Our bungling SU’s Varsity vid overlooks everything our women achieved

For the fourth year running UoN has trashed Trent in the Varsity Series, and the University of Nottingham Students’ Union has put together this glorious compilation video of sporting highlights.

If you can’t be bothered to watch it, you’ve missed 2 minutes and 22 seconds of men’s teams excelling on the sports field whilst pretty girls cheer them on.

There is also a 2 second shot of netball.

If ladies teams weren’t shunned enough by the warm-up status to the men’s events, they have been completely overlooked in the victory celebrations, despite the UoN ladies achieving massive wins like the 100-36 in Basketball, 11-2 in Futsal and 24-12 in Rugby Union.

Female contribution to the varsity series has been limited to a few seconds of cheerleading, netball and applause, whereas the men’s teams have been paraded in their full athletic glory.

One angry basketball player said: “I think this shows women in their proper place, you know smiling on the side lines. If anything there should be more footage of girls waving pom poms – otherwise people might think we actually play sport!”

The Women’s Basketball team: BUCS champions, league winners and they absolutely thrashed Trent

For an SU that is usually seen heavily promoting equal opportunities in sport, through campaigns such as This Girl Can, it’s quite shocking that it should choose to all but exclude female participation in what was described as “THE biggest sporting event of the year”, by AU officer Kiri Madhani.

The women’s rugby team called the video “disappointing”, noting: “with 4 straight wins, surely Women’s rugby is one of the most consistently successful teams in varsity, yet why didn’t it make the cut?”

One team member noted that the celebratory video includes a clip of the men’s game, despite them not actually winning against Trent.

The rugby ladies actually won their game…

Ronnie Rendra has competed in both football and futsal varsity events, and says that women’s teams “work as hard, and are as skilled as the boys but it’s just not equal”.

She added: “The SU are usually brilliant at promoting both male and female sport, but that the varsity coverage has been de-motivating, as the support for women’s teams just wasn’t there like it was for male events.”

Creator of the video, Leo Lightfoot, said: “The video itself was very limited as to what I was able to fit inside a 2-3 minute boundary.

“It was a very difficult task of picking just two or three shots from each sport.”

And yet, the vast majority of these shots included men, not women.

Women’s teams are just as successful and talented as the men’s teams, and the SU’s latest video has shown that there is still a massive depreciation for female sport.