by Jeremy Hawkes, Sun Devil Athletics
The sudden conclusion to athletics in 2020 due to COVID-19 was just that. Sudden.
On March 11, the men's basketball team was gearing up in Las Vegas for the Pac-12 Tournament and a spot on the March Madness bracket scheduled to be released that Sunday. The track and field programs were off to Albuquerque for the NCAA Indoor Championships while the swimming and diving, wrestling, hockey, gymnastics and women's basketball programs were looking ahead to NCAA Championship events of their own.
The baseball and softball teams were preparing for weekend series against Utah and UCLA, respectively, and numerous spring sports were still in the early stages of ramping up their 2020 campaigns, including water polo, beach volleyball, lacrosse and tennis.
The men's and women's golf teams -- both in the top-10 -- were loaded with talent and looking ahead to hosting the 2020 NCAA Championships at the Grayhawk Golf Club.
By the next day, that was all an afterthought.
In what was a shockwave that rippled across the nation overnight (quite literally), with the NCAA's decision to cancel all remaining winter and spring events on March 12, effectively bringing the 2019-2020 athletics calendar to a close.
It was a decision that rocked the nation's athletic landscape to the core, affecting tens of thousands of student-athletes. And while those student-athletes were faced with the unenviable task of coming to terms with the sudden ends of their seasons, support staff across the country had to ask one simple and unequivocal question.
What are we going to do to help these young men and women through this trying time?
For Sun Devil Athletics' Office of Student-Athlete Development, the answer was simple: to provide the 600-plus student-athletes with the support and guidance they would need to rally through the final two months of the academic calendar successfully.
While the goal was simple, the application was less so. Resolute in their mission, however, SDA Associate AD for Student-Athlete Development Andrea Lore and Associate AD for Inclusion and Championship Life Alonzo Jones and their respective departments put their heads down and got to work making sure no student-athlete was left behind due to reasons outside of their control.
That process would revolve around the department's academic coaches facilitating an unprecedented transition to full online immersion for the student-athletes while the Championship Life staff was tasked with coming up with creative ways to continue career and leadership development initiatives to prepare the student-athletes for life after athletics.
"We just wanted to provide a sense of stability for the students when so many things were changing and so many things were unknown," Lore said. "We were trying to be that piece that would hold some structure for them. We wanted to continue to provide them with the support they needed so that their academics wouldn't suffer."
-----
Arizona State initially announced a temporary transition to online classes on March 11, beginning the preparation to adapt during the school's spring break. By the following Monday, the university announced that the transition would carry over through the end of the school year.
For Lore and her team, that meant working lockstep with contacts on campus to help with the transition to online learning – a fact that Lore says was critical to the department's success in supporting its student-athletes.
"I really feel that our relationship with the campus Academic Success Center made it really easy for us to make this change," Lore said. "I feel that we were set up due to ASU's strong online presence in place to support that kind of learning that we had a little bit of an advantage in making this transition. It wasn't too big of a jump for us."
Lore and her department worked closely with ASU's Director of University Academic Success Programs, Ivette Chavez, while she also would take part in weekly meetings with her fellow academic cohorts at other Pac-12 institutions to review the changes in the landscape and engage in a dialogue of best practices to best facilitate the adaptation of learning.
One point of emphasis among the academic staff was maintaining the department's mentoring and tutoring programs. The inauspicious circumstances leading to sudden need for change brought a fair share of challenges.
Lore and her group first had to review all practices and policies for online support with the athletic department's Compliance department to ensure the office of student-athlete development was providing support within proper guidelines.
The team was then faced with the technological hurdles that came with such a drastic shift and worked heavily with the department's Information and Technology Services to make sure the support was in place for student-athletes to continue receiving a quality education and the ability to complete their coursework on time.
From there, the department was tasked with preparing its numerous tutors and mentors to be able to provide their support digitally as opposed to in person.
"Basically, within the span of about two days, we had to create policies around what tutors and mentors could or could not do with student-athletes on Zoom," said Jessie Richardson, Associate Director for Academic Support Programs. "We were extremely intent on maintaining our academic integrity, so we created very specific qualities and rules that they had to follow."
Mentors and tutors were encouraged to engage with their appointed student-athletes at the same time each week as they would have in person in order to maintain some semblance of continuity despite the rocky landscape.
