ALL is not well with the state of the sports facilities at the Wellington cam-pus of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
The hockey, rugby, soccer and athletics fields are more like 4x4 tracks than manicured sports fields of an educational institution.
The grass remains uncut for weeks on end, rubbish is not removed, and even building rubble is scattered in certain areas.
Both students and staff of CPUT are up in arms at the state of the facilities, and various reques-ts to the powers that be at CPUT’s head office in Cape Town have fallen on deaf ears.
Not only are the sports fields in a state of disrepair due to no maintenance, but the clubhouse adjacent to the cri-cket field is being used for storage and the student centre is falling apart.
A few months ago, thousands of rands were spent on a new hockey field, but sin-ce its establishment no maintenance has been done and the field is standing unused like a white elephant.
Almost a million rands worth of gym equipment is being kept under a gazebo where it is exposed to the elements, which is sure to shorten their life span.
Some gym equipment has also been stored in in the cloakrooms of the rugby pavilion, were students battle to use them.
Due to the state of the sports facilities, the university is losing talented sports stars to other clubs.
And according to academics who do not wish to be named due to fear of victimisation, this is also leading to the demi-se of a sports culture amongst the students.
The deterioration of the facilities is being blamed on the shortsighted decision of CPUT’s head office management, who terminated the contracts of the maintenance staff.
The university has now been advised to make use of contract workers to tend to the grounds, but ca-sual labour is exceptionally difficult to get hold of, especially at this time of the year due to the harvest season.
Now, to try and keep some form of sporting activity alive on the campus, organisers are for-ced to hire sports fields, even as far as Paarl, to accommodate their students. This then puts the university between R1000 and R5000 out of pocket.
Academics agree that it is of utmost importance that CPUT, being an educational facility which specialises in training teachers, must have adequate sports facilities, as this goes hand in hand with education.
A spokesperson for CPUT in Cape Town said that they were aware of the problems and were in the process of appointing a gardening service to assist with the maintenance of the sports fields.
