By Jonathan Sawyer
Contributing Writer
Student-athletes are a part of a group to help bring the campus community together. The Student-Athlete Advisory Council (SAAC) is a student-run organization on campus and is the voice for student-athletes
“We do a lot of specific things to help the student athletes understand their position and how we represent our school.” vice president Brian Gresock said.
SAAC deals with different events on campus, such as the girl’s lacrosse team volunteering at basketball games and other events such as Toys for Tots that the baseball team does every year, or even a home-run derby the softball has put on in years past. SAAC’s objective is to get student-athletes more involved and also get the campus and the community involved as well.
Each team has a representative that goes to monthly meetings and discusses new events or provides information to student-athletes about different topics going around the Atlantic 10 or the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
“We try to get as many student athletes from other teams to come support a game,” Gresock said. “There has been a lot of participation throughout all sports on campus.”
SAAC also handles volunteer hours for all the teams. Each player is responsible for a certain amount of volunteer hours. Also, this year alone, SAAC is second in the A-10 in volunteer hours which is pretty impressive, seeing that St. Bonaventure is one of the smaller schools in the conference and has less teams. SAAC won the A-10 video competition last year and hope to win it again this year.
Gresock also stated that he welcomes anybody to come out and support SAAC, whether it’s donating to the Toys for Tots or volunteering his or her time, such as showing up to any events that SAAC is holding.
“We are trying to come up with a big event we have been working on for over a year now, to get not only more student athletes involved, but to get more of the campus involved and to show what we do,” Gresock said .
Not only does SAAC want to help benefit the student athletes, but it wants to continue to unify the school as well as to get as many people as possible out to their events and also support their fellow student athletes on the field or court.
There are no current events that they are holding, but their next meeting is Sunday, where they will plan upcoming events on campus for the spring semester. The best way to see any upcoming events is to follow their twitter page @StBona_SAAC, or students can look at the flyers posted around campus.
