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Trojan Outreach Program reaffirms SAIT’s commitment to community citizenship
CALGARY (Sept. 1, 2010)— For Clay Goodall, and the rest of the SAIT Trojan men’s hockey team, an assist like this feels pretty good.
About 10 members of the squad, along with representatives of the Trojan women’s soccer, women’s hockey, and women’s volleyball outfits, became bellhops for a weekend from Aug. 26 to 28 as the first SAIT Polytechnic students of the 2010-11 school year began arriving at Residence Hall.
“We’d see a student pull in with their parents, and a truck full of bags, boxes, kitchen stuff, and we all went to help them up,” says Goodall (3rd year, Maple Ridge, B.C., Grande Prairie AJHL), a Trojans defenceman and hospitality management student at SAIT Polytechnic. “We made it one easy trip for everybody, pretty much, instead of going back and forth to their cars.”
The so-called SAIT Residence Move-In, using Trojan athletes this year for the first time, is the latest initiative in the Trojan Outreach Program, a long-established enterprise that demonstrates the SAIT Trojans’ commitment to community involvement. Sponsored by Cardel Homes, the Trojan Outreach Program sees Trojan individual athletes and teams participate in more than 30 clinics, fundraisers, and charitable events each season. Some other examples include:
The Heart & Stroke Foundation’s Big Bike fundraising event;
The Calgary Herald’s Raise-A-Reader Day, which will be held this year on Wednesday, Sept. 29;
The Catholic Family Service Athletes Mentoring Program;
An annual sledge hockey game in January between the Trojan women’s hockey team and the Calgary Scorpions;
And various sports clinics at local high schools and junior high schools.
“It comes down to the three pillars of what makes up a SAIT Trojan student athlete — athletic excellence, academic success, and community citizenship,” says SAIT athletics manager Mark Pretzlaff. “We can help them develop on the floor as athletes, and we support them in their academics, but we also feel that community involvement helps to teach lifelong values like character, commitment, and discipline. It rounds out the individual.”
The Trojan men’s basketball and men’s volleyball teams have participated in the Catholic Family Service’s Athletes Mentoring Program for the past two seasons.
Once a week, from mid-September through mid-March, these two Trojan squads are paired with children and teens, aged 7 through 17, for high-energy group activities and relationship building. The student athletes develop into role models, helping their protégés build confidence, character, and social skills through positive, casual interaction.
“The group activities emphasize working together as a team, and that helps to break down those walls, so the personal time that these kids have with their mentors is a little more productive,” observes Trojans men’s basketball coach Mike Stevens. “Some of these kids have some walls built up, and they’re not quick to trust somebody. Having these regular get-togethers, where you’re doing fun stuff, non-threatening stuff, can help to bring down their guard a little bit.
“And, from a coach’s point of view, our players don’t realize it, but it has quite an impact on them as well,” adds Stevens. “A lot of our first-year players are still young kids, and when you make them responsible for somebody else, all of a sudden there’s a certain maturity, a certain level of discipline, that they have to show.”
Over the years, the Trojan Outreach Program has won a Canadian Colleges Athletic Association (CCAA) Community Service Award twice — in 2004, and again in 2006.
“We take as much pride in those two awards as we do for our national championships,” says Pretzlaff. “The Trojan Outreach Program is a positive experience for anyone who’s part of it.
