15th Annual Sportsmanship Summit

The fifteenth annual Sportsmanship Summit took place at Gillette Stadium. We were held in the beautiful Fiedlity investments Clubhouse on November 21. Student Advisory Committee members arrived early and were given several jobs. Jason, Megan, and Aubree were the "greet team" and were responsible for showing the students, teachers, and award winners where to go. Donald, Mick, Nate, James and Nick were responsible for helping the students get some breakfast and find a seat in a quick and orderly fashion. Two of our own members of the Student Advisory Committe, Julia and Maria, were part of a group of stuents who won first prize for the 8th Annual MIAA Student Sportsmanship Essay/Multimedia Contest! Megan and James also submitted essays that were chosen to be finalists! The day began in a traditional sport way by the singing of the National Anthem. Everyone got pumped up with Harvey Alston's "Be the Best" speech. After the awards were presented, teachers and administrators were broken up by school name and sent off to their workshops. Students stayed in the main atrium. Speakers such as Dan Switchenko and Dan Nolan switched off from the group of adults and the group of students. Following the close of the workshops, all participants were brought back together. Then there were more awards for Sportsmanship and Community Service. Gillete provided all the participants with a delicious buffet style lunch. After lunch, the Closing General Session called "Tips fromt he Best" was held by Harvey Alston, Steve Burton (WBZ-TV Sports Anchor), Andre Tippett (Patriots Director of Community Affairs and a part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame), and Dathleen Delaney-Smith (Harvard University Women's Basketball Coach). Bob Kraft made a guest appearance and gave the students a few words of wisdom. Our Nate chased him down for a handshake and was almost removed by security. All in all, it was a very exciting day!

Student Advisory Committee Member Megan wrote, "As usual, the Sportsmanship Summit was a great success. The turnout was fantastic, the speakers were thought-provoking, and the whole day was a very positive experience. I especially enjoyed Robert Kraft's visit as well as Andre Tippett's pieces of advice. Overall, I had a great time helping out and gaining wisdom from some of the most real and accomplished athletes and role models."

Student Advisory Committee Member Nate wrote, "The Sportsmanship Summit was great! It was so cool to see everyone again. I loved getting the chance to listen to Harvey again, his speeches honestly never get old. The day went very well and everyone attending seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was great to get a chance to listen to the winning essays and video of the contest. All in all this was another great experience with the student advisory crew, and not to mention I got to shake hands with Robert Kraft! It was great seeing everyone again and I can't wait untill the next time!"

Student Ambassador First Workshop

This first workshop took place at the MIAA Office in Franklin. Harvey Alston, the speaker who the Student Advisory Committee members saw at the conference in Indianapolis spoke for the opening and closing sessions of the event. As a member of the Student Advisory Committee, we networked with other Student Ambassadors about ideas that they have regarding the Student Ambassador Program. We helped one of the presenters, Deb Hult, during her workshop session. Everyone was assigned a contact person in a school or area near them so that we may create a better support system and be able to bounce ideas off of on another. We were given our first assignment; we were told to think of the most important issue in our school and to brainstorm how to change it. We were to check in with each other after about two weeks to see how each person is doing. Deb brought up the interesting point of, so we are Ambassadors.. so what? What legacy will we leave behind? An interesting concept that inspired several of us to jump-start and double our efforts.

Student Advisory Committee member Megan wrote, "The Leadership Workshop proved to be an intimate and productive meeting. Not many students attended; however this gave me the opportunity to get to know some of them better, while the atmosphere remained personal with the speakers. After attending this meeting, I feel that I have a better understanding of what my role is as a student ambassador, and I am more conscious of my influence on people as I strive to make it a positive one more and more each day."

Wellness Summit

On October 8, 2008, the MIAA sponsored a Wellness Summit that was made available to students, administrators, teachers, nurses, and athletic directors from all over the state of Massachusetts. Twenty one presenters and twenty two exhibitors attended to promote their cause or activity and to spread awareness.

