While Princess Imoukhuede was a chemical engineering major, a biomedical engineering minor and a track and field student-athlete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she didn't feel like she was doing a lot of juggling to make sure she performed her best on the field and in the classroom.

"In retrospect, I'm starting to realize that there's a lot of balancing going on," Imoukhuede said. "While I was doing it, it just became a part of my life."

Imoukhuede's ability to stay poised under the pressure of an academically rigorous curriculum at MIT and a physically challenging training regimen as a shot-putter and hammer-thrower spoke volumes to the administrative team seeking former NCAA athletes to appear in the Association's latest round of public service announcements.

The media campaign, designed to capture the "voice of the student-athlete," debuted during selected NCAA fall championships. The format and substance of the messages is similar to that used in previous years, but new student-athletes are telling their stories of success both in the classroom and in their sport. The Association also produced one more ad this year than last year in order to keep the messaging fresh.

Each of the four new spots features a former NCAA student-athlete, sometimes melding shots of their athletics life with scenes from their academic or work lives and sometimes using a voice overlay to describe how being a student-athlete prepared them for the future.

Imoukhuede, currently doing postgraduate work at the California Institute of Technology in biomedical engineering and researching the function and structure of protein in the brain, took a day off from studying and training to tape her 30-second spot.

"It was a pretty fast-paced day," she said. "As soon as I got there, it seemed like people were just working on me, putting on makeup, different clothes and everything."

She spent a long time going through her turns and slinging the hammer into the air. Even with her training and muscle strength, the repetitive motion made her "completely sore" the next day.

Finding the balance

The whole experience of auditioning and filming the commercial was exciting for Imoukhuede, an Illinois native. The aspiring college professor had auditioned for the project last year and made it through call backs, but wasn't chosen. When she received the call to try out again, she didn't hesitate.

"At the end of the audition, I was just like it doesn't matter which way it goes, whether I get it or not, it was just such a great process. I'd never done anything like this before," she said.

What she had done before seems much more difficult to most people: balancing athletics participation with an arduous academic schedule. Because the track and field season took place in the second term, Imoukhuede learned to schedule her more grueling classes and demanding research projects during the first term.

"I'd still take the classes I needed to graduate, but I made sure I gave myself time so I could be successful in the classes, I could do the research and still dedicate a great deal of time to track and field," she said.

Tom Peck, creative director with Young and Rubicam San Francisco (the agency responsible for developing the creative concept for the campaign), called Imoukhuede "incredible" not only because of her academic prowess, but also her strength and fortitude in doing whatever the directors asked of her during filming.

"She must have thrown that (hammer) 50 times," Peck said. "The same thing with the shot put. That's a day's work for them, that's for sure, and usually they haven't done it for a while so they're a little stiff."

Telling true stories

Though she is still competing in hammer and weight throws, Imoukhuede said her NCAA experience trained her for the future.

"When I first left college, I definitely did miss the collegiate environment because you have all your friends there, everybody supports you and you have some great coaches to work with," she said. "Now it's much more independent, you have to seek out coaches yourself and be disciplined enough to follow through with your training. At the same time, I feel like being a college athlete definitely prepared me for that. I did have to fit track and field training into my life and I still had to find the balance and be motivated to do it."

Officials from the NCAA and the ad agency chose the four student-athletes from dozens of former student-athletes who submitted audition tapes, finally narrowing the field to a "final four." They are Roger Cox, a former basketball student-athlete from San Francisco State University; Peggy Odita-Hodel, a track and field heptathlete from Stanford University; Lauren Shenk Miller, a basketball student-athlete from Ohio State University; and Imoukhuede.

Each of the spots tells the former student-athlete's personal story, emphasizing the balance between academics and athletics. In Imoukhuede's ad, she jokes that the hammer throw was so intense, she studied biomedical engineering just to relax.

One of the strong points of the new campaign is its focus on reality -- each spot tells that former student-athlete's true story.

"Here you have real people that have done real things," Peck said. "But they have to come off as being real people," he said. "They shouldn't look or feel like they're actors or that they're performing somehow."

Of course, that focus on reality also presented some unique challenges in production. Peck cited the spot that focused on a former student-athlete who is a mother as an example. The ad shows her playing on the beach with her young daughter, noting that she relies daily on the skill sets she learned as a student-athlete to raise a child.

Peck said, though, that using the child in the spot presented some issues.

"It's a whole different thing when you have little children involved," Peck said. "You have them down at the beach and you're shooting them and the kid is two or three and you don't know how long they're going to last. Are they going to get there and hate the ocean?"

Just to be safe, the group recruited three sets of mothers and their children to film the spot, which required a youngster to run along the beach with the parent chasing behind him or her. Peck said that the mother-child team the group had expected to use didn't do very well because it was the youngster's first visit to the beach. Odita-Hodel's performance with her daughter, though, was superb.

"The one we (shot) turned out fabulous. You just never know," Peck said.

Peck said he hopes people who watch the ads on television or see them in print get to know more about the stories that aren't reported on television news or plastered on the pages of the newspaper.

"These are people who had fabulous athletics careers, and then they went on to do something else with their academic training. They went onto a career that was not sports," he said. "These are people who are fabulously accomplished but who are not in the news. Their stories are the ones you just don't hear about."

This is the third year of the NCAA's PSA brand campaign. This year's collection also will include one or two from last year in the rotation. The four new spots can be viewed at NCAA Online at www2.ncaa.org/flash_content/sniffer.html. Peck said the spots for 2006 will take on a new feel in honor of the NCAA's centennial celebration.

"Next year we're going to be doing a little more historic kinds of stories, which will be very interesting," Peck said. "The current campaign has discovered hundreds of good contemporary stories. Imagine what we will find when we look back. Those good stories are the essence of the NCAA -- that's what it's all about."