Skidmore College - Scope Magazine Fall 2018

SKID- MORE program is now tied in with an NCAA Division III and Special Olympics partnership designed to “enhance the lives of student-athletes and Special Olympics athletes through a mutual learning experience.” The Liberty League for the last three years has joined the Empire 8 in a SAAC-initiated “Change War,” a friendly competition in which student- athletes from each college collect spare change for Special Olympics. Not only did the Liberty League “win” the most recent competition, but Skidmore raised the most funds of all; its $833 was nearly a quarter of the total from both conferences. Skidmore participates each year in National Girls andWomen in Sports Day, with athletes and coaches leading clinics for elementary school girls. This past year, in partnership with the regional Girl Scouts, 120 participants learned from the women’s soccer, field hockey, volleyball, softball, tennis and rowing teams, while the swimming and diving teams took care of logistics. For Saratoga Bridges, a nonprofit serving people with developmental dis- abilities, LeilaWendler ’09 and Amanda Roth ’09 used a research-based social work course and got SAAC approval for a program that offers developmen- tally appropriate sports offerings throughout the school year. With all teams on board, it’s become part of the athletic department’s DNA. Posted outside the offices of many Skidmore coaches are thank-you cards featuring the happy faces of Saratoga Bridges attendees. Today a public-school counselor, Wendler says, “It’s simply amazing that what we hoped to achieve is still going strong. To take a project from the classroomandmake it real is really cool.” Varsity teams also lend a hand to Skidmore Cares, a campuswide pro- gram launched by President Philip Glotzbach and Marie Glotzbach to pro- vide cash, food and household supplies to local people in need during the winter holiday season. Athletes and other volunteers collect and deliver the donations—this past year to 10 local agencies including the Corinth School District, Latino Advocacy Program and Shelters of Saratoga. Recently SAAC supported the Adopt-a-Family program of Saratoga’s Franklin Community Center. Each varsity team is assigned one or two children, and this past year, 27 needy kids received presents from their own wish lists. Says women’s lacrosse coach and SAAC advisor Elizabeth Ghilardi, “Our student-athletes were 100 percent invested in the project. They put such great energy into it. And it gave them a real perspective about themselves and the community.” An All-American attacker on the 1988 Division I national-champion la- crosse team at Temple University and an honoree in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame, Skidmore’s athletics director, Gail Cummings-Danson, brings a winning attitude to the teams’ service ethic. She says, “We expect to be competitive and to succeed. We’re always in the hunt for league and NCAA qualifiers.” (Recent NCAA playoff teams include men’s and women’s basketball, field hockey, golf and men’s and women’s tennis, and the riding teamwon its eighth national championship.) But she empha- sizes that success is also about hard work in the classroom, representing Skidmore, giving back and advocating for positive social change through the power of sport. Coach Curt Speerschneider, whose 2016–17 women’s tennis team received the ITA Community Service Award for the northeast region, sees sports and giving back as a natural fit: “We’re trying to teach the students how to be selfless, to be the ultimate teamplayers. The true definition of leadership is making people around you better, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.” Says Cummings-Danson, “We used to mandate that all our teams do community service, but now it’s just understood by coaches and players, and they want to be part of it. It’s a shift in our collective thinking.” Last year Skidmore’s athletics community-service award went to Speer- schneider’s player Alexa Goldberg ’18. She helped lead the 2018 Show Your Sport campaign, “Change Direction,” an SAAC-led project with Skidmore’s Counseling Center that helped raise awareness and identify mental-health resources for all students. The first Show Your Sport campaign, which addressed homophobia, was spearheaded by volleyball player Clare Kenny ’15. She took a sociology class that included art activism, and she wondered why she didn’t know other queer athletes better and how that could be changed with art. Her idea was of athletes willing to commit to creating a welcoming environ- ment for their peers regardless of their position on or off the LGBTQ spec- trum. The visual: compelling portraits under the title “Show Your Sport.” Her first ally was teammate Aria Goodman ’15, now a graphic designer in Los Angeles. Goodman recalls that her participation was “empower- ing and showed me that I wanted to engage with the community to create positive change.” When Kenny and Goodman pitched the project to their teammates, Kenny admits, “We were nervous. We didn’t know what the impact would be on us or on our teammates, or how the campus would react. But they were immediately supportive.” The ultimate response from Thoroughbreds was off the charts. Good- man photographed 136 athletes wearing Skidmore uniforms and looking intimately into the camera, each image accompanied by a personal mes- sage. For Kenny, currently a youth director for GLAAD, the project was the “highlight of my life. It showed me what I was capable of as an advocate and a leader, and quite literally it got me my job, which I love.” The example set by Kenny and Goodman is still a point of pride for the athletics depart- ment. Says Cummings-Danson, “My goal is to have everyone cheering for Skidmore. It doesn’t matter who you are— for all of us, our school colors are green, yellow and white.” —Peter MacDonald At a Kids’ Night Out event, Thoroughbred basketball player Andrew Knight ’21 leads a game of dodgeball. Quincy Gregg ‘20, an ice-hockey player, joins “It’s On Us” to stop sexual misconduct. A T H L E T I C S + S E R V I C E