Amherst College Student Athlete Advisory Committee

Amherst College Student-Athlete Advisory Committee Meeting
April 15, 2007

In attendance:  Alec Goldfield, Sabrina Dorman, Lauren Benson, Stephen Stewart, Drew Blacker, Kyle Schoppel, T. J. Jackson, Ilse van Meerbeck, Judd Olanoff, Steve Shashy, Kinne Schwartz, Patrick Benson, Daniel Gonzalez, Kate Dennett, Sarah Harper, Sarah Johnston, Catherine Calvert

Chris Paradis – Opening remarks

Dan Fisher (NESCAC) – talked about purpose of NESCAC SAAC
            ►Meets twice a year (fall and spring)
            ►Deal with sportsmanship issues between athletes, coaches, similar to our SAAC
            ►Schools exchange ideas on improvement

Lauren Benson – reported on February NESCAC SAAC meeting
            ►National Student-Athlete Day- Sportsmanship Day
            ►NCAA Post-Graduate Scholarships $7500 to continuing on in studies
►NCAA Legislation – room for change, covers all sorts of issues (ie- coaches getting certified in CPR)
►Developing Sportsmanship Award
►All NESCAC Sportsmanship Team (coming next year) – one athlete from each team
►Community Service – Habitat for Humanity was the big project
►Hopeful to have a community service committee within our SAAC next year
►Student-Athlete Day – April 6th, 2007
►Student-Athlete Day Award – coaches nominated student-athletes and a small committee will select after this meeting one senior from each season for the Student-Athlete Day award.

Chris Paradis – reviewing constitution and voting on final document

►Changes: Flip mission statements, adjust some wording, members from     indoor/outdoor track will stay in group until it makes sense to change to one rep from both teams, discussion of club status.

►Noah -  more people will not complicate things, but will actually help (more people for sub-committees)

►Discussion of “NCAA Sanctioned” and clubs, NCAA technically does not sanction club sports

►Debate on what to do about club sports as far as membership (limit access, throw open doors?)

►Everyone who is in SAAC votes no matter what

►A member from each club sport will be allowed (men’s and women’s) to have a vote - they will be invited but are not mandated to have members

►Sub-committees will have their own chairs – these chairs will look over their sub-committees, so vice president doesn’t have to do oversight

►Under Executive Board (B) - wording will be adjusted to state that officers can be any club or varsity athletes, but that the NESCAC Representatives (and therefore the president) must be varsity athletes.

►NESCAC reps can be members of executive board but do not have to be

E-mail vote for the entire executive board will take place
            ►Ilse van der Beck will oversee the voting process
►In the next 24 hours, an e-mail will go out inviting students to run for office and submit candidate statements
►A week from now, voting will take place for candidates along with final constitution ratification

Erik Nedeau – Website Update
            ►Waiting to be updated with final constitution
            ►Will go live ASAP
            ►Check out and give feedback

Sub-Committee Updates

Sports Board (Alec) – is up in Keefe
            ►Needs to be updated by spring sports
►Input: simplify, smaller updates and maybe have one person update whole thing, write out schedule once rather than reprint each week, games of the week list, maybe elect someone in the fall to oversee the whole thing

Leadership Conference (Dan Fisher)
            ►NCAA pays for trip to Boston
►One member is supposed to be from SAAC; although it is open to all student-athletes

Chris – final thanks to everyone, to advisors (Ned and Tom), as well as Alec, Lauren, and Noah, for all of their efforts.

Closing statements