UMF’s Graceful Recovery from the Pandemic: How are the Clubs Doing Now?
Photo of WUMF (91.5 FM) radio station taken by Adam Hendrix.
September 19, 2023
Adam Hendrix, Contributing Writer
Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic put a heavy damper on the clubs at the University of Maine at Farmington, the campus has shown its resilience,with clubs bouncing back from their sorry state of affairs.
During the pandemic, many clubs at UMF struggled to keep their doors open, let alone do anything for the rest of the campus. Now many of these remaining clubs are gathering their strength once again. Though not every club at UMF survived the pandemic, many of those who have are quickly growing in number after coming face to face with sheer obliteration only a few years ago. With each passing year, UMF’s clubs come ever closer to bringing back the liveliness that they once brought to the campus.
"We have a lot of clubs that [had] their membership drop during the pandemic, of course, but they stuck through, their e-board stuck through, their members stuck through," Student Senate and WUMF member, Conner Malone said.
Not every club’s journey through the pandemic was the same; some clubs, like womens’ rugby and mens’ rugby, were able to just barely remain operational until the beginning of the 2022–2023 school year, where they were able to recuperate and regain their numbers, but many other clubs weren’t as fortunate. Some clubs like WUMF needed to completely dissolve and go inactive for a time, meaning they had been gone for one year, so they retained the ability to reorganize and revive their own club. Other clubs, like the Nightmare Club and Bust a Move Beavers, had completely gone defunct, or became dissolved for two years, losing any interest in those clubs, meaning that reinstating the club retains the same process as creating a completely new club. In spite of this, a club becoming inactive or even defunct doesn’t completely spell the end of a club; even now, the currently defunct Multicultural Club and the currently inactive Aspiring Educators are both working on reinstating themselves among UMF’s current roster of clubs. Despite it all, some clubs are still struggling to stay afloat, even now, to the point where it may be impossible to drum up enough interest if the club were to dissolve, much like the many that have become defunct before the pandemic. All in all, the clubs at UMF have had a quite graceful recovery from the pandemic, as many beloved clubs on the campus have been able to return from a point of near or total shutdown.
"I think it’s rewarding to see incoming freshmen, now that we have the ability to do more than we could in the last few years. It’s great to finally get back to normal," Malone said.