"The first week was, of course, a little spotty. Some of our mentors are retired educators so using technology is not necessarily a norm," Richardson said with a chuckle. "But we tried to make things just as routine as possible. The first couple weeks were a little crazy but, honestly, the last month went really smoothly."
With many students returning home during the time, it was also important to make sure everyone had access to the technology they needed. That entailed shipping computers to students who had left the state and even providing wireless hotspots to student-athletes that didn't have access to the internet at home.
The timing also coincided with the start of ASU's Session B, which meant that OSAD oversaw the shipping of books to student-athletes across the country to continue their course load.
Richardson, too, credits ASU's strong online presence for helping smooth over what could have been a rough transition.
"I think because we had such a large platform for online classes, we were definitely ahead of everyone else," she said. "At a lot of institutions, online classes aren't offered as often, so having the experience both on the professors' side and on the students' side really allowed ASU to remain almost as normal as it could under the circumstances."
One other area that provided a unique challenge was providing the support for ASU's nearly 100 international student-athletes, many of which returned to their native countries to be with their families over the course of the semester.
"Now they were in some very different time zones," Lore said. "Some of the staff would be working late into the evening or really early in the morning to accommodate those students to make sure they felt connected and like they could still excel at a high level in their classes."
For the math and science programs, online tutoring online provided its own challenges in the sense of it not being as easy as drawing or writing out an equation for a student-athlete to visualize, something Richardson aimed to emphasize in Zoom sessions with the part-time staff to show them all of the features to offset that.
On the front lines of that was Sun Devil senior swimmer Silja Kansakoski, a chemistry major who also saw her world turned upside down by the canceling of the championship season for swimming and diving. Kansakoski is a recipient of the Sun Devil Athletics Bill Kajikawa Award this year, presented annually to one male and one female graduating senior student-athlete for contributions at Arizona State University based on demonstrated academic excellence, athletic accomplishment, leadership and service in the community.
"The first two weeks after everything happened, I was just shocked and didn't really understand what was going on," Kansakoski said. "I had no clue how my labs were going to work out and I had a huge presentation in one of my other classes that was supposed to be a huge part of our grade."
Kansakoski notes that her academic coach, Kelli Benjamin, was very proactive about making sure she was on top of her schoolwork.
"She was good about reminding us that even though we weren't physically going to our classes, there was still work that needed to be done."
The ability to still meet with her tutors was important during this time, she said, especially being a part of one of the more high-intensity scientific majors.
Kansakoski credits her professors for making the transition as palatable as possible, including having the ability to work on her weekly five-hour lab at her own pace which in turn allowed her to pace herself better with her other courses without having a huge chunk of time taken away from her each week.
"From an academic standpoint, some students actually responded better working from home but still having that support in the background," said Richardson. "It was exciting to see that some people were thriving given the circumstances."
-----
Arizona State University was uniquely positioned to handle the transition to remote learning better than most due to the online infrastructure that was already in place.
"Arizona State provides each student with what we call a digital backpack of technology," said Kyle Bowen, ASU's Executive Director of Learning Experience at the University Technology Office. "That includes things like Zoom, Slack, and Google Suite and these are tools that are commonplace to industries around the world and they are also the same tools that empower our students here at ASU to engage in learning, whether that be in or out of the classroom."
ASU was ranked second nationally for best online bachelor's programs in 2019 by U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in education rankings. A slew of university online master's and MBA programs ranked among the Top-10 respective programs in the nation.
With nearly a 100 undergraduate degree options and an enrollment of over 30,000 undergraduates, ASU Online was the second-largest online campus in the nation in 2019 according to U.S. News and World Report. With the addition of graduate programs, those numbers soar to over 40,000 total students and over 200 degree and certificate options.
But while it's one thing to already have that infrastructure in place for tens of thousands of students who elected to receive an online education, it was an entirely different matter to marshal another 50,000 or more students in such a short amount of time.
"That was the key challenge. How do we, as a massive institution, make this transition almost overnight?" Bowen said. "What we saw from that was an incredible scaling of our environment to the point there were over 13,000 Zoom sessions happening every day and representing over 200 million minutes just over those 46 days."
Nearly 5,000 courses on campuses shifting to an online medium, an enormous task by itself. And while it was important to make sure the infrastructure and support was in place to make that happen, the university equally prioritized making sure it did it in such a way that it would enhance the student experience, maintain faculty-student relationships and solve the problem of connecting with students no matter where they may be.
