We start with our community, and it is in the local community that athletics has its greatest impact. While we don’t have a policy regarding community service, we encourage participation through our Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, and drawing on the natural competitiveness of athletes we manage a culture in which most teams have an annual plan and schedule of activities. They offer a clinic to the Boys and Girls Club, donate blood, speak at local schools, read to young children, serve in a soup kitchen, visit patients in our hospital, run tournaments for kids and buy treats for athletics’ sister elementary school.

The athletics department shares its playing fields and facilities with community groups, some 70 of them last year. The department also runs the UIC Community Assist Program, in which it offers free tickets to men’s basketball games (the tickets have been purchased by corporate sponsors) and complimentary bus transportation if the group size is 50 or more and if they come from within 30 miles of our Pavilion. The offer goes to more than 2,000 qualified nonprofit organizations; last year, the program worked with 215 of them.

The values these activities represent also are the stated values of our conference, the Horizon League. In addition to stating the values, the league sponsors a signature activity in which we are pleased to participate — the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration. Each of the league teams hosting a basketball game on the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day partners with a local elementary or middle school to organize a contest for sixth-graders who submit a piece of art, an essay or a musical performance focusing on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Fifteen winners from each school receive a memento and tickets to the Horizon League basketball game that weekend, and they are recognized during the pregame player introductions.

UIC’s Great Cities Commitment is realized through medical service and health care; through research in housing, transportation, community development, economic development, violence prevention and more; through arts and cultural events; through social service outreach; through extensive work with the Chicago Public Schools; through assistance to business ranging from workforce development to emergency management preparation to economic analysis. In this enormous welter of activity, athletics has a special role to play, because athletics is arguably the great common denominator of our society.

What athletics can give, so many of all ages and backgrounds are eager to receive. Athletics helps us give to our immediate community a source of pleasure and pride, and something that they need. We all know that college athletics can be a cause of controversy and embarrassment. But when college athletes, their coaches and the athletics staff turn their hands to service, outreach and friendship, there are no better ambassadors.