Coaches help student athletes adjust

Ezekial Rodriguez has a passion to help students.

Rodriguez is an assistant football coach and one way that he is helping student athletes is through a new program for both freshmen and transfers. He's created a new coaches panel to help student athletes on campus.

"It's through the Adawe Center," he said. "What we're doing is we're creating a mentor program for freshman athletes to quell any inter-team conflict."

Amber Reagan-Kendrick, Adawe Lifeplan Center Adviser, said that the plan was initated as a way for the Adawe Center to partner with other departments at OU.

"Really this is a collaborative effort with the Adawe Lifeplan Center and our mission here to work with different departments to support retention," she said.

"To create an environment that supports learning and also just make a very positive experience with our athletes."

Reagan-Kendrick said that one of the first things they started was an athletic peer mentor group.

"The purpose in that is to not only help with the incoming freshman right now in 2010," she said. "Right now the peer mentors are working specifically with our transfer athletes."
Adam Henn, a freshman biology major, said that he was asked to be one of the peer mentors.

"It's kind of a new thing and we're trying to help people who don't feel comfortable around campus or with what they're doing," he said. "We're trying to get them involved with things and just make them feel at home."

Rodriguez said there were several different goals for the new program.
"We have to get out and be active in the student population," he said. "One of the things we wanted to do was have a coaches panel for transfers and freshmen athletes."

Craig Shaw, head women's soccer coach, was one of the coaches on the first panel. Shaw said that he thinks it is important to help new students understand what college is like.

"Having been a student athlete myself, I hopefully had some knowledge that might help somebody," he said. "I thought it was very well done and I think a lot of students got something out of it."

Andy Carrier, men's head basketball coach, said that he was happy to sit on the first panel.

"I'm not sure how formal it was," he said. "But any of those types of things that are attempting to reach out to students and make them feel more comfortable and help them adjust and identify people and resources to help them is a good thing."