Amherst College Student Athlete Advisory Committee

Below are the minutes from our December 2, 2007 Meeting in the Red Rooom

SAAC Meeting 12/2/07 Minutes

• Sign in
• Meeting started at 7:07 PM
• Update on status with AAS
• We are an official club with AAS
• We can get funds from AAS
• JC didn’t let us become a club before budgets were due
• We have no budget so we have to go through discretionary next semester
• What would we hypothetically need money for?
• Events
• Food
• Committee stuff
• Reports by Each Sub-Committee
• Community Service
• Want to get going for next semester on a Habitat for Humanity project
• All Amherst sports teams to build one house
• Kyle talked to Ricardo, the coordinator
• Fall and winter teams each would have a weekend this spring—one day per weekend only
• Ideally 10 people at a time
• Needs info from a leader from each team for their particular week
• We would each be leaders for our own teams
• It’s already set up for us
• Everyone agrees it would be a good thing to do, no one opposes
• Kyle will get a tentative schedule set up with Ricardo
• Correlation between number of weekends in the semester and number of teams?
• Between 12 and 14 weeks would be available to do work
• Can combine smaller teams with bigger teams to fill roster (ex. Men’s football with men’s/women’s golf)
• Want to get athletes involved with tutoring program
• Through Karen Lee in CCE
• Currently hiring for athletics liaison student position in CCE
• It’s a two year commitment
• Want this person to sit in on Community Service sub-committee
• Want to encourage athletes in community service
• CCE will help us to determine what project will work best for each team
• Office hours in the CCE starting in Jan/Feb
• Long term projects/one day/what are we looking at?
• Depends on what each team wants to do
• Kyle read in paper that there’s a huge shortage in the food bank in MA
• Can we do something as a group?
• Maybe at men’s and women’s basketball games this weekend
• Maybe later in January over Interterm
• Would be nice if every one of us spoke to our own teams about going out into the community and knocking on doors for food drive
• Community Relations
• Solidified the role of team liaison
• There should be at least one meal with faculty liaison per semester
• Team liaison should attend at least one practice, possibly participate, should participate as many games as possible, minimum of one
• Team liaison should know every team member
• Team liaison should advocate for members of the team with academic conflicts
• Team liaison should have office hours for teams
• Team liaison should be familiar with future plans of team members
• Liaisons should be familiar with these guidelines
• Red flag: using the word “advocate” on behalf of the students—it suggests that the professor would need to choose sides, putting them in an uncomfortable position
• There’s already a 2-3 page document that the faculty liaisons already have, according to athletic director
• Class conflicts with athletic events
• Austin Sarat has been doing work on bridging the divide between athletic and academic communities
• As a whole, teams could go to lectures, participate in intellectual events
• Could be framed in a competitive way, athletes may be more likely to respond
• Setting up the class/academic schedule of the college to avoid athletic conflict
• Setting only one mid-week day for athletic events
• Having Monday be a dark day
• Publicity
• Getting fliers out on Thursdays saying who has events in the next week
• Brought up idea of getting multiple tickers in Keefe/Val
• Lord Jeff—is there someone who is set to be him? He is a good symbol of good spirit, we should have more non-athletic events with him
• We should assign someone to be Lord Jeff
• Is there any possibility of hiring someone to be Lord Jeff with a set schedule? Do we have funds for this?
• The Lord Jeff costume is great when brought out on a day-to-day basis
• If it’s going to be the symbol of the school, we should bring it out more than a few times a year
• We should brainstorm ideas of how to bring him out more
• It may be hard to find someone to commit to the job for an entire year
• Maybe only one semester, required to show up to a set number of games per sport, has pep rally requirements, could write articles in The Student
• Would be important to have a couple of understudies
• Would it necessarily have to be a student?
• Perhaps there are interested faculty members
• We could have tryouts and an election for the position
• Question about mailbox stuffing—should this be done as well?
• Nobody reads them, it’s a huge waste money- and paper-wise
• Some teams send out facebook invitations for events
• Could we do this for all athletic events?
• Club sports need to have schedules online or need to e-mail them to sub-committee
• Sportsmanship
• Trying to get banners at all the home sports venues
• Mentioning SAAC and positive sportsmanship
• Funding is a question—we should do it through AAS
• Getting together a checklist to encourage sportsmanship by sending letters home to parents, fans, etc.
• T-shirt contest
• Two submissions for today
• Trying to get discretionary funds from AAS for t-shirts so that we can give them away for free
• If they were free we could encourage attendance at events by advertising them
• NESCAC SAAC October meeting recap
• Alec and Lauren went, at Tufts
