sports association and that makes the sports card mandatory. At the moment the sports card isn’t at all expensive. Once a year it makes a small dent of seventy euros in your study funds, that’s not a huge amount. I think an increase of twenty euros in the price isn’t bad at all; I don’t think it’ll mean the Bongerd sells fewer sports cards. For students it isn’t really worth kicking up a fuss about.’
Lavinia Plataroti,
MSc International Development Studies ‘At the moment courses in the Bongerd are overcrowded. They are all fully booked 30 minutes after registration starts. I don’t know if a new sports hall is going to solve that problem too, another course room seems like a much better idea to me. The sports card is currently very cheap, so I wouldn’t mind paying more for it. About ninety or a hundred euros seems reasonable to me, but only if the courses also benefit from it. If only the student sports associations benefit from a new sports hall, I’d say that the membership fees of the associations should be raised. The people who use the sports hall would then be paying for it themselves.’