Conferences increasingly are using initiatives grants funded by Division III to organize workshops and seminars for student-athlete leaders.

However, the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference recently went a step further and made use of another of the NCAA’s resources – its national office in Indianapolis.

Student-athletes representing the conference’s nine member institutions and staff advisors for the schools’ student-athlete advisory committees gathered last weekend at the NCAA headquarters in what Commissioner Christopher Ragsdale described as an “invaluable” experience for the group.

“I thought, what better place to bring our group together than at the national office,” he said. “So many of our student-athletes, and the same for athletics staffs, never really have the opportunity – nor do they have a sense of – what that operation is all about.”

The primary purpose of the gathering was a workshop exploring diversity, gender-equity and sexual-orientation issues. However, Ragsdale – who serves on the Division III Membership Committee and whose conference is headquartered in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood – also saw an opportunity to give student-athletes a sense of what the NCAA and Division III is “all about…and by virtue of what goes on, how it impacts their lives as students or as members of an athletics department.”

Various Division III administrators – led by Vice President Dan Dutcher and Division III Director Leah Nilsson – described various programs and initiatives as they welcomed the group to the national office. The presentations included information about the Division III initiatives program, which provides member conferences with funds to support programs like the one the HCAC hosted in Indianapolis.

“Conferences are provided with grant money on an annual basis,” Ragsdale explained, adding that the HCAC meeting was funded from Tier II of the initiatives program, which supports programming in the areas of student-athlete well-being and community service, diversity and gender equity, and sportsmanship.

Ragsdale, who became the conference’s commissioner last year after serving as athletics director at Elmhurst and then La Verne, welcomed the opportunity to provide programming for student-athletes.

“I’ve been a Division III college athletics director for 22 years, and during that time, I had a lot of ideas about things that I wanted to do, but either I didn’t have the money, or I didn’t have the support staff to make those kinds of activities happen. So, coming into this position and with money available through the NCAA grant program, I felt that we could do more by centralizing activity.

“Rather than apportioning money out to each of our conference institutions,” he explained, “we could take those resources and do one central program for our entire conference.”

The group spent most of the weekend working with Stan Johnson, former NCAA director of professional development and currently a consultant and trainer in the areas of diversity and gender equity. Ragsdale sees the session ultimately having a ripple effect through the HCAC, benefiting not only the student-athletes and advisors who participated in the session but also campus communities in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

“The exciting thing about this is, in one sense, if each of our institutions has 400 student-athletes, that’s 3,600 student-athletes, so we’re only going to touch a small percentage (during the workshop),” Ragsdale said. “But this is not only a learning experience but a training experience. So, part of the expectation coming out of this is these student-athletes will have the kind of resources and information to be able to take things back to their campuses.

“It’s through this centralized activity that we will then reach out to all of our institutions and all of our student-athletes.”

However, as a result of the group’s introduction to the national office and its staff, Ragsdale hopes student-athletes also returned home with a notion that their involvement in intercollegiate athletics doesn’t necessarily have to end when their playing days are over.

He pointed to Jaime Fluker, NCAA assistant director of student-athlete development, who helped Ragsdale organize the gathering. Ragsdale, the former AD at Elmhurst in the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin, remembers Fluker as a student-athlete at CCIW member Carthage (Wisconsin).

“She is the consummate example of a young woman who, as a student-athlete, wound up having an opportunity with an internship program at the NCAA offices, and turned that into a wonderful career working with student-athletes and being involved in intercollegiate athletics.

“I certainly wouldn’t have had, at the age of 18 or 22, any idea what potential opportunities sat out there for me, so I hope that’s something (participating HCAC student-athletes) will get a sense of as well.”