The first ever Lancaster University World Cup took place in Week 1, Summer term. Organised by the Lancaster University Asian Society, the competition played host to several other cultural societies, including the Bulgarian Society, Chinese Student and Scholars Association, Arab Society and Indian Society.
The whole event consisted of an opening ceremony – which took place on Monday Week 1 – and a total of eight different sports competitions, including football, cricket, table-tennis, badminton, pool and dodgeball on Thursday Week 1 and basketball on Friday Week 1. Each participating society sent teams and athletes to compete in each tournament.
Omar Anwar, International Cross-Campus Officer of LUSU, told SCAN that they had hoped to “plan something which would break cultural barriers”, to bring different international societies together. “The overall aim is to get all the different cultural societies in Lancaster working collectively on one project,” Omar Anwar, LUSU’s International cross-campus officer, told SCAN. Anwar continued by saying that this event aimed to provide students with the experience of “the real Lancaster,” which he described as a culturally-diverse university, through an event consisting of sports tournaments and other cultural activities.
As one of the organizers, Anwar admitted that it took “a lot of time and effort”, especially since the Asian society executive committee only consists of four people. When asked about the preparations that went into organizing the Lancaster University World Cup, he detailed the most important job as “making a layout for the event”, that is, to plan the whole event from scratch. Anwar and the other organisers then liaised between different cultural societies in the university to find participating societies. Other activities involved in the organisation of the event were “booking the sports facilities, communicating with LUSU Activities staff”, working out the budget and “applying for funds” to finance the whole event. “Everything said, it took us a term and a half to organize the event,” Anwar told SCAN.
When asked about his thoughts on the overall success of the event, Anwar replied that with a high, “overwhelming” number of participants in the event, “we couldn’t have asked for a more supportive student body”, and thus rated the event as “a resounding success”. Anwar said that the high rate of involvement among students was what the organisers were “gunning for”.
Anwar told SCAN that he and his fellow organisers “plan on making the Lancaster University World Cup a tradition,” and would try to enlarge the scale of the event in the coming years.
