Amherst College Student Athlete Advisory Committee

Below are the minutes from our September 23, 2007 Meeting

Amherst SAAC
1st Meeting of the Year
September 23, 2007

Lauren Benson calls the meeting into order

• sign in sheet passed around
• hoping to get everyone’s numbers

Introductions

• which teams we represent and which teams we participate on, as well as positions within SAAC

Accounting for club teams

• 9 clubs

Establishing goals

• floor opened to SAAC members to figure out what goals we might want to set and what we might want to accomplish
• Sarah Johnston: relationship between faculty/staff and athletes and looking at improving them; more support at athletic events
• Alec Goldfield: increasing awareness of actual athletic events going on (when, where, etc.) and getting people to the events
• Sarah Johnston: would like to improve interaction between teams (maybe a project of community service shared by teams); more involved as a group rather than by sport
• Jesse Tyma: wants more recognition for club sports (don’t want them to be pushed aside under varsity sports)

Establishing sub-committees

• we have the initial three: sportsmanship, publicity and community service
• Laura Stein: curious as to means of communications between student-athletes and faculty (academics)
• Judd Olanoff: important to give athletes more support in making negotiations with faculty (as far as missing classes for athletics, etc.)
• Suzanne Coffey: there is a committee that will be looking at and assessing athletes missing class time and creating a document to figure out the situation; some members of SAAC will be on this committee to represent the student-athlete voice
• Chris Paradis: maybe it would be necessary to create a “Community Relations” sub-committee in order to sustain a constant dialogue with the rest of the school
• Lauren Benson: this committee could possibly tie everything together and unify everything that we’re working for as the SAAC; we will add it

Easter Seals Walk

• Chris Paradis: opportunity to raise money for the Easter Seals; colleges can enter teams, lacrosse teams are possibly doing it; could be a great idea for the SAAC to participate
• Suzanne Coffey: trying to make this competitive by pitting ten colleges in the MA area against each other in order to get more college-aged kids involved; transportation will be provided and given shirts
• Chris: Each walker solidifies $100 so we could potentially raise $3000 just by us 30 participating

Other Community Service projects

• Lauren Benson discussed different possible community service opportunities that we can possibly get involved with; community service sub-committee will take a lot of the work on these and giving us information

Split Into Sub-Committees

• T.J. Jackson wants groups defined and goal oriented in order to take away from overlap and to help people figure out what the sub-committees are actually for
• Take the points of the purpose and decide which sub-committee they apply to (per Lauren Benson/consensus from group):
• 1. Community Relations
• 2. Publicity
• 3. Publicity
• 4. Community Relations & Sportsmanship
• 5. Community Service
• 6. Publicity

• Chris Paradis: we’re hoping to get people into sub-committees with the goal of having the first outside-of-SAAC meeting scheduled so that groups can start their projects
• Lauren Benson: sub-committees should take minutes so that they can be posted on the website and let the rest of the SAAC know what is going on and who’s doing what

Publicity Sub-Committee Notes

• Members: Drew Blacker, Steve Stewart, Sam Grausz, Lauren Benson, Jesse Tyma, Matt Hermann, Laura Mortimer (in absentia tonight), Erik Nedeau (faculty leader)
• Drew Blacker will head the group and organize
• Drew Blacker: wants to set exact goals down
• Recap of last year: set up a billboard in Keefe with areas for each sport to update as far as schedule, results, blurbs about individual performances
• Crashed and burned after first week: good idea, but people didn’t keep updating it
• if we’re each responsible for a team, then it will be easier than depending on a bunch of people
• we’re thinking of doing scheduling, results and highlights
• where to put the board: Keefe? Not so good, not too many people know it’s there…no good location. Val, everyone goes there every day and you get non-athletes
• RCs getting involved: there’s one in every dorm and bulletin boards in the dorms so we can contact RCs to put stuff on their boards to let people know about games and athletic activities
• Print up a page of stuff and each of us get assigned to a few dorms to post on the bulletin boards early in the week
• clubs should keep their schedules updated at the very least so we can keep people notified
• newsletter with what SAAC has done and plans to do

• A “Week in Athletics” on nicer paper so that people pick it up in Val or Keefe and put it in their dorms
• We can do this instead of the bulletin board: more portable, easier to take care of
• We have to develop a budget and then go to AAS in order to obtain what we need: print up about 1000
• We can gauge its success by how many of them are gone by the end of the day
• Possibly could highlight a team per week in order to get people

• SAAC Website
• Designed last year: contains membership, committee information, etc.
• Constitution, links to various things in school, community service projects (coming soon)
• Community service will have list of what SAAC is doing, what teams are doing, possible projects and events to attend, etc.
• still through the Cross Country website but we’re hoping to get the SAAC its own link
• it’s linked to by other places on the Net and schools with their own SAACs as well
• newsletter, minutes, basically anything the SAAC produces will be reproduced on the website as well

• flyers will be our first project; try to have one out the weekend after fall break (two weeks)
• get design figured out and beat down details

• our group will meet again 7PM upstairs in Val on September 27, Thursday

SAAC Website Update

• Erik Nedeau: website info - Constitution, membership list, etc.
• Asked members of SAAC to go there and update bio; copy and paste information and submit a picture (preferably from an athletic endeavor)
• Has useful links for student-athletes: NCAA, NESCAC, etc.
• Community Service projects will have a space on the site
• Detailed information on what teams are doing, what’s available to be done, etc.
• hoping to get a new domain and address for the SAAC website so that it’s a free-standing website                                                                                                    

Money and Budgeting

• Lauren Benson: we will attempt to get money through AAS (we will have to do it on a case-by-case basis this semester) and hopefully determine a real budget for the spring semester
• Committees need to develop a tentative budget for how much money will be needed and then executive committee will determine a total SAAC budget

Campus-wide Committees

• Lauren Benson: the SAAC will have representatives on a few committees within the campus (Alcohol Task Force, Committee on Education and Athletics, [we are also in talks with Campus Climate group])
• Erik Nedeau: there will be more openings to join more campus-wide committees as issues comes up and as committees are developed; we are hoping that our SAAC can have representation in all of these committees to get our group to have a voice and attempt to bridge the gap between athletics and academics
• Jesse Tyma would like to be representative for Alcohol Task Force
• Heather Wilson, Sarah Johnston, and Judd Olanoff expressed interest for Committee on Education and Athletics
• Sarah and Judd will be our representatives
• Lauren: representatives should give us small email on what happened and elaborate on the meetings they attended when we meet as the full SAAC later on if we have questions
• Chris Paradis: members of SAAC should be in touch with their teams and let them know what we’re doing in our meetings and get information from them to bring back here and vice versa

Meeting adjourned at 8:03PM