Club sports provide both a competitive and social sporting experience to any Purdue student. Whether you are looking to continue to be part of a sport you love or looking for new experiences, there is a club for you at every skill level.

The Purdue University Baseball Club

The Purdue University Baseball Club is a student-run organization that participates in intercollegiate(大学间的)athletic competition. We provide students an opportunity to continue their baseball career at a collegiate level.

President: Jack Fitzhugh

Email: jfitzhu@purdue.edu

The Purdue Gymnastics Club

The Purdue Gymnastics Club is a group of normal everyday students who, like yourself, want to stay active while at school. We practice during evening hours four times a week during the fall and spring semesters. We own and operate equipment for four women’s and six men’s events.

President: Maya MeDonald

Email: medon127@purdue.edu

The Purdue Triathlon Club

The Purdue Triathlon Club’s mission is to get together multi—sport athletes who want to train in a social environment and promote interest and participation in triathlons(铁人三项), duathlons(铁人两项), running, swimming and cycling events on the Purdue University campus. We encourage and support members while training together. We travel to races in the spring and summer together and host two races during the school year. We end our year at the Collegiate Nationals in April.

President: Katalin Kovach

Email: kovach 10@ purdue.edu

The Purdue Men’s Club

The Purdue Men’s Club Volleyball allows Purdue undergraduate and graduate students to play volleyball at a competitive, intercollegiate level. Tryouts are held at the beginning of each semester and teams are divided based on skill level. Players come from all over the country, not just the Midwest. The first and second teams travel to tournaments across the Midwest and to the NCVF National tournament each spring. The club is an NCVF and MIVA recognized program and consistently finishes in the top competitive divisions of the region and nation.

President: Ben Bednarczyk

Email: bbednarc@ purdue.edu

It’s far from easy for people to run just one marathon. They usually need months of training to get into shape to last the 42.195-km distance. However, marathons are no problem for Australian runner Erchana Murray-Bartlett.

Murray-Bartlett ran 150 of them — every day for 150 days. The 32-year-old woman ran 6,329 kilometres from Queensland, at the top of Australia, to Melbourne, at the bottom. Her five-month coast-to-coast run set a new world record, the most consecutive (连续不断的) daily marathons. She smashed the earlier record of 106 marathons in 106 days.

As a professional runner, Murray-Bartlett missed out on getting the chance to take part in the Tokyo Olympics, so she set her sights on a record-establishing challenge. More importantly, by running across the country, she hoped to make people pay more attention to the fact that many kinds of animals and plants were dying out in Australia. Finally, her run raised $70,000 for the protection organization, the Wilderness Society. She said it was terribly hard five months, but she knew she could do it. She said, “Even though sometimes I was covered in sweat and flies, and everything ached, I thought, ‘No, I can go one more kilometre’ or,’ No, I can go 500 more metres’. Lots of tiny goals mean you can do it.”

Hangzhou Asian Games are defined as a great success. For 16 days over 12,000 athletes from 45 countries and regions across Asia competed over 480 events, broke 13 world records and shared unforgettable moments in Hangzhou. It is worth mentioning that in this 19th edition of Asian Games break-dancing and e-sports made their debuts as official medal sports.

In Asia, e-sport games are more popular than traditional sport, making it the leading region for e-sports and, within Asia, China is undoubtedly the region leader as well as the largest e-sports market in the world, accounting for “34% of global industry income in that category, Asia combined takes 53%”, says Niko Partners in their market research reported by MIT Technology Review.

Within China, e-sports are run like any popular sport and have been for a long time: there are regional clubs, each with its home stadium; competitions featuring different levels of talent make it possible for the industry to evaluate the players (and also for the players to make a living); and in recent years, star players have even been marketed like celebrities, attracting crazy fan groups.

For the first time in history, the Asian Games included e-sports as medal-earning event, with over 20 countries competing in seven e-sport games making it the “highest-stakes mobile game match that’s ever been played” according to MIT Technology Review: “Of all the competitions taking place, e-sports is the only one in which arena(竞技场) tickets were sold on a lottery(抽签) basis because of skyrocketing demand. There were over 5 million lottery buyers for all the e-sports events; each had a 0.5% chance of getting a ticket.”

The reason for such popularity has been identified in the drive of the major Chinese tech companies promoting the rise of mobile gaming in China and making the e-sports more accessible to people who don’t have computers or consoles(游戏机). The popularity of e-sports is particularly intense among young people, for this reason brands like Disney or Nintendo are recruiting companies like Tencent to make their mobile games.