• There are NCAA post-grad scholarships available
• Can get more information on NCAA website
• Sub-committees
• Sportsmanship
• Pairing teams to increase attendance with “buddy teams,” they have this at Williams
• Winter sports teams should be paired together in theory since the meat of their seasons occur over interterm
• A lot of club sports travel a good distance to play their sports, no home games, how would this work?
• Publicity
• Bates has an athlete of the month
• We could do this in The Student, a poster in Keefe/Val
• Community Service
• Bowdoin has an Adopt a family at Christmas program
• Each team adopts their own family
• Williams has a Sunday skate program
• Community Relations
• At Bates they are able to get excused absences through the Dean’s office
• At Hamilton they have a dinner at the end of each season for the people with the highest GPA from each sport and professors of their choice
• Alumni connection program at Wesleyan
• Decided as a NESCAC SAAC to do one big program this year
• Change Drive
• Second Semester
• School gets designated a one month period to raise as much change as possible
• It’ll be a contest between all the NESCAC schools
• Proceeds will go to Jimmy Fund
• Legislation stuff
• NESCAC All-Sportsmanship Team
• Each season they select one member from each team from each school
• Good grades, attitudes, sportsmanship, etc
• Posted on the NESCAC website
• National Girls and Women in Sport Day: February 8, 2007 (Friday)
• Will try to get young girls from the community to come to the gym
• We’ll introduce them to different sports
• Food will be available
• Help from each SAAC member
• Each sub-committee will have different supporting projects
• Representative from each sub-committee
• Paired with a women’s basketball game the same night
• NCAA Scholarships
• Already mentioned under NESCAC SAAC
• Potential project: “Buddy” teams
• Do people think that this is something that we could do/want to do?
• It’s a great idea, easy to implement
• Men’s lacrosse went to women’s basketball game, it was much appreciated
• Encourages positive cheering because of a sense of accountability
• Beyond supporting one another buddy teams could support another campus activity (ex. Orchestra) and it could go both ways
• Athletes already support athletes, we should support other activities
• It’s going to be lopsided based on size and personality of teams
• Could possibly attend practices instead
• Would have to be in opposite seasons
• There ought to be SAAC-wide accountability
• It might be a good idea to pair opposite-sex teams
• It would be great if every team picked one event a year that they advertised to the entire campus, offer food (ex. Barbecue) to increase attendance
• Could get funding through BC
• Every team would need to be committed to the team that they are paired with
• We would ask one committee, probably sportsmanship, to organize it and figure out pairings
• Open floor for new business
• Why are the back doors to the gym locked?
• More than half the campus comes from that side of campus
• Athletic director will get a real answer to this question
• Is there a reason to why the stairs going down to the hockey rink aren’t lit?
• They are wood, very dangerous, especially this time of the year
• Is there any way that we could look into getting a game cast online so that people could watch games online?
• Would benefit parents, those students who couldn’t make it to the game, and alumni
• Like Jumbo Cast from Tufts
• Tufts has had a club for about 10 years, guy who started it has started his own company now, D3 Cast
• We’re acquiring the equipment to make this possible over the next year
• We have to find enough people on campus to work equipment, a media club
• There are outside companies that could do this for us, servicing D3 athletics
• Could we do a “take your trainer out” program like TYPO?
• Maybe we could budget for this through the AAS
• TYPO could be easily expanded to include all faculty and staff members of the college
• The track team wants an indoor track…
• They’re not the only ones
• Issues with the training staff?
• There have been negative comments heard in the past
• They give next to no support to Ultimate (and club sports in general)
• Teams that aren’t specifically given a trainer don’t have any continuity in their treatment
• Can we do anything to foster the relationship between athletes and trainers?
• Are their options for club sports members that we don’t already know about?
• The training office is understaffed
• 5 full-time trainers, 520 varsity athletes, not to mention club athletes
• Could ACEMS be involved with training staff?
• Student government is supportive of it
• Would be a great way to alleviate some of the stresses on the training staff
• Issues of certification, emergency medicine vs. sports medicine
• Brief sub-committee meetings
• Not going to meet tonight because we’re running short on time
• Should meet before the end of the semester
• Send nominations for planning committee to Lauren by the end of this week
• Choose winner of t-shirt contest
• Only two nominees
• Should we push this off a week to get more nominees?
• Yes, going to do more advertisements
• We want to get the t-shirts out by the time we get back from winter break
• Our next meeting is February 10
• Discussion about Mike Pressler talk
• Will put this on next meeting’s agenda because of time restraints
• End of meeting: 8:38 PM