I began starting my Sports Mentorship on Monday May 2nd. I am working with the Athletic Director Peter Liddell of Cayuga Community College. What is great about working with Pete is the fact that he was once in my shoes, and he has explained to me how he got to where he is right now. For my mentorship I decided to work at a community college located in Auburn New York. Auburn is a very small town, but has plenty to do, and working at Cayuga Community College will make for a great experience for my future. I decided around this time last year what I really wanted to do with my life, and that was work with college athletics. I decided this would be a great fit for me, I enjoyed playing both basketball and softball while I was working towards my undergraduate degree at Cazenovia College where I studied Sports Management. Cayuga Community College is smack dab in the middle of Auburn, although this is a great location for a college, the college lacks a lot of land to expand. After talking to my mentor we worked out a time frame to work weekly unless things came up for either one of us. I will be working Monday-Thursday from 9 am to 3 pm.
As for working attire, there really are not dress codes and can wear jeans and polo if we want to. The Athletics Department is really laid back; although my mentor is extremely busy trying to bring in two new sports teams both softball and baseball. This is a very lengthy task, and extremely time consuming because he has to have meetings with numerous amounts of people. Also the Athletic Department just recently made a huge decision to get rid of women's lacrosse until enough women show interest in the sport. This decision was not easy but after I had talked to him about the situation he explained to me: "when you have to drop a program 3 out of 5 years, it just is not fair to the other colleges in the conference". It made me realize that adding and cutting programs is no easy decision but it may better the college.
For the past week I have been working on academic records for all the athletic teams from fall 2006 up until now. This has been quite a task and has been extremely time consuming. My supervisor wanted to me to get an idea of what he used to do but just has not had the time to continue working on the academic records since 2006. For each student I looked at their number of credits that semester, GPA that semester, quality points of that semester, as well as the overall credits, overall GPA, and overall quality points. No names were produced in the academic record files because this this is confidential and should be kept confidential.
There are a few reasons as to why looking at previous academic records is helpful to the athletic department, and one of those reasons is to see what the retention rate of athletes is or even the retention rate of the college. Although the numbers for returning athletes is shown in the document as low, we looked at the retention of athletes just returning to Cayuga Community College is rather high. Another reason why we looked at the academic records was to compare the GPA of athletes to the GPA of the rest of the college. Looking at the retention rate of Cayuga Community College is a great way to attract positional students especially with the number of colleges that are around Cayuga.
No comments:
Post a Comment