KronBars covers more than 50 sports, including rather exotic ones, such as fencing, ultimate frisbee, and esports. Last year, the club also launched the project Kronbars.Online that gave ITMO students an opportunity to pass their PE exams by playing chess, sports poker, and Dota 2, as well as doing yoga, CrossFit, and other physical activities at home.

In June, the sports club won 15 million rubles (about $207,000) in the contest run by the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education for the best organization of sports activities among higher education institutions. 

Price of winning

The National Student Sports Forum held a competition for the title of the best student sports club on October 7-10 in Rostov-on-Don. More than 200 clubs competed for the prize fund of one million rubles.

The competition included two stages: first, students submitted applications listing their achievements and events. Based on this, the jury formed a preliminary club ranking. This year, the KronBars club placed second in this stage. Next, the top five clubs presented a report of their best cases in 2021 and defended it before the jury.

“It was hard to sleep four hours a day and then not sleep at all before taking off. My hard drive stopped working twice and our corporate laptop shut down when we decided to make edits to the presentation. Dmitry found another laptop, but it had no mouse, so we had to do everything using a touchpad. It also had no flash drive reader and the internet connection at our hotel was very poor so it took us one and a half hours to download the layouts. But we still managed to create the presentation,” says Angelina Shulyakovskaya.

Angelina and Dmitry have different ideas on how to win: the digital manager says that to be the best, you need to be yourself and enjoy what you’re doing, while the sports marketer highlighted the importance of understanding the club’s audience and responsibly creating interesting and useful projects for it.

“We don’t see any obstacles to make good quality products. Many clubs say that they don’t have enough money but most projects we discuss aren’t about funding, they’re about aspiration and skills,” says Dmitry Rusanov.

Being the best

There were three stages in the categories Best Student Sports Marketer and Best Media Manager of a Student Sports Community: a task to complete remotely, self-presentation, debates, and solving a case.

“It took me only 15 minutes to solve the case. I came up with a partner and a project, in the framework of which they would be able to present themselves at a certain brand’s platform. I called the owner of this brand, shared my idea, and they said “Great, let’s do it!” That’s when I realized that I won,” says Dmitry Rusanov.

Winning in individual categories helped the club take a fresh look at their activities and recognize the level of their proficiency.

“The offline stage is always fun and stressful. I had little time to prepare and it’s been a while since I last participated in debates. It’s nice to be the best but not winning is also nice, because you have something to aspire to and people to look up to,” says Angelina Shulyakovskaya.