More than 100 freshmen student-athletes from all eight East Coast Conference institutions gathered at the Molloy College campus recently for a diversity workshop, facilitated by the National Consortium for Academics and Sports. The event, sponsored by the ECC’s Senior Woman Administrators Council, was the first of its kind in focusing on educating freshmen student-athletes.

“We were pleased to have had such great participation by our student-athletes for this event,” ECC Commissioner Robert Dranoff said. “All credit for this program goes to our senior woman administrators, who identified the need to provide diversity training to our freshmen team members and developed the idea for the workshop.” 

Student-athletes divided into small groups and worked through exercises that focused on issues involving race, ethnicity and gender.

“It is so important for student-athletes to embrace diversity since we have teammates from different backgrounds and ethnicities in the conference,” said Jackie Bove, co-vice president of the ECC Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. “It is wonderful that we get to experience this training with our fellow ECC student-athletes.” 

ECC institutions recruit student-athletes from six continents with vastly diverse backgrounds. By educating first-years students-athletes, the conference hopes to foster an accepting environment where diversity is encouraged.

“We have built a strong relationship with the National Consortium for Academics and Sports,” Dranoff said. “They are on the cutting edge of programming in the area of student life issues and we look forward to doing more programming with them in the future.”