This past week, six students from across the Old Dominion Athletic Conference represented their schools and their conference at the NCAA convention. This is an annual event where delegates from all three divisions of the NCAA come together to vote on legislation that will shape the future landscape of college athletics. This year, the ODAC received a grant from the NCAA to sponsor a group of students’ trip to the convention. These students had the opportunity to go to informational sessions, attend awards ceremonies, and network with their peers and senior members of the NCAA. This year, the event took place Jan. 13-16 at the Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor.
Isabella Timmerding, a senior thrower at Washington and Lee University, decided to apply for a spot at the convention after talking to a teammate who had gone the previous year and had a positive experience. She saw this as a good professional opportunity, saying, “I plan on attending law school after my graduation from W&L, and what exactly I want to do with my law degree? I’m still figuring out… I would be more interested in potentially a higher level, like working for the NCAA, as an attorney or representative… I’m also really interested in corporate law. So I guess that kind of overlaps with the NCAA being a big corporation and also an intersection with my passion for sports.”
Zephiniah Chalmers, a football player in his junior year at Hampden-Sydney College, saw this as an opportunity to gain valuable information, as he hopes to work in sports in the future. He said that they kept a busy schedule with many long sessions about the future of the NCAA and what sets Division III apart from the other divisions. One of these meetings had the athletic directors from each of the ODAC schools discussing how they were going to vote on the proposed legislation. This offered a chance for the students to meet administrators from other ODAC schools.
The convention wasn’t just business meetings and debating legislation; there were also opportunities for socializing. Timmerding said, “We also got to go to Top Golf as a group with our conference, which was really fun because it was on the first night, and I felt like we all really got to know each other a little bit. And then from there, we spent most of the rest of the week together, which was awesome.” There were other scheduled events intended for socializing, such as the student mixer, which featured a lip sync battle and ice cream sundaes. There were also less formal occasions where convention attendees could mix between divisions, and your status as a student or administrator fell away.
Chalmers and Timmerding both found value in the convention outside of the professional opportunities it offered. They both highlighted the session they attended on Wednesday morning that emphasized the importance of taking care of your mental health.
Chalmers made note of how important mental health is for student athletes, saying that, “If your mental isn’t right, then your physical won’t align with your goals.” Chalmers also said that mental health can often be neglected, stating, “As an athlete, I know people go through mental health things, especially like around my school, but, you know… across the nation with division three, I feel like mental health is a big topic that sometimes goes unsaid and unsolved. So I feel like that was the biggest thing I’ve gotten out of division three was the importance of mental health.”
Timmerding said, “One of the most impactful sessions, for me, was the mental health session, where we learned a few different techniques and stuff that we should try to implement in our own everyday lives as student athletes to help us really collect ourselves and refocus when we might be really stressed or having a hard meet or a bad day in general, and how can we just ground ourselves, and realize that, bringing ourselves back to the present moment, doing the best that we can each day.”
Timmerding is the president of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee at her school, and is using the lessons she learned to help other students on her campus. She said, “I think that that’s super important to continue, just going to the convention, sending representatives from the ODAC and bringing this knowledge back to our own individual campuses to just continue making our lives as student athletes on our campuses as best as we can.”
