New Division I rules designed to encourage student-athletes to participate in study-abroad programs will take effect in August, but some schools already have created programs that open international study opportunities to college athletes.
At Stanford and Duke, for instance, student-athletes are getting an opportunity often not available in college sports.
In a collaborative effort, athletes from each school have served areas of need across the world through the Rubenstein-Bing Student-Athlete Civic Engagement Program, known as ACE. For three weeks in the summer, college athletes travel to South Africa, China, India or Vietnam to engage in what program director Emily Durham calls “immersive service experiences.”
“We really see it as a reciprocal exchange,” Durham says. “The student-athletes are learning so much, and the communities are learning from them. It’s really a two-way street.”
The program is the result of a February 2014 meeting at which Stanford hosted the Duke board of trustees. Both schools were interested in finding ways for the academically and athletically elite universities to work together. What emerged was a desire for both athletics departments to provide international education opportunities for student-athletes, whose myriad commitments often make those sorts of experiences inaccessible.
“To have this window of opportunity in the summer to allow them to, in a sense, study abroad is just a wonderful opportunity,” Stanford Athletics Director Bernard Muir says. “I’m glad both of our institutions were able to come together and make this happen.”
As part of the first ACE trip, Duke student-athletes Elizabeth Horne and Oliver Spring traveled to South Africa with eight other athletes from both universities. Outside Cape Town, the group served an elementary school and orphanage housing children with mental and physical disabilities. Among their projects: Build a platform for a water tank and hold a camp to teach the children track and field events. The athletes also taught goal-setting classes and showed the students how they could use math to check their athletic progress.
“I gained so much more from being there than they gained from me going to help,” says Horne, who is from the United Kingdom and competes on the rowing team at Duke. “Maybe they got an extra water tank, but the lessons I learned were so valuable.”
Spring, a soccer player at Duke, said his coaches supported his participation in the program and wanted him to encourage other student-athletes to apply.
“The way it works in with our schedule and the way we’re able to train, it’s an awesome opportunity that a student-athlete shouldn’t turn down,” Spring says.
