Changing the Game | From the Sidelines to the Front Office | The Campus as Community | From Eligibility to Excellence | Telling Their Story
Building the Whole Person: Development, Identity, and Life Beyond Sport
College athletics has always promised to develop more than competitors. The phrase “student-athlete” is itself a statement of intent—a recognition that what happens in the classroom, on the field, in the community, and in the development of a young person’s character. That promise has often remained aspirational rather than structural. The following honorees have made it concrete, creating programs that deliberately develop their student-athletes as leaders, as professionals, and as people—with or without a uniform on.
Agnes Scott College sits in Decatur, Georgia, and its DNA of a Scottie program is designed to define and develop the qualities that make an Agnes Scott athlete prepared for the world. Launched two years ago and now fully integrated into the athletics department’s expectations, the program is built around year-long intentional programming covering identity and goal-setting, leadership, nutrition and wellness, stress management, communication, career development, and decision-making. Rather than relying on one-time workshops, the program takes a deliberately developmental approach—skills are built progressively throughout a student’s collegiate career, with coaches reinforcing the work within their own teams.
Every athlete, not just team captains, is encouraged to understand how her choices, voice, and contributions shape her team, campus, and community. Community service is embedded in the program as leadership in action—they learn that showing up for others is part of what a leader does. The initiative also includes a community-centered facility revenue strategy, opening Agnes Scott’s athletic spaces to youth organizations, schools, and recreation programs at affordable rates, turning their facilities into community assets and generating sustainable revenue without making local access an afterthought.
Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, has tackled a different but complementary challenge: getting clinical-quality psychological skills training to every student-athlete, not just those who seek it out. The Cardinal Mental Fitness Community (CMFC), constructed over two years by Director of Athletics Dr. Greg Lott and clinical sport psychologist Dr. Steve Graef, delivers ten targeted sessions throughout the academic year, each covering a specific psychological construct such as goal-setting, mindfulness, visualization, anxiety management, and identity beyond sport.
The sessions work across three elements: learning the science, connecting with peers across sports (a golfer discussing anxiety with a football player creates unique moments of empathy and insight), and receiving practical tools to integrate into training. Coaches have become genuine partners in reinforcing the content within their own programs—the volleyball team now uses mindfulness techniques in serving preparation, while cross-country employs daily stress check-ins before practice. In the program’s most recent cycle, the CMFC averaged more than 80 participants per session, up from roughly 30 in its first year, with 61% of athletes reporting the program was valuable to them and 58% saying the tools were useful in competition.
A third area of this work involves helping student-athletes translate the exceptional skills they develop through athletics into credentials that employers actually recognize. The demanding schedules of competitive athletics make it genuinely difficult to engage with traditional career development programming, and many athletes arrive at graduation having developed extraordinary leadership, resilience, and communication skills that never appear on a résumé.
The University of North Florida’s Total Osprey Digital Badge Program, launched in Spring 2025 and now serving 357 enrolled athletes, addresses this directly through a digital badge framework delivered through the university’s Canvas Credentials platform. The OspreyPro Professional Skills Badge covers résumé development, interview preparation, and career exploration through workshops and AI-assisted professional assessments. The Covey LeaderU Badge is a 30-hour leadership curriculum. Elective badges allow students to personalize their learning in areas including NIL, financial literacy, and personal branding. A Capstone Career Readiness Experience requires demonstration of mastery in transferable skills and identity development beyond sport.
What ties these approaches together is the conviction that holistic development doesn’t happen by accident—it requires structure, intentionality, and genuine institutional investment.
At the University of Miami, that investment has been sustained for more than a decade through the Helper Helper platform, which began in 2015 as a community service tracking tool and has since evolved into the operational backbone of an entire student-athlete development ecosystem. With 400-plus athletes across 18 sports—roughly 25% of them international—keeping the University of Miami’s Leadership Academy department meaningfully connected and engaged requires both consistency and flexibility. The platform’s three-minute mobile sign-in process allows the university to communicate events, track engagement across four pillars including Community Outreach, Career Competence, Leadership Development, and Personal Enhancement, and document volunteer activities that athletes initiate on their own time.
The Annual Pen Pal Program, which pairs 100-plus athletes with local second- and third-grade classrooms throughout the year, exemplifies the philosophy: the program curates experiences with genuine developmental staying power. Since 2015, Miami athletes have accumulated more than 81,800 total engagement hours across 3,272 opportunities, and the Hurricanes have ranked in the top three nationally in Helper Helper’s NCAA Community Service Challenges for five consecutive years, including first-place finishes in 2022-23 and 2024-25.
