Missouri Student-Athletes and Greeks Team Up To Fight Hunger
2/8/2008 12:00:00 AM | General
Friday night at the annual Beauty and the Beast event, approximately 50 members of each group will team up to collect food and money that will be donated to the Central Missouri Food Bank. In addition to the tremendous asset this will be to the mid-Missouri community, an even more important connection will be initiated.
Alicia Hatcher, a junior gymnast, and Raymond Jordan, a junior wrestler, attended an NCAA leadership conference in Dallas during the fall semester. After the action packed three-day event, the pair of students were charged with a task: take the skills that you learned at the leadership conference, go back to your campus, and affect positive change. In addition to the positive impact these two students were able to have on their respective sport teams, both currently ranked in the top 15 nationally, they wanted to do more. They wanted to impact campus as well. Their new focus was to identify a group on campus that student-athletes generally had either a non-existent or poor relationship with. The consensus, the Greek community.
"Athletes and Greeks don't maintain a lot of interaction," Hatcher said. "This is a step in the right direction. Hopefully this event will allow us to work with them on some other projects as well."
The idea was pitched to the Greek Leadership Counsel and the project was off and running.
"Members of Greek community at Mizzou are always looking for ways to collaborate with other students and when this opportunity was presented by other students, they were even more eager to come together," Jana Basler, assistant director of student life said.
Once the Greek community was on board, they had to choose the event. The easy consensus again, the Beauty and the Beast event.
According to Hatcher, "Beauty and the Beast is such a cool event to begin with, we hope we can continue to team up with the Greeks to make it that much better every year."
The hope is that these two student groups will start a long lasting relationship.
"Hopefully, this is just the beginning," Joe Scogin, director of academic services for athletics, said.
Scogin, along with Basler, are the two campus administrators overseeing the event.
"This relationship, if continued on behalf of the students, can be a model for other campuses around the country," Basler said. "What an amazing opportunity for our student athletes and Greek community to work on issues and projects that affect their community. The possibilities are endless."
"To me, the most inspirational part about this event is that it is completely student driven," Scogin said. "These students (both student-athletes and the Greek community) identified the need for better cooperation between the two groups, the athletic event that would support this large of a project, and the community organization that would benefit. They really took this idea and ran with it. I am very proud of them."
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