WILL KARR
Editor in Chief
Change isn’t going to happen overnight. However, Angela Pucciarelli, assistant director of Athletics, said the Athletics Department and other offices on campus are working to envision a safer environment for club sports.
Pucciarelli said herself and the other offices on campus started working on a new model for club sports last year. Offices involved include Athletics, Campus Life and Student Association.
“There was no official club sports meeting. We met over Zoom with multiple offices to talk and use the shared governance model. We came up with lightning policies and addressed some issues to lay out expectations to benefit the club sports,” Pucciarelli said. “We are trying to make this a good experience with the way things are currently evolving to have something that is sustainable.”
Pucciarelli and Mark Suida, director of Campus Life, explained how club sports are formatted at other universities and colleges. Pucciarelli said that there are many different models.
“It’s really a mixed bag between Campus Life, Student Association (SA) equivalents and student government,” Puccirelli said. “Those are pretty much the people who we are talking about and the general areas that they fall into.”
Many students and club athletes believe that there should be one designated person or office on campus who oversees club sports.
“If there was one person that was the club sports person and handled all club sports and didn’t have to require something from Angela, Vince and Rachel (Martin of Campus Life), I think we would all enjoy that,” said Jerry Fisk, director of athletics. “I don’t know if that will be the solution. But, what I can say is that the model will not look exactly the same as when we started the process. We just don’t know what it will look like.”
Many club athletes feel that they should not be responsible for finding and paying for their own medical personnel when they are already operating on small budgets, leading them to ask if the school or SA could work to provide trainers for club athletes. For varsity level sports, there are currently two trainers for the university’s 19 NCAA level sports.
“It goes back to a resource situation. We don’t have enough resources,” Fisk said.
One solution that has been established is having club athletes become certified in first aid and CPR to have basic skills on how to respond to a medical emergency. However, some students view this as putting students in charge of their peers’ safety, rather than having safety personnel provided on an administrative level.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily asking students to be responsible for each other, we think it would be great to have them first aid and CPR trained,” said Gugino.
Suida added that “it’s a recommendation in terms of resources.”
Club sports and clubs at Fredonia are funded primarily through student activities fees. Fisk explained how if medical trainers started being provided for club athletes, it could potentially force the athletes to have to pay to play — preventing students who couldn’t pay the amount of money from being involved.
The question is where the money would come from to support a model where club athletes have trainers or all of them were to become certified in first aid/CPR: would it be the students themselves, SA or the university? Fisk hypothesized what might happen if students were the ones to pay.
“If everyone of our students that participated in a club sport had to pay $500 dollars that would eliminate a lot of people, but would also give us a lot of resources to have people in the game,” Fisk said. “Games could have their own EMTs … it’s just a totally different model. We have to figure out what the right model is here because we don’t want to do something that has an unfortunate unintended consequence that has an impact on the student experience.”
Fisk and other offices at the meeting mentioned that they are open to hearing feedback from club athletes and the campus community on what this new model could look like.
“We would love to know what support looks like for club sport [athletes] and what they need,” Suida said.
Fisk added, “I don’t think we know about many of the thoughts of club leaders. We the people that can implement change don’t hear what we need to … through meetings, training [sessions] and continuous improvement, we want to start hearing what’s going well and not going well.”
Athletics, Campus Life and SA would love to start hearing more from students, specifically club athletes. You can reach out to them using the contact info below.
Emails (Athletics, Campus Life and Student Association):
Jerry Fisk (director of Athletics): fiskg@fredonia.edu and 716-673–3101
Angela Pucciarelli (assistant director of Athletics): pucc4120@fredonia.edu and 716-673-3542
Mark Suida (director of Campus Life): suida@fredonia.edu
Rachel Martin (assistant director of Campus Life): rachel.martin@fredonia.edu
Vince Gugino (general manager of Student Association): gugino@fredoni.edu