The York St John World Cup 2018: Tournament Review

If you follow us on twitter, the chances are you may have seen or even voted in our recent #YSJWorldCup which took place in January. 32 well known buildings, rooms or locations from across the York St John campus were pitted against each other in a series of polls, to establish which one was the ‘best’ of all. A total of exactly 2000 votes were cast over the duration of the campaign, spread across 23 different polls

Following the format of a traditional FIFA Football World Cup, we started with eight groups, each with four teams, with the top two teams from each group progressing to the second round.

It was especially nice to see every single one of our 32 entries receive at least one vote, showcasing perhaps that York St John is special to so many people for so many different reasons, everyone leaves with their own special memories and favorite places, spare a thought however for our Skell building, which received just two or three votes before exiting the competition. Largely however, there were no great surprises, as many of the places commonly referred to as firm favourites of Alumni, Staff and Students alike, all received good handfuls of votes and made it through to the second round. With the exception of course of our the Alumni Team’s very Heritage Room, which took a disappointing early exit.

The greatest ‘drama’ came from Group C, where the Foss building and the Peace Garden both ended up with 15% of the votes, facilitating a play off to see which went of the two would go through, where the Foss building progressed with 78% of the votes.

Well, 32 teams became 16, with eight second round matches following the group stages, and the winner from each making it through to the quarter-finals….

Again, as with the group stages there was very little in the way of big surprises, with most of our second round winners booking their quarter-final place by quite large margins, the closest contest came in the battle of the two lecture theatres, with Fountains claiming victory over De Grey with 60% of the votes. The largest victory of the round came courtesy of the Quad (an early contender for champion emerging perhaps?) despite the old chapel being firm favorite of alumni and students for many years, it only managed to attract 2% of the votes.

We now had our 8 quarter-finalists, facing off in an attempt to make the semi-finals, things were clearly starting to get interesting, with sections of the University starting to publicly come out in support of their respective buildings and facilities in an attempt to win as many votes as possible, a special mention here for Information Learning Services at York St John, whose attempts to galvanise support for the Library were not enough to prevent defeat at the hands of the Haxby Road Sports Site. Although they did take it fairly well.

With the quarter-finals complete, we were down to our final four, which resulted in a close run tie between the front of the Lord Mayor’s Walk main University building, and our slightly more recent Haxby Road Sports site, with the other semi-final resulting in a fairly comfortable victory for the Quad, and so we had our final two.

The Quad, built in 1846 has stood for more than 170 years and has been the home to York St John students for almost the entire history of our institution, when built the Quad WAS York St John, the top floor consisted of student dormitories, the ground floor made up of lecture and seminar rooms, as well as student common room and the refectory.

Haxby Road on the other hand represented a very different part of York St John, the 57-acre facility is about 20 minutes walk from the main campus, and includes a multi-use 3G pitch, tennis courts, an indoor sports hall, state of the art gym, as well as new conference and teaching space. It was completed in 2016 and officially opened by former international football referee , and honorary York St John Graduate, Howard Webb MBE in 2015.

Well, we were fairly sure which we thought would win, and having looked back through previous rounds The Quad had accumulated more votes in total on the way to final, but as is often the case (out there in the real world) previous form doesn’t mean everything, and in what was billed as a shock result (mainly by our Technology Enhanced Learning team at YSJ) the Haxby Road Sports Site claimed victory, and the title of YSJ World Cup Champion 2018! much to delight of our YSJ Active colleagues.

So, what next? well, we’ve already been asked to consider a world cup featuring a wide range of York St John buildings and locations, from across our 176 year history, which very well may be one for the future, perhaps you have suggestions of your own?.

At the very least, I think we can expect to see our #YSJWorldCup return in 2019. Thank you to everyone who voted, and retweeted during the World Cup, and congratulations again to YSJ Active and Haxby Road for being crowned our 2018 champions!