Potential of the Student-Athlete and The Passion to Act
As a student-athlete, I love the culture of collegiate athletics. I have many goals of having a future working as a coach at the division I level and then working in administration at a university. To start my journey on my career, I had the opportunity to attend the NCAA Career in Sports Forum at the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a great opportunity to learn more about the organization that I represented in my four years as a student-athlete, also to find out more about different career, but most importantly making connections with other participants and speakers at the event. Attending this event gave me insight and knowledge about others journeys of how they made a career out of college sports. The passion and the drive of these individuals and the student-athletes that I met was so incredible it helped motivate me to write this article.
Sports have impacted my life immensely and I want to share my passion with whoever wants to listen. Nonetheless, there were many pieces of information that I learned during my days at the NCAA Headquarters, especially two keys that I learned about the NCAA that I didn’t know before:
- The NCAA is a regulator/ rule enforcing body. They have little say in what happens on campuses, unless an event or action by an NCAA sanctioned team or athletic department has been violated.
- The NCAA is made of member universities around the country in three divisions: DI, DII, and DIII. There are a total 1,099 colleges and universities that are NCAA members. All of the members in each division vote on different legislation each year to be enforced by the NCAA.
I also learned how the NCAA and the student-athlete are very closely related. While at the NCAA Career in Sports Forum a student-athlete used an analogy that was eye opening. He stated, “The
NCAA is a gold necklace, while the student-athlete is the gem in the center.”
Many do not realize that without the student-athlete, there would be no NCAA or collegiate athletics.
As explained above, the member institutions control the rules and regulations that are set in place and governed by the NCAA. These member consist Athletic Directors, Presidents of the universities, and a various other administrators. Well some may be thinking where does the student-athletes fit into this hierarchy? I’ll tell you.
“How do Student-Athletes fit into the NCAA?”
- The members give student-athletes a voice by granting to have a student-athlete run organization called the Student-Athlete Advisor Committee (SAAC). Each campus runs it differently, however there is more likely than not an administrator present at each meeting.
- There are different levels of SAAC: (1) Individual Campus SAAC, (2) Conference SAAC, and (3) National SAAC. These three different levels of SAAC representatives have more responsibilities of communicating to the NCAA about the needs of student-athletes.
These different opportunities are great opportunities for student-athletes to get involved and letting the administrators hear their voices. At some campuses, the SAAC reps are not likely to take it as serious as they should. These are the most important representatives because they are the base.
And yet, as I sat at the NCAA Forum, listening to the different panels and different speakers from the national office to campus around the country, I thought to myself, “Where is the voice of the most important people- the student-athlete?” At this event, I met and bonded with student-athletes from New York to California and everywhere in-between and we all had the same thought, where is our voice? Like many, we thought that we needed to go after the NCAA because that’s all we see in the media. However, after talking to many people at the Forum, they point us in the direction of the people we know best- our own athletic departments…. to start in our own back yard.
These keys showed me a vast potential of voice that a student-athlete has that I did not understand before I graduated. This new understanding of how the NCAA votes on legislation fuels my passion to speak out to help other student-athletes understand that their voice can be heard if they communicate with SAAC representatives and administrators in their athletic department.
I believe as student-athletes, we come to colleges and university solely focused on playing our sports and getting an education while keeping our heads down and following the directions that we’re are told. We do not realize that it is okay to ask questions, to voice opinions, or to challenge a policy of an athletic department. I believe in the potential of the student-athlete, and that we must find our passion to act on and off the court.
Written by Cassie Breen
Cassie Breen joined the Forward Progress Athletic Consulting team in May 2018. As an intern, her focus is in the Academics Consulting aspects of the company. Cassie graduated with honors from Central Michigan University in May 2018, where she will have competed as a basketball student-athlete for four years. Cassie’s undergraduate degree is in Sports Management and Psychology. She attended the 2018 NCAA Career in Sports Forum.