U.S. News and World Report gave Arizona State a Faculty Credentials and Training Score of 93, which measures how well a school prepares qualified instructors to teach remotely. Over a third to half of the faculty at ASU was already trained to provide quality digital instruction from a distance.
"In many ways we were, as an institution, already technologically positioned to provide this kind of support," Bowen said. "And as we had the need to change very quickly, what we were able to do was mobilize to engage thousands of faculty in their transition from teaching in the classroom to teaching remotely."
The university was incredibly proactive in preparing for the potential shift to remote learning, according to Bowen, with the campus engaging in an initial planning exercises around the time of the first reported case of COVID-19 in the United States to look at how the university might put the necessary resources into place for supporting the faculty and students in that type of environment.
While no timing is good timing for a worldwide pandemic, the university benefited from the placement of Spring Break in order to begin the preparation to transition over 70,000 campus-based students to online instruction.
"A lot of work was done over Spring Break to get the university ready," Bowen said. "Many of the faculty, who would have otherwise been enjoying that break, really engaged in the transition. A huge part of our success was the resilience of our faculty and their ability to change modalities very quickly."
-----
While academic and professional support were incredibly important to everyone, there was also a sense of providing personal support to student-athletes facing an unheralded experience in their life.
"We wanted to make sure that, academically, they were doing alright but first and foremost that they were mentally okay and in a good headspace given everything that was happening." Richardson said.
Among other activities, the department organized a Zoom Town Hall for its Barrett, The Honors College student-athletes to discuss ways it could support those students during such a trying time.
Lore and her staff kept on the department's Tip of the Fork programming, which aims to acknowledge and develop the most excelling Sun Devil student-athletes into becoming transformative leaders. The group had guest speakers that would chat with them about leadership in times of crisis.
"I feel like, as a staff, we kept our arms around our students by staying connected," Lore said. "The academic coaches did a great job of reaching out to students and addressing issues as they came up and making sure that they were a support structure as much as they could be."
As all of this was going on, the department was especially cognizant of its senior student-athletes. With graduation less than two months away at the onset of this, it was vital to keep those student-athletes on track to reach that goal.
"For us (in Championship Life), the first priority was communicating with our seniors to get a sense of what their plans were, what their leads were and to – as much as possible – prepare them for life after sport," Alonzo Jones said. "We wanted to be a regular partner with them and let them know they weren't doing this in isolation or alone."
Jones and his staff contacted all seniors to get an idea of who was good to go and who needed support, providing programming to help those student-athletes flesh out their resumes and professional profiles to best position themselves for future opportunities.
The athletic department hosted a Virtual Stole Ceremony on Monday, providing all of its graduates with the vestment denoting their academic achievement. The ceremony has annually been held in person the week of graduation and it was a tradition that did not want to get lost in the chaos of everything going on. The event featured a graduation video and everyone hearing their name called by the Voice of the Sun Devils, Tim Healey.
"For many of them, they look forward to that at the end of their four or five years to celebrate their graduation with their families," Lore said. "We wanted to honor them and that was something that was important to them and important to us."
The department will also look at ways to celebrate their seniors in the Fall in a more intimate and personal setting.
Kansakoski, who hopes to continue swimming but also be able to work in a pharmaceutical production lab post-graduation, credits her preparation as an athlete for helping her be successful given the circumstances she was faced in her final two months of her senior season and is excited for the opportunity to graduate.
"As an athlete, you're used to having a strict schedule and getting stuff down and that helped in staying on top of everything," she said. "It is nice that we're still getting something and getting a ceremony to celebrate."
There will be 98 Sun Devil student-athletes graduating this Spring/Summer, a number that could have very well have been much lower had they not rallied in the face of adversity.
"I feel like I speak on behalf of all the academic coaches when I saw how proud we are of them because they easily could have gone a different direction with all that was happening," Richardson said. "All of our student-athletes who were planning on graduating in the Spring are still going to be graduating on time."
-----
In addition to the academic piece of things, the Office of Student-Athlete Develop also focused heavily on continued professional development among the student-athletes through the Championship Life program, headed by Alonzo Jones.
Jones noted that when you look at the whole of the student-athlete experience, it was important to provide some continuity especially in a time when seasons were being cancelled and there was high uncertainty about the future.
