LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — Centenary’s Sarah Bradshaw was named Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Female Character and Community Student-Athlete of the Week. The senior from Longview, Texas, joined fellow Centenary student-athletes Kayla Thornhill (women’s cross country) and Gregg Simmons (men’s cross country) who were honored earlier this seeason.
Bradshaw, who served as President of the Centenary College Student-Athlete Advisory Committee this past year, helped to organize many activities throughout the 2013-14 academic year, including the Centenary College Service Week, which is sponsored by the Centenary SAAC.
This week-long event gave the student-athletes to interact and assist with various organizations in the Shreveport community.
The 17 intercollegiate programs divided into small groups to lend a helping hand at Common Ground, the Northwest Louisiana Food Bank and Querbes SPAR Recreation Center with service projects that consisted of dinner preparation, helping in the community garden, cleanup projects, tutoring and various other activities.
“This is a new approach to service that we have implemented this year,” said Bradshaw. “Community service is very important to us and this is a great way to get everyone involved. We as student-athletes believe that community service is important to grow and expand the community and we are all excited to help in any way we can.”
“With smaller groups, everyone can help and we can help many different organizations with service projects instead of finding somewhere large enough for all of us to go together,” continued Bradshaw. “We paired teams up by their brother and sister teams and then found places that needed some type of service work done and sent student athletes there.”
The student-athletes totaled 200-plus hours of community service during the week.
In addition to her role as SAAC President, Bradshaw played a huge role in the mentoring and training of Resident Assistants. She coordinated the “Sunshine Committee”, which helped create a culture of caring among the Residence Life staff by leading a committee that celebrated birthdays as well as spreading “sunshine” to staff for encouragement. The group also supported Centenary students and student-athletes by giving them encouragement and promoting their activities across campus.
Bradshaw also assisted with the Salvation Army Toy Drive, Polar Plunge, a canned food drive, Oxfam America and single-handedly organized a Special Olympics Basketball game.
She also assisted with the campus MLK Service Day and worked with Shreveport Green.
The SCAC Character & Community award was created in 2009 to honor and recognize the efforts of the extraordinary student-athletes of the conference who not only excel athletically on the field, course, court, pool or track, but also by serving their campus and community.
Source: http://www.gocentenary.com/wgolf/news/2013-14/7105/bradshaw-named-scac-female-character-and-community-student-athlete-of-the-week/
