The Division I national Student-Athlete Advisory Committee honored a campus SAAC that helped save its community from devastating flooding and another group that created a nonprofit group for community-service initiatives with the inaugural National SAAC Awards of Excellence.

The award, created by the student-athletes who serve on the national SAAC and endorsed in March by the Division I Leadership Council, is designed to bring attention to the good work done by student-athletes all over the country and to promote awareness of the national SAAC. A committee of national SAAC members selected the SAACs at North Dakota State and Oregon and to be the first award recipients from among more than two dozen SAACs that applied.

“We had a great response,” said SAAC Chair Matt Baysinger from Kansas. “There were two schools that it came down to, and we couldn’t come to terms with giving the award to just one because they had both done such a great job.”

Baysinger said the national SAAC members enjoyed the process of choosing the winners and were heartened to see the amount of good work student-athletes were doing nationwide outside of competition and the classroom.

Oregon was honored for its O Heroes program, a nonprofit that the student-athletes formed to donate money collected on campus to assist the family of a sick child. Since O Heroes, a branch of the school’s athletics foundation and an athletics department-recognized student group, was created, the student-athletes have used it to launch projects ranging from Habitat for Humanity builds to entire days of service for all athletics teams. On May 31, the SAAC − through O Heroes – will sponsor one of its largest annual events, Quack in Action. The project brings more than 300 elementary schoolchildren to the Moshofsky Center (the school’s indoor football practice facility) for a day of education and activity surrounding the themes of nutrition, sportsmanship, teamwork, fitness and safety.

Katie Harbert, coordinator of student-athlete development and SAAC liaison at Oregon, said the student-athletes at Oregon have ownership of their projects and get more out of the experience because they devise, plan and execute them with minimal assistance. The nonprofit provides assistance in the areas of health, education and service, which allows for more focused project planning and gives the group the ability to decline projects that don’t support their goals.

“It’s great,” Harbert said of the award. “We’re excited. I alerted SAAC immediately and everyone was responding to say how excited they were.”

The national SAAC recognized North Dakota State’s SAAC for assisting with sandbagging and other flood-prevention efforts when the Red River overflowed its banks earlier this year. The student-athlete cheer team and student-athlete athletic trainers spent more than 7,200 hours fighting the flood and have continued to assist with sandbag removal efforts. Football student-athletes even traveled to nearby Valley City State University, which closed briefly due to the flooding, to assist.

While the national SAAC originally intended to distribute only one award per quarter, Baysinger said the two SAACs’ outstanding work made it difficult to value one over the other.

“We wanted to showcase groups for what they were already doing,” Baysinger said. “The fact that North Dakota State and Oregon did two different things, it’s hard to judge. But what we could very easily determine was that they were both pretty outstanding, so it made sense to recognize them both.”

The next round of applications will occur in July, and Baysinger said he expects to see many different projects in the summer months. Winners are selected on the following criteria:

• Progress and growth of campus SAAC
• Community service/outreach
• Sportsmanship initiatives
• Teamwork
• Originality
• Leadership

Baysinger said the process of choosing the winners was complicated but also inspiring. Seeing so many student-athletes doing so much good work all over the country reinforced the group’s decision to create the award. And hearing the excitement in the voices of the winners helped too.

“Our hope was when we did this that we would be taken seriously,” Baysinger said. “It was really refreshing to be on those phone calls when we told them and to hear their reaction.”