"For us that meant quickly converting to virtual learning to support their academic goals and graduation, first and foremost. And then they have their communication with their coaches which is both personal and sport specific," Jones said. "But then you have this new accumulation of time. With life skills, it was important that we provided some level of programming so that the student-athlete could feel connected to other student-athletes and have something familiar to them that they would normally expect."
Transparency and communication and a "personal touch" were pivotal in this time with student-athletes navigating such tenuous circumstances. The department arranged three all-student-athlete meetings where they heard from the likes of Vice President for University Athletics Ray Anderson and Deputy Athletics Director Jean Boyd while also discussing the medical climate with Sun Devil Athletics Head Team Physician and Chief of Sports Medicine, Dr. Shanyn Lancaster.
The student-athlete meetings feature other guest speakers, including head volleyball coach Sanja Tomasevic, who discussed training for her national volleyball team in war-time Serbia in an effort to provide testimony on the powers of resiliency.
That resiliency is a common theme among Jones' instruction, who notes that this can be a very traumatic time for many student-athletes. As such, the meetings include access to university counseling services for students in need.
Even in the face of such adversity, however, Jones credits the student-athletes and notes he's not seeing cases of "doom and gloom".
"Even those that lost a season, there's a spirit of resiliency. They've really risen to the moment," he said. "There's some natural frustrations around access and not being able to work out the way they want to, but they're really taking it in stride. That's been commendable."
The Championship Life department held a workshop for student-athletes about "controlling the controllable" with COVID-19 being something outside of the realm of normal and, as such, outside the control of the student-athletes.
"There are likely private moments of frustration, but as a collective body they are managing it quite well."
Jones' focus from a life skills standpoint is to continue to do programming that is lightweight and career-centered but also of interest. Jones' staff seeks to bring some high-profile personalities on Zoom calls and generally help the student-athletes build themselves into something more well-rounded when they come out of this. He hopes that every student-athlete finishes their time at ASU with a completed resume and LinkedIn profile.
Even beyond the current end of the semester, Jones looks ahead to the summer where his department will hold an entrepreneurial workshop alongside the university Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to do that.
Jones believes that even though the unprecedented times lead to being physically remote, individuals can still take the time to become psychological inward and use it as a "contemplative and reflective time".
"We have a collective goal to come out of all of this better than we went into it," Jones said.
The sudden conclusion to athletics in 2020 due to COVID-19 was just that. Sudden.
On March 11, the men's basketball team was gearing up in Las Vegas for the Pac-12 Tournament and a spot on the March Madness bracket scheduled to be released that Sunday. The track and field programs were off to Albuquerque for the NCAA Indoor Championships while the swimming and diving, wrestling, hockey, gymnastics and women's basketball programs were looking ahead to NCAA Championship events of their own.
The baseball and softball teams were preparing for weekend series against Utah and UCLA, respectively, and numerous spring sports were still in the early stages of ramping up their 2020 campaigns, including water polo, beach volleyball, lacrosse and tennis.
The men's and women's golf teams -- both in the top-10 -- were loaded with talent and looking ahead to hosting the 2020 NCAA Championships at the Grayhawk Golf Club.
By the next day, that was all an afterthought.
In what was a shockwave that rippled across the nation overnight (quite literally), with the NCAA's decision to cancel all remaining winter and spring events on March 12, effectively bringing the 2019-2020 athletics calendar to a close.
It was a decision that rocked the nation's athletic landscape to the core, affecting tens of thousands of student-athletes. And while those student-athletes were faced with the unenviable task of coming to terms with the sudden ends of their seasons, support staff across the country had to ask one simple and unequivocal question.
What are we going to do to help these young men and women through this trying time?
For Sun Devil Athletics' Office of Student-Athlete Development, the answer was simple: to provide the 600-plus student-athletes with the support and guidance they would need to rally through the final two months of the academic calendar successfully.
While the goal was simple, the application was less so. Resolute in their mission, however, SDA Associate AD for Student-Athlete Development Andrea Lore and Associate AD for Inclusion and Championship Life Alonzo Jones and their respective departments put their heads down and got to work making sure no student-athlete was left behind due to reasons outside of their control.
That process would revolve around the department's academic coaches facilitating an unprecedented transition to full online immersion for the student-athletes while the Championship Life staff was tasked with coming up with creative ways to continue career and leadership development initiatives to prepare the student-athletes for life after athletics.
