SU Spring Elections 2026 Interviews: Thomas Starr, VP Sports

In the run-up to the Warwick Students’ Union (SU) Spring Elections, The Boar offered all Full-Time Officer (FTO) candidates the opportunity to be interviewed.

Thomas Starr, who is running to be the next Vice-President for Sports, sat down with The Boar‘s News team to discuss his vision for the position, including improved coaching opportunities, continued communication with students over the Warwick Sport rebrand, and expanded promotion of Team Warwick clubs.

Why did you decide to run for this position?

Starr said that one of the reasons he ran for the position was because he is “quite passionate about broadening accessibility to sports”. He said that he has worked on broadening accessibility to target rifle through coaching, admitting that it is a sport that is “quite hard to get into”.

Target rifle is not the only sport Starr has competed in. He has also participated in “tennis and more traditional sports”, only looking for other alternatives after contracting long Covid in 2020. 

What’s your experience with sports at Warwick?

Starr has been an active member of Warwick’s Rifle Club, holding the positions of Welfare Officer and Smallbore Captain on the club’s executive committee. He has also attended social events and Rock Up and Play events outside of Target Rifle, but has not joined other clubs because “target rifle takes a lot of time for me to practice and stuff”.

Warwick Sport is currently undergoing a rebrand, with potential mission statements including ‘For the W’ and ‘Beyond is Where We Belong’. Do you think this Warwick Sport rebrand is an important step forward for student sport, and how will you continue to listen to the opinions of sports club members throughout the rebrand? 

“From what I’ve heard about people’s opinions on the rebrand, it’s been less than positive, but I will do my best to work with Warwick Sport to try and make it so that student voices are heard”, Starr said.

He also admitted that he hadn’t heard about the rebrand until recently, and so he said he would want to “improve awareness of such things”, which may not have been widely advertised to the student community. 

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

Starr said that one of the key points he would work to improve is coaching: “In most clubs, outside of the Performance ones […], those responsible for coaching beginners are typically experienced players, so what I want to do is provide [some] sort of coaching courses run by the SU, maybe working with the current coaches for the respective sports to make an interdisciplinary course that is opt-in to do that will basically teach experienced players on how to actually coach people.”

“I think that that’s really important to get people to know how to coach and bring people into their sports to lead for a better experience for new members and also reduce pressure on the potentially more technical players who don’t know how to teach or are concerned about, ‘Am I being too harsh on this fresher? Am I doing too much? Am I not doing enough?’”, he added.

An article by The Boar in December found that 60% of students are unaware of when sports clubs are playing fixtures on campus, leading to low crowd turnouts for sports fixtures. The One Warwick programme last year drew crowds of only 400 people over two terms. How will you ensure Team Warwick isn’t just something that sports club members feel part of, but that every Warwick student feels part of through being able to support their peers?

Starr began by saying that he’d like to promote sports clubs more on the Warwick Sport Instagram, through “weekly spotlights on different clubs” to highlight the “diversity” of sports on offer at Warwick.

He hopes that, in turn, this would increase the number of people attending matches and expand the crowd from being just those who are already in that sports club, but just in a different team, to the wider University population.

Starr also said that he would look to promote the clubs beyond the University, expanding the promotion to “the local area”. “I think that’s something which would improve numbers quite substantially”, he concluded.

This interview, along with all other interviews for Full-Time Officer positions, can be watched in full using the link here.

You can also view a list of all candidates and their manifestos here.