The Student Athletic Advisory Committee (SAAC) has decided to implement volunteer programs through athletics. After all, who better to serve the community than the Fightin’ Quakers?
Except there are times when volunteering isn’t volunteering, like when it’s a condition of your allowance, your fraternity, or your parole. Even your high school had the courtesy to call them “community service hours.”
Even if SAAC’s requests aren’t mandatory, how much of a right do athletes have, or feel they have, to say no?
In the sweltering August heat, when your lungs are burning, your legs are lead weights, and that bruise on your forehead is starting to swell, you nod and get back to work with nothing more than a single word from your coach. Coming from the same person, how much less weight does a request to do community service bear when it’s merely very inconvenient?
Athletes are already donating countless hours to the college’s athletic department on top of being students. Are they really the best people on campus to press-gang into reading to fourth-graders on a Tuesday morning?
Included in the plan is a system where athletes get points for selected cultural activities on campus, part of an effort to make the athletes more involved in the community.
I’d rip logic behind this hollow gesture a new one, but there’s already an organization on campus created by the NCAA to shout down a patronizing, brownie-points based bother for the athletes. In theory, it’s supposed to be SAAC’s job.
According to the NCAA, SAAC’s were adopted NCAA-wide along with a national conference in 1989 to “generate a student voice within the NCAA structure.”
With an extra judicial process, departmental and team guidelines, the authority to drug test at will and access to the athlete’s for hours a day, the athletic department exercises considerable control over its athletes.
As the representatives of student athletes to the school, SAAC is supposed to be a shield between the athletes and the athletic department and administration, the closest thing they have to a union. They’re supposed to be the people who have the athlete’s backs when the school or the league goes too far, not generating loads of new work for them.
And while it is within their mandate to promote a positive image for the athletes, this plan is not a viable solution to the divide that exists between athletes and other students at every middle school, high school, and college in this country. Coercing athletes into sitting at the back of a seminar and signing a sheet, or volunteering by themselves, isn’t going to create the level of interaction that would foster a sense of community with the other students.
As long as we’re drafting people let’s use a random selective-service across campus for volunteer work. What better way to build fellowship than the athletes and non-athletes volunteering together? An athlete-exclusive volunteer program misses out on a great opportunity for the different elements on campus to bond.
This is Guilford, after all. Surely there are already dozens of underused programs or some club through Campus Life that keep urban youth from peddling arms to the Iranians or save kittens or something, and provide an experience that would bring Guilford’s “volunteers” together.