WINNING WAYS: BALANCING SPORTS, STUDIES AND SERVICE
As a member of the men's crew team, senior Dave Lewicki knows how difficult it can be to juggle scholastics and sports. But an even greater challenge for Yale varsity athletes, he discovered, is finding time in between studying and their rigorous training, practice and game schedules to perform community service work.
While 2,600 undergraduates -- about half of all Yale College students -- are involved in some form of volunteer service, athletes may sometimes feel that other time commitments force them to miss out on an important opportunity to make a contribution to the community beyond Yale, Mr. Lewicki says. He wants to ensure that no athletes feel that they have missed out on that chance.
Due, in part, to his efforts as cochair of the Athletics Department's Student-Athlete Community Outreach Committee COC , many Yale athletes have found ways to participate in community service projects and programs. Composed primarily of student- athletes, the COC meets monthly to help plan and carry out community service projects, enhance opportunities for community service and assist in the Athletic Department's mission of providing opportunities for community groups and organizations to attend Yale sports events and utilize the University's facilities and fields.
For Mr. Lewicki, his work on behalf of the COC not only fulfills his own desire to be actively engaged in community work, but also helps other students attain that goal as well.
"When I began rowing during my freshmen year, I never felt I could get involved in community service because crew seemed like an all-consuming activity to me," says Mr. Lewicki, an American studies major. "But I felt that service was too valuable to ignore. And I found dozens of athletes in the same situation. A lot of us want to offer something to the community but just need to find ways of doing it that don't conflict with other commitments."
With the help of athletics department staff -- including Tim Ford, assistant director of athletics -- Mr. Lewicki and other student representatives of the COC have identified a variety of community service projects or activities for athletes. These range from the "Youth Day" events sponsored by the Department of Athletics that bring some 300 New Haven elementary and middle school students to campus three times a year to participate in athlete-led sports clinics and attend Yale varsity games, to the "Buddy" Program, which pairs fifth- and sixth-graders from New Haven's Troup Middle School with athletes, coaches and athletics department staff members, who serve as mentors, friends and tutors to the younger children.
"Some of the community service programs require once-a- week commitments, while other activities athletes can get involved in are just a one-shot deal," explains Mr. Lewicki. "One of our goals, for example, is to have each varsity athletic team commit one day during the course of the year to a community service effort. The crew team, for instance, spent one day helping Habitat for Humanity work on Collegiate House a Habitat for Humanity project in the Newhallville section of New Haven in which volunteers are area college students . The goal is to make it easy for athletes to get out in the community and to get them excited about it. Last year more than 200 of us performed some kind of community service, and I think that's great. Athletes can make wonderful role models for kids in the community."
Yale College senior Greg Lund, a member of the men's lacrosse team, is one of the hundreds of athletes who are setting aside time this year to become involved in community work. In addition to being a volunteer in the "Buddy" program, he also serves as the lacrosse team's liaison for Yale Athletes and Kids, or "YAK," a program the lacrosse team initiated two years ago. It involves weekly trips by athletes and coaches to Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital's adolescent and primary care units to play with and talk to young children who are waiting there while family members are in the hospital for one-day surgery or to spend time with adolescents who have been admitted.
"Last year team members basically went to the hospital in small groups for about an hour each week," explains Mr. Lund, a mechanical engineering major. "Sometimes I felt tired and I had to push myself to go. But once I was there, I always got so much out of it. Being involved in the community is something that I feel I cannot not do."
For Mr. Lund, one experience in the "Buddy" Program revealed to him just the kind of influence that Yale athletes can have on children from the inner-city. "There was this one boy who came up to me and said 'Boy, that jacket's "fat," I gotta get one' referring to Mr. Lund's varsity lacrosse jacket . And I said 'Man, I had to work real hard to get this jacket,' and I told him about the kind of practice and work it took. His appreciation for something I had gave me this little opportunity to try to explain something about what you can earn through hard work and effort."
A frequent visitor to Yale's playing fields is Marissa Hughes, also a senior, who is an athletic secretary for intramurals at her residential college, Trumbull College. Being an athletic secretary for an intramurals program is somewhat akin to being a cheerleader for all of the college's teams, according to Ms. Hughes. Her job entails helping to find team captains at the start of each season, recruiting players for the teams, encouraging captains and players when their teams are doing worse than they'd like, and making sure the teams get acknowledgment when they have done well, she says.
But Ms. Hughes does more than cheer on her fellow Trumbull residents; she also plays on her college's soccer, co-ed touch football, co-ed volleyball and tennis teams.
