With the end of the academic year quickly approaching, the Club Sports Council and professionals within club sports are planning the annual Club Sports Banquet.

Ben Strunk, assistant director of sports programs, said the reservation and food are paid for through the club sports program at Wellness and Recreation.

“The Club Sports Banquet is our end-of-year celebration for our 43 club sports,” Strunk said. “It is an opportunity for us to celebrate the accomplishments of the clubs and to recognize some of the award winners and graduating seniors.”

Strunk said that some awards presented at the banquet include Athlete of the Year, Club of the Year, Community Service Club of the Year and Club Event of the Year.

“Depending on the year, the room we are in determines how many members we limit each club to bring,” Strunk said. “We would love to invite everyone if we could.”

As it stands, clubs are required to send at least two club officers to the banquet, said Emerson Grubbs, a third-year studying business administration and president of the Club Sports Council.

“You get allocated a certain amount of money, and then at the end of the year if there is any other money that is not collected by clubs, or we receive any extra funds, we reallocate that money towards teams going to nationals, and you pick up the rest of that money at the banquet,” Grubbs said.

Grubbs said this reallocation of funds is what makes club attendance so important.

“In the beginning of every semester, the clubs receive all of the dates for the Leadership Development Series, due dates of budgets, all of the things that give you or don’t give you compliance points,” Grubbs said. “You want to have zero [compliance points]. You get a compliance point if you don’t turn something in on time, or there is an ethics violation, things like that.”

Strunk and Grubbs said that compliance points can be avoided by informing the council of any issues in meeting the attendance requirement beforehand.

“If a club lets us know ahead of time that… there are extenuating circumstances, that is not a problem,” Strunk said. “We have definitely had cases in the past where clubs haven’t come.”

The past year’s banquet didn’t see any significant absences, according to Grubbs, but even that wasn’t an overly significant problem.

“Last year only one club didn’t come, and the club that didn’t come wasn’t receiving reimbursements for nationals anyway,” Grubbs said. “It was a bummer that they didn’t come, but they didn’t lose any money…. They probably received a compliance point for the following year.”

Grubbs said that failure to attend the banquet could not just result in receiving a compliance point, but create problems in distribution of reimbursement checks as well.

“It is more of an awards ceremony, and where you can pick up your reimbursement check,” Grubbs said. “That is why it is so important that you attend, so you have someone to pick up that reimbursement check. If they don’t pick it up there, it can get lost in the translation, so to speak.”

The banquet will be occurring April 15 in the Coastal Ballroom in Talley Student Union, Strunk said over email.