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!