Part-time students and non-students will now have a tougher time playing intramurals, if they are allowed at all, due to a crackdown on checking the status of each player.

Starting this intramural season, intramural supervisors will be swiping the Polar Express cards of each player in an intramural competition.

"People have been misusing the program and not paying for it," said Ruth Olsen, the director of intramurals and the SRC.

The rules for intramurals state players must have a "valid UAF I.D. card (with a current SRC privilege) or a picture I.D. and paid fee statement for the semester with them to enter the complex for intramural activities."

Eligible players are students, staff, and faculty of UAF, and their significant other, so long as he or she has SRC access.

Current SRC privileges are given to full-time students taking nine or more credits since they are automatically charged the student life fee.Part-time students can pay the $125 fee, but it is not automatically charged to them.Previously, although this rule was in place, there was no system to actually check the eligibility of each player.

Many players either ignored the rule or weren't informed by their captains, who may have not known the status of each player on the team.

Olsen said that she realized that the system needed to be changed when a student tried to come in at 9:45 p.m., before the SRC closed, to play a soccer game later in the evening.The student was unaware that he needed to have paid the SRC fee.

Adam Wiatros, a junior on exchange from the University of Minnesota, was a teammate of the student and said that nobody had any idea about the rule.

"The officials at the game said that this was the first they had heard of the rule as well, and it hadn't been implemented for any games until ours," he said via e-mail.

Olsen said that she gave the student, and another on the same team, the chance to pay the fee by the next day and bring their statement to her so they could continue to play.

It was the season tournament with at most three games left, Wiatros said.

"Both students thought it was pointless to pay $125 to play three games of soccer," he said. "The rest of the team agreed, and we forfeited."

This season Olsen has implemented a system to catch the breaks in the system.Before each game, the supervisor will collect all players' cards and will swipe them at the SRC before the game to ensure that all players are eligible.

Unfortunately, sometimes the cards are not swiped until the game has already begun, which forces teams to forfeit if ineligible players have already played.Olsen said that if the ineligible player hasn't played yet, the teams will be allowed to continue playing.

Daylen Evanger, the intramural supervisor for broomball, said that while it is somewhat of a hassle, most students have already gotten used to it.

"You can tell that they don't like it any more than we do," he said. "[Ruth] realized how much the system was being taken advantage of." Evanger understands the reasoning behind it.If an ineligible player is allowed to play and gets injures or injures someone else, the SRC could be held liable for that.

"I understand it, but this could have been solved so many other ways," he said.

Evanger thinks player eligibility should be a one-time deal and should be determined before the season starts.Although it makes sense that if a person is eligible in their first game, they would be eligible in each game thereafter, but he said that they have to swipe at each game in case a person's SRC privileges have been revoked, or if the person has been trespassed from the facility.

He said that to his knowledge, at least two broomball teams have lost key players, one lost half of its players, and a couple soccer teams have forfeited out of the league.

Wiatros said that although he was upset with the initial enforcement of the rule at the end of a season in which players had been allowed to play, he is not upset now that the SRC is enforcing the rule across the board.

"I don't agree or disagree one way or the other with the rule itself," he said. "My main concern is with fair application of the rules."