"Attending the NCAA Student-Athlete Leadership Forum was such an impactful, enlightening experience, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity.  I spent four days in Orlando, Florida amongst a diverse and dynamic group of select student-athletes, coaches, faculty, and administrators from all three divisions.  A majority of our time was spent in our "Color Teams," which composed of about 30 individuals.  As part of the Purple Team, I built close relationships with my teammates through our interactions and open dialogue around a variety of topics.  Our team had two facilitators who led us through various activities and workshops, during which we had time for both personal reflection as well as collaboration.  Some of our main focuses throughout these sessions were core values, strength-based leadership, effective communication through crucial conversations, and developing our own leadership philosophy.
 
Besides our Color Team sessions, we also broke out by Division for a governance session and a SAAC session.  In the governance session, we learned about the legislative process at the Division I level and ended up having a very open conversation with NCAA administrators regarding "hot topics" surrounding the NCAA.  These were things like transfer rules, "Should student athletes be paid?" and the controversial NCAA "day in the life of a student-athlete" commercial that recently came out.  It was a neat dialogue in that as student-athletes, we were able to openly and honestly express our opinions and the representatives from the NCAA were very transparent with us.  The SAAC session educated us on the different levels of SAAC (i.e. campus, conference, national) and how they operate.  We also had time to share with each other different initiatives our campus SAAC participate in. 
 
One of the days, in conjunction with an educative session on healthy relationships from the One Love Foundation, everyone participated in a service activity, where we packed care bags for a local women's shelter.  Though there was not a lot of downtime during the forum, I got a chance to explore the beautiful resort and its golf course and ate all of the meals in a big open ballroom, where I could sit and chat with any of the other participants. They also had fun evening activities for us, with one night being a movie and another night a bunch of fun mega-sized games set up in the ballroom, where we could hang out.  I got to know so many different people, what school they were from and what sport they participated in, which was really awesome.  Everyone came into the experience not knowing what to expect, but with an open mindset and a lot of energy, which truly made it a unique couple of days.  We even had an epic rock-paper-scissors tournament that resulted in people standing on chairs and tons of cheering."

Junior Sophie Capaln
Women's Track and Field