SU Summer Elections 2025 – VP Sports Interviews: Louis Gosling

As part of the Warwick Students’ Union (SU) Summer Elections, The Boar offered all candidates for the Vice President for Sports election an opportunity to answer questions outlining their manifesto, experiences, and aims for the role. 

Louis Gosling, the incumbent position holder and one of the six candidates contesting the position in the Summer Elections, discussed his manifesto and aims with The Boar’s News and Sport teams. In particular, Gosling spoke about continuing the work he has done as Vice President for Sports this year, as well as his aims for expanding student sport opportunities, inclusivity, and sports events on campus. 

What are your key manifesto pledges? 

• Keep empowering our students to be at the centre of our decision-making. A big focus this year has been on ensuring that we are a truly student-led pair of organisations which guide our actions. If re-elected I will grow this even further, by embedding the new Presidents Forum to provide unprecedented student insight into our strategy, and also by ensuring that students are at the centre of the upcoming kit tender to see if we want to replace Akuma.
• Continue fighting for our clubs and the issues that matter to them, such as continuing the £10,000 investment into storage spaces from this year, further reducing bureaucracy, and by ramping up the level of professional support we provide to our execs.
• Increase the opportunities available to students, better supporting them to run their own events such as Touchdown. I also want to grow Varsity significantly by including friendlies and a Friday night showcase fixture, and to bring back All-Stars.
• Support a more inclusive environment by reinvigorating the Sexism in Sport taskforce, building off the work done with women in-male dominated sports (WMD) before, and by running a regular panel series exploring how we can tackle our inequalities.

An investigation by The Boar earlier this year found that 91% of students find the cost of a Warwick Sports Pass too high. How do you plan to decrease the price of sport at Warwick and make it more accessible to students?

If re-elected as VP Sports, I will continue the ongoing work to ensure that sports remain as affordable as possible to our students, by continuing to lobby the key figures involved in setting the price of fees at Warwick.

This year, I’ve built fantastic relationships with key figures, from the Director of Sport right up to the Vice-Chancellor, and I strongly believe that I can leverage these relationships to benefit our student sporting populations.

In addition, I’d love to further my existing work to keep expanding the Sports Officer Bursary, which this year has reached the highest number of grants in its history, thus continuing to increase the accessibility of sports at Warwick.

How would you seek to support and improve sports clubs performance in both BUCS tournaments and non-BUCS competitions in the year ahead? 

Over the past couple of years, Team Warwick has seen the highest level of performance we have ever had. Improving on this will be an incredibly complex journey, and it won’t be quick, but there is still so much we can do. Research has shown that, albeit each sport differs slightly, the biggest impact on competitive performance is the quality of coaching that teams receive.

Our clubs are crying for support in this area, both financially but also when recruiting and managing professional coaches. By increasing the amount of support we can provide clubs with, we can free up our execs from having to deal with mindless HR issues and allow them to focus on growing and developing their clubs. Financially, we can help by repositioning the grant as a development one, and by guiding clubs through the financial challenges of employing coaches far better than we currently do – utilising alumni and sponsorship opportunities much more too, potentially through the addition of a central Team Warwick sponsor.

One conversation currently being had across campus is about transgender rights and inclusion policies. How would you ensure that trans students continue to be included in sports at Warwick, particularly in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling? And how do you plan to promote diversity and accessibility in sport more widely too?

My representative role as VP Sport means that I will always fight to make sure that sports at Warwick are as inclusive and accessible as possible. There are many ways in which transgender athletes will continue to be active at Warwick in inclusive environments, not least through our thriving mixed-gender sporting network. I will also continue to lobby for positive changes to NGB rules and national law to ensure that no one is prevented from living an active lifestyle through sport, following NUS guidance.

Elsewhere, I also want to further the work done this year with the WMD committee, and create a new Sexism in Sport taskforce structure, which allows us to actively combat sexism in all its forms, no matter where it exists. Further, I will also run a series of panel discussions on D&I inclusion, empowering student leadership to guide our direction in this space, with full support from staff teams to make change happen.

Sports clubs at Warwick have often been the focus of criticism and scrutiny for dangerous and non-inclusive socials, including circling and ‘initiations’ (adoptions). An investigation for the upcoming Boar print found that 40% of students felt pressured to take part in sports socials, and only 50% had to sign an agreement form before adoptions. How would you ensure that execs create a safe environment for their club members at these events? 

We will continue to stress the need for our clubs to create inclusive and comfortable environments for their members in all their activities, amid the ongoing review of our disciplinary structures. In our new Term 1 training weeks, I would want to run sessions encouraging all exec members to take responsibility for this within their clubs, and do an outreach programme to make sure all club members, including new ones, know what they should not be expected to do at socials.

Communication between the VP Sports and sports clubs and their members is key to ensuring an open and transparent dialogue. How do you plan on ensuring students have a sufficient way of voicing their opinions and problems with you?

This year, I strongly believe that communication between clubs and the VP Sport has been amongst the best it has ever been. The relationships are in such a better place than when I took over, and the benefits have been massive. If re-elected, I will continue all of the above work, in particular by carrying on the regular drop-in sessions that have allowed club execs to raise any and all issues they may have easily. I also want to start a new termly all-member update, to make sure that this communication is getting through to regular members, and not just the execs.

During the Spring Elections, the sole candidate for the VP Sports position was criticised for having a so-called ‘joke candidacy’. What can you say to the Warwick student community to show your candidacy isn’t a ‘joke’ one, and that you have what it takes to become the next VP Sports? 

If anyone seriously questions my commitment or love for sport, and in particular student sport at Warwick, they would be the first to do so. I love Team Warwick with all my heart, and sports have played such a massive role in my time here. It has been an honour to be VP Sports this year, and I’m so excited by what there is still left to achieve.

You can read Gosling​’s manifesto here. Voting in the SU Summer Elections opened on Monday 26 May, and will remain open until 12pm midday on Friday 30 May, with results published shortly after.