"We just wanted to provide a sense of stability for the students when so many things were changing and so many things were unknown," Lore said. "We were trying to be that piece that would hold some structure for them. We wanted to continue to provide them with the support they needed so that their academics wouldn't suffer."
-----
Arizona State initially announced a temporary transition to online classes on March 11, beginning the preparation to adapt during the school's spring break. By the following Monday, the university announced that the transition would carry over through the end of the school year.
For Lore and her team, that meant working lockstep with contacts on campus to help with the transition to online learning – a fact that Lore says was critical to the department's success in supporting its student-athletes.
"I really feel that our relationship with the campus Academic Success Center made it really easy for us to make this change," Lore said. "I feel that we were set up due to ASU's strong online presence in place to support that kind of learning that we had a little bit of an advantage in making this transition. It wasn't too big of a jump for us."
Lore and her department worked closely with ASU's Director of University Academic Success Programs, Ivette Chavez, while she also would take part in weekly meetings with her fellow academic cohorts at other Pac-12 institutions to review the changes in the landscape and engage in a dialogue of best practices to best facilitate the adaptation of learning.
One point of emphasis among the academic staff was maintaining the department's mentoring and tutoring programs. The inauspicious circumstances leading to sudden need for change brought a fair share of challenges.
Lore and her group first had to review all practices and policies for online support with the athletic department's Compliance department to ensure the office of student-athlete development was providing support within proper guidelines.
The team was then faced with the technological hurdles that came with such a drastic shift and worked heavily with the department's Information and Technology Services to make sure the support was in place for student-athletes to continue receiving a quality education and the ability to complete their coursework on time.
From there, the department was tasked with preparing its numerous tutors and mentors to be able to provide their support digitally as opposed to in person.
"Basically, within the span of about two days, we had to create policies around what tutors and mentors could or could not do with student-athletes on Zoom," said Jessie Richardson, Associate Director for Academic Support Programs. "We were extremely intent on maintaining our academic integrity, so we created very specific qualities and rules that they had to follow."
Mentors and tutors were encouraged to engage with their appointed student-athletes at the same time each week as they would have in person in order to maintain some semblance of continuity despite the rocky landscape.
"The first week was, of course, a little spotty. Some of our mentors are retired educators so using technology is not necessarily a norm," Richardson said with a chuckle. "But we tried to make things just as routine as possible. The first couple weeks were a little crazy but, honestly, the last month went really smoothly."
With many students returning home during the time, it was also important to make sure everyone had access to the technology they needed. That entailed shipping computers to students who had left the state and even providing wireless hotspots to student-athletes that didn't have access to the internet at home.
The timing also coincided with the start of ASU's Session B, which meant that OSAD oversaw the shipping of books to student-athletes across the country to continue their course load.
Richardson, too, credits ASU's strong online presence for helping smooth over what could have been a rough transition.
"I think because we had such a large platform for online classes, we were definitely ahead of everyone else," she said. "At a lot of institutions, online classes aren't offered as often, so having the experience both on the professors' side and on the students' side really allowed ASU to remain almost as normal as it could under the circumstances."
One other area that provided a unique challenge was providing the support for ASU's nearly 100 international student-athletes, many of which returned to their native countries to be with their families over the course of the semester.
"Now they were in some very different time zones," Lore said. "Some of the staff would be working late into the evening or really early in the morning to accommodate those students to make sure they felt connected and like they could still excel at a high level in their classes."
For the math and science programs, online tutoring online provided its own challenges in the sense of it not being as easy as drawing or writing out an equation for a student-athlete to visualize, something Richardson aimed to emphasize in Zoom sessions with the part-time staff to show them all of the features to offset that.
On the front lines of that was Sun Devil senior swimmer Silja Kansakoski, a chemistry major who also saw her world turned upside down by the canceling of the championship season for swimming and diving. Kansakoski is a recipient of the Sun Devil Athletics Bill Kajikawa Award this year, presented annually to one male and one female graduating senior student-athlete for contributions at Arizona State University based on demonstrated academic excellence, athletic accomplishment, leadership and service in the community.
"The first two weeks after everything happened, I was just shocked and didn't really understand what was going on," Kansakoski said. "I had no clue how my labs were going to work out and I had a huge presentation in one of my other classes that was supposed to be a huge part of our grade."
Kansakoski notes that her academic coach, Kelli Benjamin, was very proactive about making sure she was on top of her schoolwork.