Nick, one of the Student Advisory Council Members wrote, "The MIAA Wellness Summit was a great experience. The day began with an opening session by Mr. Gaine. After the opening session and schedule for the day was announced, the students were then broken up into workshops. There were many different workshops that students and coaches were able to attend throughout the day. My favorite session was the one with Kupah. He is a great motivational speaker and his dance crew along with DJ Twist did a great job. Urban Kinetiks is an awesome group, if you missed them that day you have to go see them. Many students from the Berkshire County area attended the area and also enjoyed the day. Three of the girls from my school's soccer team even learned a dance that they enjoyed and were later able to perform it. The Student Ambassador Workshop was also a great success, and I got great feedback on the workshop from my fellow students. Another high of the day was meeting the Wellness award winners from the MIAA. I could tell that these people deserved the awards they were to receive from the start as they were great people and really cared about today's youth. One more thing is that the students from my school enjoyed the day so much that they were begging me and my athletic director to have them attend another MIAA event as soon as possible. They are already excited to hear about the Sportsmanship Summit at Gilette Stadium."

Along with being able to sit in on workshops, the Student Advisory Committee was given the opportunity to lead their own workshop. We planned out a workshop that began with a slideshow to music with all of our NFHS pictures to get people interested. We followed that by giving everyone a card from a deck of playing cards and broke up the room by the suit of the card they had. SAC members split up and led the different groups in the Human Knot Game as an icebreaker. In those same groups, we discussed issues and read statements that the participants were asked to either agree, disagree, strongly agree, and strongly disagree with. At the end of the day all participants were asked to fill out an evaluation and we got lots of positive feedback for our workshop. The day was a great success!

First Meeting

The Student Advisory Committee (SAC) had our first meeting on September 18. There was some communication breakdown and a few of us arrived very very early at the MIAA Office in Franklin. Some of us (Mick) didn't arrive at all due to another communication breakdown. In any event, the meeting got started with a slideshow of pictures from all cameras from the NFHS trip so we could all laugh and talk a little bit about the trip before we got started. The first thing on the agenda was to elect the Chair and Vice Chair of the SAC. As a group, we elected in Nick and Nate as our Chair’s and Megan and Donald as our Vice Chairs. As Pete, one of our advisors, is on the NFHS board, one of his jobs is to give evaluations with out thoughts from the trip and try to incorporate what we wanted to change, so we held a discussion about what we would do differently. The basic thing that everyone would change is less time in the museum and less time at the community service project, or actually to have a community service project. Everyone enjoyed the speakers and the break out sessions.
The next thing on the agenda for us to discuss was the Wellness Summit. We were to have many responsibilities at the summit such as leading exhibitors to their tables, ushering all the participants to where they are supposed to be, managing time for the presenters during their workshops, and last but not least, we were to give a presentation of our own. We needed to plan out a 50 minute time slot to show what we do as an organization and do some leadership exercises. We opted to open our workshop with a slideshow of pictures from NFHS to get people interested in what we do. As people walk into the room, they would be handed a card from a deck of playing cards, to be used later. When everyone is settled in, we would do an introduction of what we do as student leaders and where we are all from. After that, we break everyone up by the suit of card they have. The SAC would divide themselves evenly to run the human knot game as an ice breaker. Once that is completed, we would have a set of discussion questions that the participants would use strongly agree, strongly disagree, agree and disagree. Once we finished talking about them in the groups, we would hold a big discussion and have people go to corners of the room where the signs that say disagree, agree, etc. are. If we had any time left, we would play a big game of paper scissors rock that we learned at NFHS.
Once our workshop was finalized, we began to discuss our community service project. We all liked the idea of helping out our communities by cleaning up parks and playgrounds, but we wanted to make a bigger difference. Some of us wanted to work with children by having a field day of games and activities for elementary school children. We had many good ideas but we haven’t nailed down an exact activity. We are also to take part in the Student of the Month Award judging process, which we are all very excited about. The last thing that we discussed was the possibility of hosting our own community service project as the SAC but also leading all of the student ambassadors from around the state in their own community service projects. We would like to have one central event, but also branch out to different regions of the state having their own. There is more to come on this idea as well.

