NSU Horizons Spring 2014

42 HORIZONS By Mary Hladky I t was June 2013, national championships were looming. Lauren Boudreau , in her third year as cap- tain of NSU’s women’s rowing team, was determined to win. What she needed was a strategy to clinch it. “We came together as a team. I wanted to help lead the team to that recognition. We developed a plan. The team worked really hard and was able to achieve that goal,” said Boudreau, who also was among the 30 top nominees for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Woman of the Year award last year. After graduating with her bachelor’s degree, Boudreau, now 22, no longer is rowing. She has set her sights on a new goal: to become a great doctor after she graduates from NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. What she learned as a student-athlete will play a big role in getting her there, she said. “I firmly believe a lot of the lessons I learned through sports and rowing will help me succeed in anything I do in the future. It is some- thing I will use the rest of my life and definitely as a doctor with my patients.” Leadership skills There are more than 400,000 student-athletes on about 18,000 collegiate teams in the United States. Only a sliver of them will become professional athletes. In 2013, 1.2 per- cent of men’s college basketball players and 0.9 percent of women’s basketball players went on to play professionally, the NCAA reports. As NSU student-athletes move on to nonathletic careers, they say their sports experience will help prepare them for rigors off the field. Research backs that up, showing that playing sports can increase grade point averages and test scores. A survey of executive vice presidents at 75 Fortune 500 companies showed that 95 percent played sports in high school, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, indicating that student-athletes can have leadership skills, higher incomes, and better jobs. Participating in sports builds self-esteem and self- discipline, teaches time management, and shows students how to work as a team, as well as how to deal with adver- sity and criticism, according to various studies. Michael Mominey, M.S., NSU’s director of athletics, who oversees 17 Division II intercollegiate teams with 385 student-athletes, said athletics better prepares students for nonathletic careers. “I believe that intercollegiate athletics is a platform to prepare students for life—personally and professionally,” he said. “Life skills such as accountability, responsibility, teamwork, and discipline are just a few attributes that are taught through athletics, and they are obviously very relevant to be successful in life.” NSU embraces the NCAA’s Division II philosophy that emphasizes academics. “We subscribe to the true meaning of what the term student-athlete means—a student first and an athlete second,” Mominey said. NSU increased its student-athlete Academic Success Rate (ASR), which measures degree completion, for the fifth straight year to 92 percent, 21 percent higher than the national average, the NCAA announced in February. Six NSU teams had perfect 100 percent ASRs. Ralph V. Rogers, Ph.D., NSU’s provost and executive vice president of academic affairs, who played as a center forward on Ohio University’s basketball team, knows the benefits of athletics firsthand. “You can go through the whole list of things it prepares you for: teamwork, being part of something bigger than Student-Athletes Score in Game and Classroom athletics