"She was good about reminding us that even though we weren't physically going to our classes, there was still work that needed to be done."
The ability to still meet with her tutors was important during this time, she said, especially being a part of one of the more high-intensity scientific majors.
Kansakoski credits her professors for making the transition as palatable as possible, including having the ability to work on her weekly five-hour lab at her own pace which in turn allowed her to pace herself better with her other courses without having a huge chunk of time taken away from her each week.
"From an academic standpoint, some students actually responded better working from home but still having that support in the background," said Richardson. "It was exciting to see that some people were thriving given the circumstances."
-----
Arizona State University was uniquely positioned to handle the transition to remote learning better than most due to the online infrastructure that was already in place.
"Arizona State provides each student with what we call a digital backpack of technology," said Kyle Bowen, ASU's Executive Director of Learning Experience at the University Technology Office. "That includes things like Zoom, Slack, and Google Suite and these are tools that are commonplace to industries around the world and they are also the same tools that empower our students here at ASU to engage in learning, whether that be in or out of the classroom."
ASU was ranked second nationally for best online bachelor's programs in 2019 by U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in education rankings. A slew of university online master's and MBA programs ranked among the Top-10 respective programs in the nation.
With nearly a 100 undergraduate degree options and an enrollment of over 30,000 undergraduates, ASU Online was the second-largest online campus in the nation in 2019 according to U.S. News and World Report. With the addition of graduate programs, those numbers soar to over 40,000 total students and over 200 degree and certificate options.
But while it's one thing to already have that infrastructure in place for tens of thousands of students who elected to receive an online education, it was an entirely different matter to marshal another 50,000 or more students in such a short amount of time.
"That was the key challenge. How do we, as a massive institution, make this transition almost overnight?" Bowen said. "What we saw from that was an incredible scaling of our environment to the point there were over 13,000 Zoom sessions happening every day and representing over 200 million minutes just over those 46 days."
Nearly 5,000 courses on campuses shifting to an online medium, an enormous task by itself. And while it was important to make sure the infrastructure and support was in place to make that happen, the university equally prioritized making sure it did it in such a way that it would enhance the student experience, maintain faculty-student relationships and solve the problem of connecting with students no matter where they may be.
U.S. News and World Report gave Arizona State a Faculty Credentials and Training Score of 93, which measures how well a school prepares qualified instructors to teach remotely. Over a third to half of the faculty at ASU was already trained to provide quality digital instruction from a distance.
"In many ways we were, as an institution, already technologically positioned to provide this kind of support," Bowen said. "And as we had the need to change very quickly, what we were able to do was mobilize to engage thousands of faculty in their transition from teaching in the classroom to teaching remotely."
The university was incredibly proactive in preparing for the potential shift to remote learning, according to Bowen, with the campus engaging in an initial planning exercises around the time of the first reported case of COVID-19 in the United States to look at how the university might put the necessary resources into place for supporting the faculty and students in that type of environment.
While no timing is good timing for a worldwide pandemic, the university benefited from the placement of Spring Break in order to begin the preparation to transition over 70,000 campus-based students to online instruction.
"A lot of work was done over Spring Break to get the university ready," Bowen said. "Many of the faculty, who would have otherwise been enjoying that break, really engaged in the transition. A huge part of our success was the resilience of our faculty and their ability to change modalities very quickly."
-----
While academic and professional support were incredibly important to everyone, there was also a sense of providing personal support to student-athletes facing an unheralded experience in their life.
"We wanted to make sure that, academically, they were doing alright but first and foremost that they were mentally okay and in a good headspace given everything that was happening." Richardson said.
Among other activities, the department organized a Zoom Town Hall for its Barrett, The Honors College student-athletes to discuss ways it could support those students during such a trying time.
Lore and her staff kept on the department's Tip of the Fork programming, which aims to acknowledge and develop the most excelling Sun Devil student-athletes into becoming transformative leaders. The group had guest speakers that would chat with them about leadership in times of crisis.
"I feel like, as a staff, we kept our arms around our students by staying connected," Lore said. "The academic coaches did a great job of reaching out to students and addressing issues as they came up and making sure that they were a support structure as much as they could be."
As all of this was going on, the department was especially cognizant of its senior student-athletes. With graduation less than two months away at the onset of this, it was vital to keep those student-athletes on track to reach that goal.
