Senior soccer player Jordan Sargent was promoted to Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) president for the next year.

She’s been a member of SAAC for two years and now she’s ready to run the organization, which allows student-athletes to be connected with each other as well as the university. 

Sargent started in SAAC by working with the Gold Program ─ a program designed for student-athletes to help them with the job application process. 

Students create a portfolio that features different events they’ve attended such as community service or life skills events.

“The Gold program highlights life after athletics and after school,” Sargent explained. 

“Because we’re athletes, we don’t always have the opportunity to do internships and work at different places, so the portfolio is a way to highlight the things we have done because of athletics.” 

Evan Dermidoff is the advisor of SAAC.  He’s the connection between the administration at Oakland University and the committee.

“I think Jordan will be a great president,” Dermidoff said. 

“She brings the needed leadership and communication skills this position demands.  Her passion and experience will continue to drive SAAC towards accomplishing great things not only for the student-athletes and athletics, but for the whole campus community.”

Every team has at least one representative on the committee, though most teams have more. They attend monthly meetings and keep their team in the loop on upcoming community service opportunities and events.

“Anyone can join that has decided they want to be in it,” Sargent explained.  “It’s more about whoever wants to be in it instead of having us pick people.”

By having the athletes volunteer to participate, they are able to make sure the SAAC representatives want to be there and care about helping the athletic community. 

The new SAAC board was elected in a similar fashion this year.  Instead of having people nominated for each position like they’ve done in the past, people volunteered instead.

Only Sargent and one other student-athlete were returning members of board, so they were named president and vice president. 

Senior women’s basketball player Elena Popkey has taken over this year as vice president. 

Sargent says they plan on working side by side instead of her having all the control.

“We both decided to work together,” Sargent said.  “We’re both figuring it out together.”

Sargent and the new SAAC board have some ideas of changes to make to the committee.  Though nothing is set in stone, they’ve had a chance to bounce some ideas around.

“As a board we’ve talked about having more of an open floor,” Sargent said.  “So that during our SAAC meetings it becomes a little bit more of a back and forth with the teams and there’s a little more interaction with the team.”

“The more open communication we can have as a group the better,” Dermidoff said.   

“A big part of SAAC’s purpose is communication.  SAAC communicates to and from the student-athlete body and to and from athletics/university.  It’s essential that an open dialogue fuels this.”

As of right now, these are just ideas in Sargent and the committee board’s minds.  When the SAAC monthly meetings resume in the fall, they will be put into action.