NFHS '08

The MIAA chose twelve student athletes from Massachusetts to represent Massachusetts at the NFHS Student Leadership Conference in Indianapolis. We felt it to be an honor and a privilege to even be considered, let alone chosen as one of twelve to serve on the Student Advisory Committee. We all met at the MIAA Office in Franklin at 8:45 on the morning of July 17th. From there, we got on the bus and headed of to Green Airport in Providence. We caught our first flight without losing anybody or any luggage and that was a major bonus. We had a little bit of a lay over in Chicago and we played card games and walked around the airport. By some stroke of luck, we made it to Indianapolis on time and with everyone and our entire luggage.
From there we got checked into the hotel and checked in with the NFHS people. All the Student Advisory Committee members crowded in the “freebie” room where we got t-shirts, shampoo, conditioner, a red polo, a bag, a notebook and lots of other things. Then we were introduced to Happy Bill, the conference photographer, and we were CLEARLY his favorite group. After getting settled in our rooms, we had the chance to explore the t-mobile lounge. T-mobile donated cell phones for everyone to use to call almost anywhere in the world. We all hung out in this one room with games, a big screen TV and movies, laptops with wireless internet, coaches, and popcorn.
That night, we had our first State Meeting where Massachusetts met Nebraska. We were broken up into groups by state and our leaders had us draw our state and everything that we feel is important or what people know our state for. Since we had double the amount of participants, our group split in half, boys vs. girls. The girls spent every second on the poster, but the boys finished early and made a very impressive tower of markers. From there, we were grouped off with a mix of people from Mass and from Nebraska to talk about issues in our schools to see how they compared to each other. After that, it was off to bed.
Day two required us all to wear our matching red polo’s we were given in the day before. We all met for breakfast at around 7:30 and then dove right into our ice breaker activities and workshops. It was a very long day, a good day, but long. As a treat for all of us, the NFHS staff planned a surprise outing for the night; they took us to the Children’s Museum, which is one of the largest museum for children in the world. It had six floors with a variety of wings to keep most people interested. There was a tolerance wing where there was information about Anne Frank and other prominent children figures in history. There was a comic book section where you could dress up as your favorite super hero. There was also a history of children’s amusements sections with a carrousel that we all rode several times (including our chaperones). After about an hour we were ready to go, but we were there for around three hours, making our own fun. We got back around ten and we were all beat.
Day three started out with an ice breaker session, but it was our community service day. They loaded us on a couple busses and brought us to a local park. Since there was such a large amount of us, we were split into two groups with two different locations. While it was a good experience for us to give back to a community, we all felt that our time would have been better spent cleaning a dirty park. Our park was actually pretty clean and we spent a lot more time sitting around trying to find something to do then actually doing something. Just when we thought we were done, one of the men in charge had us pick up and walk down the street to clean up a golf course for around an hour. What made the whole experience even more fun was when it started to rain!
We were told to get back to the hotel, shower and clean up, and dress nice because our chaperones were taking us out to dinner! We went to a restaurant called Boca de Peppo, an Italian place just around the block. We had a hilarious waiter named Adrian who sang Grease songs with us. We all told him that it was Mike’s birthday and made everyone sing happy birthday to him. We all had so much fun; it was most of our favorite parts of the trip. After that, we went back to the hotel and got ready for the dance! That was a lot of fun too. We were all sad to go back to our own rooms because it was our last night.
The next morning there was a bit of schedule confusion and the closing ceremony was pushed back an hour but no one knew about it until we got up there, all dressed and ready to go. There was a magician who was hilarious and very very good but sadly we had to leave partway through to catch our plane! Our first flight went smoothly, our lay over was fine, but we had some trouble trying to get home to providence. We are sitting on our flight waiting to taxi out to the runway when the captain makes the announcement that there have been some security breaches in Providence and there are no flights going in or out. He also said that he didn’t know how long it would take for them to get that cleared up, so we should just sit tight (as if we could do anything else). So we took pictures and slept and listened to music. In about an hour we had our clearance to depart and we made it home safely.