Reese Maccario will represent UConn Sport Management and UConn Athletics at the AAC Symposium.
Sport Management undergraduate student Marisa Maccario and Associate Professor Dr. Joseph Cooper will travel to the University of Central Florida this weekend to attend this year’s American Athletic Conference Research Symposium.
Maccario, a four-year member of the women’s ice hockey team, will be participating in a panel discussion on Friday, April 6 that focuses on critical issues concerning the well-being of student athletes at the Division I level. More specifically, the conversation will surround mental health, sleep recovery, leadership training, career development, transition to post-eligibility and body issues.
Dr. Joseph Cooper will discuss cultural well-being of student athletes in the AAC.
Dr. Cooper will be presenting with Dr. Drew Brown from the University of Delaware on the cultural well-being of student athletes in the AAC. He and his colleague will focus on how, and to what extent, the students’ cultural needs are being met and by whom.
Scott Brown, UConn’s NCAA Faculty Athletic Representative, AAC Conference Faculty Representative Committee Chair and the head of the Educational Psychology department in Neag, will also be accompanying Maccario to Orlando for the conference.
Follow @UConnSPM on Instagram and Twitter to get live updates from the symposium.
Left to Right: HESA Graduate Assistant Rico Destinvil, Professor Kari Taylor, HESA student Jessica Gramajo Vivas, Professor Reggie Blockett, HESA Student and Staff Development Manager Danielle DeRosa, and Professor Milagros Castillo-Montoya stand with donated clothing. Photo by Shawn Kornegay.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Connecticut schools welcomed a wave of Puerto Rican students who had been displaced from their homes and communities on the island. This February, the HESA program and campus partners (the Department of Educational Leadership, HESA students, and the HESA village) ran a winter clothing drive to benefit newly-arrived Puerto Rican students at two local high schools.
Professor Milagros Castillo-Montoya, who spearheaded the project, initially approached Christina Rivera, an Ed.D. student in the Department of Educational Leadership, with the idea. Rivera was able to connect Dr. Castillo-Montoya with the two Connecticut schools that expressed the need for donations: Hartford Public High School and Windham High school.
Once the school connections had been made, Castillo-Montoya said, the HESA and EDLR communities mobilized to collect a total of 270 items, which included coats, jackets, boots, scarves, pants, and gloves. HESA practicum student Jessica Gramajo Vivas created a flyer to notify the HESA and EDLR communities of the opportunity to donate items, and HESA Student and Staff Development Manager Danielle DeRosa coordinated with current HESA students to distribute donation boxes to collect items.
“The success achieved in so little time would not have been possible without the people who helped get the word out, HESA students who collected donations at their respective assistantship sites, assistantship site and practicum site supervisors who allowed donations to get collected there, and everyone who donated,” said Castillo-Montoya. She also highlighted donations from EDLR faculty, HESA students, and the entire HESA village.
“For these high school students and their families, some of which are living in shelters, this made a big difference,” said Castillo-Montoya. “Thank you to all who got involved and helped make this happen.” While unable to assist in all hurricane relief efforts, this drive was an opportunity for the HESA and EDLR communities to build on existing relationships and support local students in a targeted and timely way.
Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom, outlined in this month’s issue of Neag School Accolades.
National Education Policy Center (The UCLA Civil Rights Project held a policy briefing at the U.S. Senate on March 5th regarding vouchers, which included a presentation by EDLR’s Preston Green)
Joseph Cooper meets with student Joseph Cooper, assistant professor of sport management, meets with a Neag School student. (Photo Credit: Sean Flynn/UConn)
Editor’s Note: The following was originally published on the UConn Innovation Portal and then again on the Neag School of Education’s website.
Joseph Cooper, an assistant professor of sport management and educational leadership in UConn’s Neag School of Education, is a co-investigator with Drew Brown, assistant Africana studies professor at the University of Delaware, on a grant from the American Athletic Conference to study the topic of whether and how white coaches are fulfilling the cultural needs of black college athletes.
Nine out of the 12 universities in the American Athletic Conference (AAC) have white football coaches, but many of the athletes on these teams are black, and the quality of the relationship between black college athletes and white coaches often impacts athletes’ developmental experiences in college and post-college, according to the researchers.
The quality of the relationship between black college athletes and white coaches often impacts athletes’ developmental experiences in college and post-college, according to the researchers.
Cooper and Brown will conduct interviews and administer surveys to college athletes from three different AAC schools to better understand if black college athletes feel their relationship with their white coaches fulfill their cultural needs.
The study will apply co-cultural communication theory, which studies how nondominant groups in society create alternative forms of communication to articulate their experiences. In addition, this study will incorporate critical race theory, which scrutinizes existing societal power structures that marginalize people of color and is germane to the study of the dynamic between white coaches and black college athletes. Thus, this study will explore the role race, culture, and communication styles play in the relationship between “in group” and “out group” members across the lines of race and sport role involvement.
After completing this study, Cooper and Brown will generate suggestions for the direction of future research in this area to improve these critical relationships.
Cooper received his Ph.D. in kinesiology and sport management and policy from the University of Georgia. His areas of interest are sport management, gender and race in sports, racism and other forms of oppression, higher education and qualitative research.
Access the original post on the UConn Innovation portal.
