By Eric McDowell, CoSIDA President/Assistant Athletics Director, Union College (N.Y.)
It has been an annual tradition, and a productive one at that. Each summer, CoSIDA sends a contingent of Officers and Staff to the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis. These three busy days are packed with meetings and discussions with a wide variety of NCAA directors and staff members to help the CoSIDA leadership better serve you for the upcoming year.
This year, I had the pleasure of being joined by First Vice President Judy Willson (Mountain West Conference), Second Vice President Andy Seeley (Central Florida), Third Vice President Rob Carolla (Big 12 Conference), Secretary Jeff Hodges (North Alabama), and our staff, Executive Director Doug Vance, Director of External Affairs Barb Kowal and Director of Internal Operations/Treasurer Will Roleson.
Earlier Monday I met with various NCAA staff members in charge of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committees. In our upcoming update piece on SAAC, we will discuss their initiatives and ideas, and we thanked them for providing students to our 2014 convention. Thanks to Peyton Williams, Assistant Director of Academic and Membership Affairs, for arranging this session.
We arrived Monday afternoon and our focus from 5-10 p.m. was all about the upcoming NACDA contract extension opportunity. We came away with a variety of thoughts and requests and I truly appreciate the input of our membership, as we had over 800 responses to the survey. Your thoughts and suggestions were imperative and after a full board call later in the week, we came away with a variety of requests to enhance the NACDA Convention for our CoSIDA members. Our staff is in Cleveland this week (Wednesday and Thursday, July 30-31) to meet with NACDA leadership to provide our desires and to discuss the future.
Here are the individuals we met with throughout the day in Indianapolis:
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Terri Steeb Gronau (NCAA Div. II Vice President)
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Academic and Membership Affairs Staff
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Eric Christianson (Managing Director of External Affairs)
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Media Services and Statistics, Champions and Alliance Staff
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Dan Dutcher (NCAA Div. III Vice President) & Louise McCleary (NCAA Div. III Director)
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Chuck Wynne (Director, Employee and Community Initiatives) & Monica Miller (Associate Director of NCAA President and Former Student-Athlete Outreach)
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Brian Hendrickson (Director of Membership Communication) & Staff
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Dana Thomas (NCAA Director of Web Communications) & Staff
We were joined at dinner Tuesday with Eric and also Nafeesa Connolly, an intern at the NCAA and a former National Division III SAAC leader from Simmons. Nafeesa was one of the first four student-athletes to attend our convention in 2012.
Terri informed us of a new branding campaign for Division II, that will focus on parents and prospects. A community event will be held at all Division II championships, and she will look forward to working with our new DII-SIDA President, John Kean of Alvernia. The Academic and Membership Affairs Staff involves compliance, and this was the first opportunity a team from CoSIDA met with NCAA compliance staff members. They stated it would be beneficial for our members to have a social media handout for new student-athletes to educate them about the do’s-and-don’t’s. Eric provided his thoughts about our relationship and he deserves so much credit for opening this door for us many years ago.
For our lunch, we invited local SIDs to visit with them for their thoughts about where we are in a variety of areas. We thank Geoff Sherman (Marian) Kevin Alcox (Great Midwest Athletic Conference), Jeff Smith (Great Lakes Valley Conference), Jim McGrath (Butler), John Dedman (Indiana Sports Corporation and a former Butler assistant SID) and Ed Holdaway (IUPUI) for their time and thoughts for us.
Our friends with media services and statistics stated that they are looking to update statistics more often for all three divisions. For example, Division I football is updated daily.
Consistency is important with the entry of rosters, and they wish to remind the membership that rosters should not be changed in XML game files that affects player statistics. They emphasized that there has been an excellent response on volleyball statistics, which became a requirement last fall.
Dan and Louise discussed the responses to the survey regarding the first ever Division III “Divisional Day” Programming. It was very positive and they look forward to continuing this opportunity to serve their institutions. With the new website, Division III leadership is looking for more stories about current student-athletes and their activities outside of the playing arena. Chuck and Monica are working on a special project, “After the Game – Celebrating the Student-Athlete.” They are looking for success stories from former student-athletes and look forward to hearing about your special alumni. You can submit this information at
NCAA.SUBMITTABLE.COM, and for more information, go to
NCAA.org/formerstudentathlete.
Brian is the Editor of NCAA’s Champions Magazine. He stressed how he enjoyed meeting many of you at the CoSIDA Convention, and also stressed to keep the story ideas coming. In the near future, there will be a tablet format, and for more information go to
championsmag@ncaa.org.
Dana stated that NCAA.org has been relaunched and is looking for more video from our membership. This is a service website and a survey will be produced later this fall to assist on how to better serve the membership as the new look site continues to develop.
Personally, this was a bittersweet visit for me. From the first time I entered the NCAA Headquarters as a College Division Board member in 2005, I was proud to have the opportunity to meet and greet many of the people who work so hard for us and our student-athletes. Knowing that this would be my last visit in an official CoSIDA capacity, I made sure to thank each and every person we met with to let them know how important they are to our profession.
Although they do not work in a campus environment and do not have the benefit of daily student-athlete interaction, the NCAA directors and staff work tirelessly to service these special young men and women. Thanks to board and CDMAC roles, I had the privilege of visiting the NCAA and the Hall of Champions (the home of our Hall of Fame and Capital One Academic All-America® Hall of Fame). Thanks to everyone who visited with us this year.