C-USA Student-Athletes Visit Children's Medical Center
Trip Kicks Off Annual Conference SAAC Meetings

July 17, 2012

IRVING, Texas - The Conference USA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, representing all 12 current member institutions, conducted its annual meetings July 13-15 at the C-USA offices.

SAAC Photo Gallery

The theme of this year's meetings was "Defining the Building Blocks of Leadership" as led by C-USA Director of Compliance and Sports Services Frank Arredondo and Academics and Compliance Assistant Callie Hubbell. The group had a great weekend of learning about how to become a more effective leader, sharing best practices, and identifying goals for the academic year. They also heard from other C-USA staff members as well as guest speaker Leslie Barnes, the director of student-athlete development at Duke University.

As always, this year's meetings also included community outreach as the student-athletes kicked off the weekend with a visit to Children's Medical Center in Dallas. The SAAC group interacted with patients - reading, playing games and signing autographs. The C-USA student-athletes that made the visit included Jill Jelnick of East Carolina, Meredith Ware of Houston, Peter Starnes of Marshall, Altrese Hawkins of Memphis, Andrew Murphy of Rice, Blake McJunkin on SMU, Alan Howze of Southern Miss, Brian Lozes of Tulane, Lauren Collette of Tulsa, Kaycee Ike of UAB, Lianne Maldonado of UCF and Marissa Rodriguez of UTEP.

CONFERENCE USA
Conference USA (C-USA) is a NCAA Division I-A Conference based in Irving, Texas. Its membership consists of 12 schools - East Carolina University, University of Houston, Marshall University, University of Memphis, Rice University, Southern Methodist University (SMU), University of Southern Mississippi, Tulane University, University of Tulsa, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), University of Central Florida (UCF) and University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). This realignment was formed on July 1, 2005, and the Conference was first established in 1995. C-USA offers 20 sports total, nine sports for men (baseball, basketball, cross country, football, golf, soccer, tennis and indoor and outdoor track and field) and 11 for women (basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, rowing, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, indoor and outdoor track and field and volleyball).

ABOUT CHILDREN'S MEDICAL CENTER
Children's Medical Center is a private, not-for-profit system, and is the fifth-largest pediatric healthcare provider in the country with 559 licensed beds, two full-service campuses and 10 outpatient sites. Children's was the state's first pediatric hospital to achieve Level 1 Trauma status and is the only pediatric teaching facility in North Texas, affiliated with UT Southwestern Medical Center. For more information about Children's or how to give, please visit www.childrens.com.