SportLinc Re-launched

SportLinc is back! The Athletes in Action (AIA) program, Sport Leaders in New Campuses, created to build student athletes into volunteer leaders on campuses without AIA staff has made an impressive comeback after a four-year hiatus due to a shortage of staff to man the program.

“SportLinc was definitely an area where the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few,” Director of Campus Partnerships, Scott* says. “It has been a priority of AIA for a number of years now to get SportLinc up and running just because we would continuously get e-mails from students expressing interest in starting AIA.”

Originally pioneered in 1997, SportLinc volunteers are assigned a full-time AIA staff member who serves as a coach. Volunteers receive encouragement, guidance and information that enable them to lead AIA ministries on their campuses.

Primarily, interaction between a staff member and a volunteer is through a weekly telephone appointment. The volunteers generally spend time discussing with an AIA staff consultant about their own personal walks with God, the campus ministry and in prayer.

“It has been good to have guidance from our coach just helping us along the way as far as discussion topics for meetings and just the accountability that we get knowing that our coach is waiting to hear about our meetings every week,” Michelle Snow, a volunteer leader at the University of Northern Colorado, says.

SportLinc could play a number of different roles including the following:

· SportLinc Distance is done either from the AIA headquarters in Xenia, Ohio or by other staff in the field and is carried out entirely long distance.

· SportLinc Connection campuses do not have a specific AIA staff member assigned to them therefore they do not have a weekly telephone conversation with a consultant. They do receive all mailings such as email letters and brochures to keep them informed on the latest ministry ideas and opportunities. SportLinc staff is available to Connection campuses on an “as needed” basis.

From 1997 until 2004, official SportLinc campuses grew from 19 to 52 full-fledged campuses and an additional 45 Connection campuses, and 20 Canadian universities. Returning in the fall of 2008, the program began with just two campuses and grew to 21 “Distance” campuses and 12 “Connection” campuses.

Concordia University has only been using SportLinc for one semester and according to Erin, the AIA staff coach, although AIA is not yet an official ministry on the campus, the student-athletes expressed interest.

Getting AIA started on a campus such as Concordia could be a long, gradual process as much of the first year working with SportLinc focuses on the leader’s growth as well as getting a feel for the campus’s interest, looking towards what lays ahead and developing a realistic vision.

“As SportLinc leaders, we want to be here as a resource for them but our advice is to really seek God, spend time in the word, continue to grow in their own faith and walk in the Lord while continuing to search for His direction on the way the ministry should go,” Erin says.

The basic concept of today’s SportLinc is similar to its original goal but improvements have been made to make the learning experience more personal and beneficial.

With advancements in technology, the SportLinc website now has resources and material that can be downloaded and volunteers can have face-to-face weekly meetings with their coaches using SKYPE if their computers have video capabilities.

“We are trying to be more personal with occasional face-to-face contact, visiting them on campus or bringing them to a winter retreat to have a connection point with students that are doing SportLINC as well as recruiting for more SportLinc campuses,” Scott says.

Not only will leaders and staff-members be uniting more in the future but the Campus Partnership department intends to establish retreats catered to SportLinc.

“We are hoping to do more regional leadership retreats where we can do what we call Student-Athlete Leadership Team (SALT) training for SportLinc campuses so we could bring leaders together from different campuses to help them catch the vision of AIA and how God could use them on their campuses,” Scott says

In addition, SportLinc now includes United States Campus Ministry (USCM) Connect in which Scott provides resources for Campus Crusade for Christ staff so that they could work with athletes and bear the name AIA.

“Campus Partnerships help to resource USCM to do a better job because working with athletes can be significantly different from working with your average student,” Scott says.

According to Snow, bearing the name AIA could significantly help in a campus’s ministry growth.

“For the first semester, two of us just met because we couldn’t get any other athletes to join so it was like we needed the AIA name just to motivate more people to be involved,” Snow says.

As the University of Northern Colorado got hooked up with SportLinc in August 2008, Snow’s group of two gradually grew to about 15 student-athletes.

Not only have their weekly meetings grown but SportLinc has helped with the bigger picture as well.

“It’s been interesting to see how our campus has really come together. What’s really neat is that we have seen a community between AIA and Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) that hadn’t necessarily been built in the Colorado area,” Snow says.

For more information on SportLinc, please visit http://www.aiasportlinc.org/.

By Elaine Piniat, AIA summer intern in the communications department.

Elaine.piniat@athletesinaction.org

*Athletes in Action’s policy is to use only first names of AIA staff members in online stories.

News | General | Campus Ministry