National Collegiate Athletic Association

Latest News

« back to 2011 | Back to NCAA News Archive Index

Student-athlete success on stage at Convention

Reigning NCAA Woman of the Year Justine Schluntz was on a plane heading to the NCAA Convention when the man sitting next to her asked if she played sports. Schluntz, who is currently studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, relayed her experiences as a swimming student-athlete at Arizona.

“He said how amazing the NCAA was and how he wished Canada had a similar system,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity to be a part of.”

That was the message Schluntz, along with former NCAA student-athletes Jenn Brown, Isaiah Goodman and Nicole Semeraro, delivered at Wednesday’s keynote luncheon. They entertained and enlightened the crowd while sharing insights into how the student-athlete experience shaped their respective lives.

“The panel of student-athletes helped set the tone of an NCAA Convention that is all about success in college and beyond. Three current student-athletes will be on stage with NCAA President Mark Emmert at today’s opening business session to further demonstrate how athletics participation is an integral part of the student-athlete educational experience.”

For Goodman, the discipline and focus applied in his current position at Target Corp. is the same as when he was a basketball student-athlete at Washington and Lee. “It’s really neat just to think about the extra hours that I spent on the assignments and the tests and the extra hours I spent in the gym and the weight room and how that is paying off now,” said Goodman, a former Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee chair who interned at Target as a sophomore. “If I get to work just a half hour early and stay a half hour late and I do it every day, every week and every month, I start to see the progress.

Semeraro can sit for hours and talk about healthcare, because she feels the same rush as getting on the court as a volleyball student-athlete at Bentley University. Now vice president of business development for a small company that develops endoscopy ambulatory surgery centers, her passion is for business and helping others.

“As a student-athlete, every day you get up to play your sport and you’re so passionate about training and winning and being a team and all the different emotions that run together with that,” she said. “The most important skill set you can take away from being a student-athlete is to continue to have that passion in everything you do.”

The panelists also talked about how being a student-athlete helped them overcome and thrive despite difficult situations in their lives.

Brown had a built-in support system in place when her sister was killed in a car accident, thanks to her coaches and teammates. “To go through something like that and then come back to school and have that kind of support is what helped me get through it,” the former softball student-athlete at Florida said.

Brown also learned about perseverance as a walk-on with an academic scholarship who worked her way to a team captain. Later, her work ethic propelled her from production assistant at a small company to a sideline reporter at ESPN.

With two former NCAA Woman of the Year winners ahead of her in the Arizona program, Schluntz didn’t have to look far for positive role models.

“You didn’t have to think about trying to be great because you just had to copy what the upperclassmen were doing, and they happened to be doing great things,” she said.