Student Athlete Advisory Committee adviser Meghan Horn inherited SAAC and its programs when she began work at the University as the assistant coordinator of the Student Athlete Services in September 2015. One of those programs was Falcons Fighting Hunger.
When Horn arrived, SAAC wasn’t “fully functional,” but with full-time employees she began putting 100 percent into getting students involved in the programs SAAC offers, including FFH.
Falcons Fighting Hunger is a SAAC sponsored food drive at home hockey games, which used to collect not only perishable food items but cash as well. This year SAAC won’t be collecting cash to avoid so many hands touching the donations.
SAAC vice president Kohl Taberner hopes to get as much student involvement as possible in the food drive this year.
“It’s good obviously to give non-perishable goods to people who don’t have them, and it’s good for the athletic department and student athletes to show that we care about people other than student athletes and we’re trying to help the world,” Taberner said. “The more we can do to help the community is always a great thing.”
To get more participation in the food drive, as well as help the organization as a whole, SAAC has split into committees this year. Taberner is on the seven-person committee working on the food drive.
Volleyball player Katie Scholten is also on the committee to plan Falcons Fighting Hunger. Her main responsibilities were helping to make and post fliers, contacting athletic supervisors and helping with social media.
“It’s completely our responsibility now to get it completely set up and executing it,” Scholten said.
Horn said regardless of its success, the food drive is truly now “a solid student athlete effort.”
“If you can have 300 items, that’s feeding 300 people,” she said.
One improvement the committee is making is better publicizing the event by contacting the hockey team, SICSIC, Bleacher Creatures and Falcon Fanatics to get more community members involved, Taberner said.
“Last year it wasn’t run by student athletes. It was just run by advisors, and it wasn’t super successful, so this year we’re just hoping that we can make a big impact with it,” Scholten said.
There will be three collections at home hockey games this year; the first one was last Friday. At Friday’s collection, SAAC collected four full boxes and a few bags full of food items. Students, community members and others can also take non-perishable food items to the home hockey game Dec. 9 and cans only on Feb. 4 for the Soup-er Bowl collection.
At the games, there will be SAAC representatives collecting the non-perishable items.
After the food is collected, it will be given to the United Methodist Church on Wooster Street near the Stroh Center. The church will then send the food out to local food banks.
“We’re just looking to get as much community support as possible to show what the BG community is made of,” Taberner said.
SAAC as a whole serves as the voice of student athletes, Taberner said. There are two to three representatives from each of the 18 University teams.
In addition to Falcons Fighting Hunger, Horn said SAAC tries to do “something fun and creative each month.” Some of these include Trick-or-Treat at the Stroh and MLK Day.
“I’m really excited this year for SAAC because the student athlete involvement has been great,” Horn said.