"I have very little athletic talent," declares the art history major, "but I do have a lot of fun." And fun is what the intramurals program is supposed to be about, she notes.
"Intramurals is great exercise and is a wonderful way to get to know people from another college," she explains. "For freshmen, it's a great way to meet upperclassmen. And no one minds when you don't win." Victories, however, are celebrated, and Ms. Hughes is particularly proud of the fact that last year Trumbull College teams won three championships: in men's soccer in the fall, water polo in the winter and baseball in the spring the baseball team was made up of players from both Trumbull and Saybrook colleges .
Although Ms. Hughes has sometimes considered going door to door to recruit fellow students to join one of Trumbull College's spirited teams, participation in college intramurals is actually very high, according to Ed Mockus, director of intramural sports and recreation. Yearly, about half of Yale College students usually participate in intramural sports, and approximately 90 percent of undergraduates are active in either intramurals, varsity sports or physical education classes, he says.
For Ms. Hughes, not even a busy schedule can deter her from her own participation in intramural sports. "There's just a great sense of camaraderie in it," says the senior, who, in spite of a full course load, also finds time to serve as director of Peace Games at Yale, a program designed to teach conflict resolution skills to area elementary and middle school students. She also checks in periodically with staff on the New Haven Police Department's Bias Crime Unit, where Ms. Hughes worked over the summer as a President's Public Service Fellow. There, she was instrumental in putting together a workshop aimed at educating the public about hate crimes and also wrote a grant proposal to obtain funding for a Hate Crime Prevention Program. As she details some of her involvements, Ms. Hughes notes that "making people feel good about each other" seems to be a central theme of most of her extracurricular activities.
While still considering her options for the future, Ms. Hughes says she envisions that helping people to get along will be a major element of any future career. "I'm an art history major because I happen to love it," she says, "but I'm sure conflict resolution will play a big part of anything I decide to do."
Helping fellow students -- as well as University faculty and staff -- master the computer is the job of senior Ben Zhao, who is now in his second year serving as a computing assistant. Mr. Zhao, a computer science major, is one of about 50 undergraduate students who are paid to work as computing assistants through the University's Academic Computing Services. He spends about 12 hours each week on tasks ranging from installing networks for student computers, acting as a computer specialist representative for his residential college and helping computer users with troubleshooting and other problems in the five main computer clusters used by undergraduates, which are located at the Yale Computer Center, Connecticut Hall, Dunham Hall, Cross Campus Library and Phelps Hall. Computing assistants rotate working at each of these sites.
"The beginning of the year is the most busy time for us because there is a lot of network installing to do and we get a lot of questions from freshmen about how to use electronic mail or how to get network connections, for example," says Mr. Zhao. "But in this job, there's always a lot of satisfaction that comes from helping people out."
Mr. Zhao and the other computing assistants meet weekly with supervisors to discuss work issues, and they often meet with other computing assistants in their own residential colleges Mr. Zhao is a member of Branford College . In addition to working their regular shifts, Mr. Zhao and his fellow "CA's," as they refer to themselves, also make "house calls" to help students with problems on their personal computers.
Since starting his job last year, Mr. Zhao says he has already seen a difference in the computer savvy of this year's freshmen class. "An ever increasing number of students are coming in with their own machines, and a lot of them are really knowledgeable about how to use them," he explains. "Many of the students in my class didn't have their own computers when they first arrived. The majority of freshmen today got familiar with the Internet in high school. It's almost scary how much they know; they could probably teach most of us CA's a thing or two."
Every Sunday afternoon, a small group of New Haven children gather in Linsley-Chittenden Hall, where they quietly sit thinking over strategies in games of chess. Junior Alex Marchione is one of some 15 undergraduates who help the youngsters perfect their skills at the game. He serves as co-coordinator of CheckMate!, a volunteer undergraduate organization that seeks to encourage children's interest in chess and help them to become better players.
The program, started by undergraduates three years ago, involves about 15 elementary and middle school students from New Haven. "We teach them the basics of playing and advise some of the more advanced kids," says Mr. Marchione, a chemistry major who has competed in national chess competitions and in several World Open contests. "Our focus is on promoting chess as a fun activity, letting the kids know that it's something that they can do for the rest of their lives."
As they learn how to move pieces and plot strategies, the youngsters are also gaining some other skills that will help them in life, Mr. Marchione points out. "Playing chess with them provides a good opportunity to instill things like gamesmanship and courtesy -- simple things that, in my opinion, are all too often ignored," he explains.
By Susan Gonzalez