A little weekend update from good ol’ Charlottesville, VA, home of the Cavaliers and Blue Ridge Mountains. I’ve got to say, the past two days have been crazy! Our team (three student athletes, an intern, and Winthrop’s Life Skills and CHAMPS coordinator) headed out around 11 AM on Friday. The five hour drive wasn’t too bad, it was nice to be in a car for such a long time without actually having to drive!
We arrived at the Double Tree hotel in Charlottesville around 4:30 and unpacked our bags, then the fun began. We had a nice buffet dinner, accompanied by thirty-nine other college’s and universities. Some campuses that I can recall include: Duke, Akron, Univ of Toledo, UNC Chapel-Hill, St. Johns, Towson, Bowling Green, Monmouth, St. Francis, Farleigh Dicksinson, and many more. All NCAA divisions, I II and III are represented. The conference started out with an opening presentation and an announcement of the weekends plans and goals. All the student athletes then went down stairs to another ball room and interacted with each other via a lot of fun leadership and life skills activities. We did some weird stuff, but it definitely helped break the ice and made it a lot easier to meet people. The rest of Friday night included another speaker, ice cream sundaes, and then an intense viewing of the documentary “Haze” which really opened everyone’s eyes to the problems of alcohol abuse in college campuses around the country, especially with athletic teams.
Saturday came pretty early as breakfast was from 7:30-8:30, followed by the first set of sessions. The APPLE Conference is divided into seven main themes concerned around college campuses and athletics. Each “slice” of the apple was discussed, then each team talked about these specific “slices” (recruiting, sanctioning, attitude, education, etc) and how they were present on their own campus right now. The main goal for today was to devise a specific plan with your APPLE team to carry out and take back to your school. After these sessions, the day continued with a set of breakout speakers in which you could choose which one you wanted to attend, then lunch, then another set of breakout speakers. The speakers that my team chose to attend were 1) an ex-football player at the University of Virginia who talked about his experiences with alcohol abuse and peer responsibility in college. 2) A lady from VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University) who spoke about “The Most Devastating Drug” which she revealed to be alcohol. She also talked about other common substances such as cigarettes, hookah, etc. And 3) A guy from the University of Arizona who spoke about “Stepping Up” when the majority of people don’t. These speakers were followed by an hour devoted to plan making for the individual teams, which I felt went really well! I think my Winthrop team has a good idea and I can’t wait to start getting things together when we get back. (I’ll express the details to our plan later).
Dinner was at six and was followed by a great keynote speaker who talked about the specific nutrition of athletes. Did you know that in order to gain a pound of muscle a week you need to first, be on a weight training program, and then second, eat an extra four ounces of protein (a small breast of chicken) a day, seven days a week? Interesting. I’m going to try it next week! After this speaker we were served some cool fruity drinks and finally Tom DeLuca came out and did his hypnotist show for about two hours.. May I remind you that this was the third time that I’ve seen his show, but it was still pretty entertaining!
Now I’m sitting up in my room, just hanging out/winding down with my other team members. It’s been a long day, that’s for sure. Tomorrow will be short and sweet though, as we’ll be on the road home by 11. This has been a great experience though, I feel that I’ve definitely learned a lot and can’t wait to try to implement my new “leadership” attributes into my daily college life.
