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Senior track & field athlete Billie-Jo Grant serves as the president of Virginia's SAAC and is one of UVa's representatives to the ACC SAAC. Grant took a few minutes to chat with theACC.com about SAAC's initiatives and her experiences. |
What is the overall goal of Virginia's SAAC?
The overall goal is to communicate the concerns of student-athletes to the administration and to promote relations between student-athletes and non-student-athletes on Grounds.
How is your SAAC set up?
We meet once a month. There are two representatives from each team, and we have an executive board with a president, vice-president, and a few secretaries. We meet as an exec board perhaps the Wednesday before the SAAC meeting to discuss the agenda. For larger initiatives, we form committees to create proposals for those specific concerns. Those might be, for instance, if a lot of people are interested in amending the student-athlete ticket policies for men's basketball games, we would get three or four people together who are willing to work on a proposal and go talk with the administration. Or they can work with myself, as the president of SAAC, or Phil Gates (our advisor) to figure out the best way to approach the problem. We also have a Social Night once a month for the members. That's meant to promote communication between members so that people are more active at the meetings.
What types of policy meetings does SAAC participate in?
We have two in-person meetings with the ACC SAAC and two conference calls each year. We also have a member participate in the Student Services meeting, which involves our Senior Woman Adminstrator (SWA), compliance director, academics advisor, and Life Skills director, so we'll sit in on that maybe once or twice a year. We also sit in on the Athletics Advisory Council, which is once a month and involves faculty around Grounds, our athletic director, and SWA. We'll listen to the issues that come from faculty and be able to report as a student-athlete.
Are there certain issues that your SAAC is currently focusing on? What past legislation do you feel you've really had a say in?
Stuff that we've been able to change this past year would be improving the relations between student-athletes and non-student athletes on Grounds. We created a program this year called "Adopt an Athlete," where a residence hall staff will adopt an athlete on their hall and will go to one of their games, and then the student-athlete can report back to their hall about how they're doing. (We do this because) student-athletes often don't have a lot of time to spend with their suite-mates or their residence hall. So we've promoted that. Parking has always been an issue. We've been trying to figure out for the past couple of years the best way for the University to provide parking for student-athletes during practice hours, which is allowed by the NCAA but we've been trying to figure out the best way to accommodate student-athletes and their need to be at practice at a certain time. Other than that, we've been working a lot with the dining hall requirements for full-scholarship student-athletes to try to expand the options that are available.
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Shootout for Cancer |
What types of community service activities does SAAC participate in?
We've been working on expanding our community service. We're hosting a canned food drive, which Virginia Tech challenged us to this past year. We're hosting it, but we're also having the Student-Athlete Mentors (SAMs) help us out at the event - they run most of the student-athlete community service initiatives.
With SAMs being the primary community service organization but SAAC starting to expand more into that, how much and what kind of collaboration has taken place between the organizations?
We have a requirement for each team to do a community service event once per semester. There's a member of each team on the SAM committee, and they help facilitate that or help create community service events that teams could participate in. SAAC and SAMs work together on a lot of events. For instance, the canned food drive is primarily put on by the SAAC but the volunteers for the event are from SAMs. We have an event - the Santa Fund - where we collect money from all the athletes and from community donations to help get toys for kids. Shootout for Cancer is an event that both organizations host in the spring. We gather our efforts to make sure the event runs smoothly; the SAMs might deal more with the participation factor, whereas the SAAC might work more with the administration or the marketing.
What types of programs does SAAC put on for the student-athletes?
This year, we've been working on changes to the student-athlete banquet. Typically, it's been a very traditional awards ceremony, so we're trying to make it a little more fun for the student-athletes. Each year, we host Game Night in the fall. We have a variety of stations, such as a shot put station or a station where you can try pitching a softball or another where you can try shooting with a lacrosse stick. This way the student-athletes can try other sports that they normally wouldn't have time to. It's a night just to have fun, try other sports, eat pizza, get t-shirts, and all that good stuff. In the spring, we usually have it in our budget to do another all student-athlete event. This past spring, we had a day out at the baseball games. There was a baseball doubleheader followed by a lacrosse game, so we went up there, had food out by the track, and watched the games.
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Game Night |
One of the other things we've done this year is put together a Grounds Organization list. It's a list of things on Grounds that student-athletes can participate in; whether it's Student Council, a cappella choir, etc., along with their information, meeting times, and contacts. We handed that out to all student-athletes so they're aware of not only student-athlete-run activities but also activities that are run on Grounds so they can be involved in our University. Our University has so much to offer, but often student-athletes are so isolated in athletics that they forget about all the other things that are available. I think that's been a good addition.
Can you talk about your experiences as an ACC SAAC representative?
I think it's really great to be able to communicate with other ACC SAAC members and to compare how their SAAC works as opposed to our's. We're able to compare and contrast, and bring those ideas back to our own campus. It's a great way to formulate ideas and really use the other reps as a resource in helping to make our SAAC the best that it can be.
How do you feel your time as president of Virginia's SAAC and as an ACC SAAC representative will help you after graduation?
I've definitely expanded my skills for creating proposals and also with communicating with higher-level administration and management effectively. I often put together proposals before going to talk with administration to show them exactly what changes we would like or what suggestions we would like to make for legislation. I'm going into education policy, so this experience will definitely give me the tools to communicate effectively with legislators and to plan effective strategies for change.
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Renovated women's track &
field locker room |
How did you personally get so involved with SAAC?
Personally, the track here at UVa was getting pretty old. We had an old locker room, too, and there were quite a few changes where I thought, "You know, hopefully we could make some changes here." So, I got into it as a personal effort to help with track, to get the locker room renovated - which has been done! - but I realized that I could also be a voice for not only track issues, but for many other teams and for the student-athlete welfare at UVa and student-athletes in general across the ACC. It's been great to be able to be a voice for student-athletes.
If there was something you'd like the public to know about Virginia's SAAC and/or student-athletes, what would it be?
I would want them to know that the administration at UVa definitely holds our opinion in high regard and has open ears to suggestions to anything we communicate to them about. Although I think SAAC is challenging because you're working with higher-level administration as a student-athlete who's very busy, I think it's a great opportunity to be able to voice concerns and work with somebody who's really listening to your opinions.
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