Thrower Nicole Elliott Represents NAU at Big Sky Meetings

My name is Nicole Elliott. I am a thrower on the track and field team here at NAU. I am also the co-chair of SAAC. On the weekend of October 4th I was lucky enough to attend the Big Sky Leadership Conference. While I was there I had a wonderful experience. I attended a meeting with other SAAC representatives from our competing schools. We talked about issues among our teams and how well our SAAC groups are getting involved. We shared the plans that ours schools have for community service projects and got many great ideas of things that we do not already do and can bring back to our schools. I am proud to announce that it seems that NAU is definitely ahead of the game in this. Some of the schools have not had their first meetings yet, whereas we have had 2 full group meetings. We also went over around thirty of the new NCAA proposed legislation. Some of this will have an effect on NAU, but some of it will not because it involves sports like baseball which we do not have.

Another meeting I was able to sit in on was of the Joint Athletic Council. In this meeting I got to see all the athletic directors of all of the Big Sky Schools try to work together and figure out some new legislation. There were two big pieces of legislation discussed in this meeting. One was over the indoor track and field championship site rotation. The main thing is that they want to cut NAU completely out of this rotation, meaning NAU will not host any more indoor track and field championships. The other piece of legislation discussed was over men’s and women’s basketball, the issue being travel squads. They want to be able to take as many athletes as they want as long as there is not air travel. There were schools on both sides of these issues and it was interesting to see how the things were dealt with and to get both sides of each story.

It was a great experience. I got to see how the other Big Sky schools handled situations and I also got their point of view on different subjects. It was also really nice to get together with a group of individuals that I have never met before and talk about issues present on our campuses and what could be done about them.