National Collegiate Athletic Association
NCAA News Archive - 2006
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St. Thomas Aquinas College
Institutions of higher education are founded to meet the challenges of society. Society is global, national, regional and local. These challenges can be addressed through research, education and service by the members of our campus communities. The costs are high — for example, thousands of children die every day due to lack of basic necessities; the benefits are enormous — winning the critical plays of life.
The noble purpose of education is grounded in the search for truth and understanding.
Service learning flows from this purpose and is led by the imperatives discovered through research and education. The outcomes of student learning are assessed. The "winning" student has been intellectually and morally developed to meet individual and societal challenges. Moreover, the student embraces the challenges.
You have to want to win. Yet, most people in our global community never get the opportunity. If one is lucky enough to have the opportunity, one must work hard both intelligently and strategically. To create the win-win opportunities, one must also know the real win goes beyond oneself to the community.
"Life in the Balance," the strategic-positioning platform of Division II, impels us to create service-learning opportunities for our student-athletes that foster their holistic development. Community engagement can direct the energy and spirit of winning student-athletes to positively change society as they change themselves. We know this to be true. Our student-athletes walk to fight cancer, they build homes for the homeless, they make wishes of dying children come true, and they invite children from disadvantaged neighborhoods into their gyms, onto their fields and into their lives. Our student-athletes, along with our faculty and staff, search for the underlying causes of injustice and in great ways and small right the wrongs.
Life is relational. Community is built upon common goals enlightened and enlivened by the collective wisdom and work of its members in an environment of dynamic interdependence. The athletics department, knowing the dimensions of truly winning, can be a catalyst for
community engagement on the entire college/university campus to benefit the local, regional, national and global communities.
Those of us involved in athletics can work with the entire campus community to engage in the critical plays of life.
As presidents, athletics directors, coaches and student-athletes, we can lead co-curricular activities that will make a difference.
We can invite onto our campuses the local communities of youth and adults and by our activities and example teach them the skills of a sport and also the value of sportsmanship.
We can invite the larger community to new understandings of global realities and participate in events to support the work of global justice.
We can teach that charity is allowing us to do the right thing — a critical play of life.
We must work together within our individual educational communities to fulfill the social mission of the institution to see, to judge and to act collectively for the common good. If our students and our institutions do not acknowledge their social responsibility, then we are all losers locally and globally.
We are not losers, however. Our tradition is to win. Our cheerleaders dance to win, our bands march to win and our student-athletes play to win. Stand up, shout out. We in athletics must sweat to win in our sport and in the broader game of life.
We must be leaders on our campuses to witness that character formation touches the core of an individual and the heart of a community.The critical plays in life can be exhilarating and transformative for us and others. Life in the Balance can have a whole new meaning. The world is waiting. Community engagement, count me in!
Margaret Mary Fitzpatrick is the president of St. Thomas Aquinas College and a member of the Division II Presidents Council.
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