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UB Council recognizes athletic achievement
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
Student-athletes from the women’s tennis and crew teams were recognized for their accomplishments during the past season at Monday’s meeting of the UB Council.
Council members passed resolutions—and presented framed copies of the documents to team members and coaches—praising the teams for their achievements, both in the classroom and on the court and on the water.
The tennis team won the Mid-American Conference Championship on April 27—UB’s first outright MAC title—and was the first UB athletic team to compete in an NCAA Division I championship tournament. It has earned the highest team grade-point average of all varsity teams for five consecutive semesters.
The crew team on May 11 won the overall points championship—the Jack and Nancy Seitz Trophy—at the Dad Vail Regatta, North America’s largest collegiate rowing regatta. It has earned a team GPA of more than 3.0 for 10 consecutive semesters, a feat that is especially noteworthy given the large number of team members, according to head coach Rudy Wieler.
In introducing the teams, Anucha Browne Sanders, senior associate athletic director and senior woman administrator, stressed the importance of leadership.
“As a world-class athlete myself, the one thing I remember when I played was the influence that my coach and the leadership of Northwestern had over me and the importance of treating us as students first and athletes second. I know you take great pride in doing that here at UB,” said Browne Sanders, who was a two-time Big 10 Conference Player of the Year and first team All-American basketball player at Northwestern University. “It really reflects leadership. I think leadership casts a tremendous shadow across an organization and I think that’s really where your coach makes a huge difference in your life,” she said. “I remember my coach had a tremendous influence on my life and on my career. The one thing that really resonates is what that coach meant to me.”
Browne Sanders praised coaches Wieler and Kathy Twist of the tennis team, noting that their leadership was key to their teams’ success.
As a retired high school principal, Wieler said he appreciates the academic aspect of being a student-athlete. “I respect it, I’ve encouraged it, I’ve nurtured it my entire life,” he said. “UB is a special place; it’s a wonderful place for a student to get an education, for a student to realize their opportunities in the academic world and prepare them for life.”
Wieler noted that UB’s academic reputation has been extremely helpful in recruiting talented athletes.
“It’s the thing that helps me encourage kids to come here: They can realize not just their rowing dreams, but also realize their academic dreams and prepare them as they move forward,” he said.
In other business at Monday’s meeting, President John B. Simpson updated council members on the budget situation. He noted that the UB 2020 strategic planning process has helped the university in planning for a nearly 3 percent cut in state operating funds for 2008-09.
“We have the advantage of having done as an institution a considerable amount of preparation about rethinking, re-engineering and revising the kinds of things we do; in that way we are, in my view, better off than any other SUNY campus,” Simpson said. “We are better prepared than we would have been if we hadn’t done all the things required of UB 2020 in thinking about the future that we’ve done over the past several years.”
He stressed that he and other university leaders are viewing the budget situation as “not a one-time event; it’s going to be an event that’s going to be visited by this university for several years.”
Simpson also cited several points about the budget situation that he wanted council members to keep in mind:
UB 2020 always has been envisioned as a long-term, multi-year plan. The fact that UB will see a decline in funding from the state this year and for perhaps the next several years “does not dissuade us in our determination in pursuing our goals and aspirations.” While the timeline may change, the long-term goals do not, he said.
UB will deal with the budget crisis as a community. A paradigm for doing this has been established by what has been done with UB 2020—“by broadly engaging all sectors of the campus,” Simpson said. “If you do not engage the community in a successful way with what you’re planning to do, you can’t do anything and you’ll end up having chaos and talking about the wrong kinds of process issues and not engaging your energy and your time and your thinking in the long-term goals of the institution.”
The budget cut illustrates how New York is going to have to start thinking about different kinds of policies and treatments for its campuses if it wants to have a successful state university system. “It’s a perfect illustration of how the present paradigm, particularly the year-to-year consideration of how the state university is viewed, is not going to get us beyond, at best, where we are today,” Simpson said.
The budget crisis gives UB an opportunity to “provoke conversations” about policy and funding issues, and about community engagement in ways that push the agenda and success of the university, particularly in the context of UB 2020 and UB as an asset in the community.