"For us (in Championship Life), the first priority was communicating with our seniors to get a sense of what their plans were, what their leads were and to – as much as possible – prepare them for life after sport," Alonzo Jones said. "We wanted to be a regular partner with them and let them know they weren't doing this in isolation or alone."
Jones and his staff contacted all seniors to get an idea of who was good to go and who needed support, providing programming to help those student-athletes flesh out their resumes and professional profiles to best position themselves for future opportunities.
The athletic department hosted a Virtual Stole Ceremony on Monday, providing all of its graduates with the vestment denoting their academic achievement. The ceremony has annually been held in person the week of graduation and it was a tradition that did not want to get lost in the chaos of everything going on. The event featured a graduation video and everyone hearing their name called by the Voice of the Sun Devils, Tim Healey.
"For many of them, they look forward to that at the end of their four or five years to celebrate their graduation with their families," Lore said. "We wanted to honor them and that was something that was important to them and important to us."
The department will also look at ways to celebrate their seniors in the Fall in a more intimate and personal setting.
Kansakoski, who hopes to continue swimming but also be able to work in a pharmaceutical production lab post-graduation, credits her preparation as an athlete for helping her be successful given the circumstances she was faced in her final two months of her senior season and is excited for the opportunity to graduate.
"As an athlete, you're used to having a strict schedule and getting stuff down and that helped in staying on top of everything," she said. "It is nice that we're still getting something and getting a ceremony to celebrate."
There will be 98 Sun Devil student-athletes graduating this Spring/Summer, a number that could have very well have been much lower had they not rallied in the face of adversity.
"I feel like I speak on behalf of all the academic coaches when I saw how proud we are of them because they easily could have gone a different direction with all that was happening," Richardson said. "All of our student-athletes who were planning on graduating in the Spring are still going to be graduating on time."
-----
In addition to the academic piece of things, the Office of Student-Athlete Develop also focused heavily on continued professional development among the student-athletes through the Championship Life program, headed by Alonzo Jones.
Jones noted that when you look at the whole of the student-athlete experience, it was important to provide some continuity especially in a time when seasons were being cancelled and there was high uncertainty about the future.
"For us that meant quickly converting to virtual learning to support their academic goals and graduation, first and foremost. And then they have their communication with their coaches which is both personal and sport specific," Jones said. "But then you have this new accumulation of time. With life skills, it was important that we provided some level of programming so that the student-athlete could feel connected to other student-athletes and have something familiar to them that they would normally expect."
Transparency and communication and a "personal touch" were pivotal in this time with student-athletes navigating such tenuous circumstances. The department arranged three all-student-athlete meetings where they heard from the likes of Vice President for University Athletics Ray Anderson and Deputy Athletics Director Jean Boyd while also discussing the medical climate with Sun Devil Athletics Head Team Physician and Chief of Sports Medicine, Dr. Shanyn Lancaster.
The student-athlete meetings feature other guest speakers, including head volleyball coach Sanja Tomasevic, who discussed training for her national volleyball team in war-time Serbia in an effort to provide testimony on the powers of resiliency.
That resiliency is a common theme among Jones' instruction, who notes that this can be a very traumatic time for many student-athletes. As such, the meetings include access to university counseling services for students in need.
Even in the face of such adversity, however, Jones credits the student-athletes and notes he's not seeing cases of "doom and gloom".
"Even those that lost a season, there's a spirit of resiliency. They've really risen to the moment," he said. "There's some natural frustrations around access and not being able to work out the way they want to, but they're really taking it in stride. That's been commendable."
The Championship Life department held a workshop for student-athletes about "controlling the controllable" with COVID-19 being something outside of the realm of normal and, as such, outside the control of the student-athletes.
"There are likely private moments of frustration, but as a collective body they are managing it quite well."
Jones' focus from a life skills standpoint is to continue to do programming that is lightweight and career-centered but also of interest. Jones' staff seeks to bring some high-profile personalities on Zoom calls and generally help the student-athletes build themselves into something more well-rounded when they come out of this. He hopes that every student-athlete finishes their time at ASU with a completed resume and LinkedIn profile.
Even beyond the current end of the semester, Jones looks ahead to the summer where his department will hold an entrepreneurial workshop alongside the university Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship to do that.
Jones believes that even though the unprecedented times lead to being physically remote, individuals can still take the time to become psychological inward and use it as a "contemplative and reflective time".
"We have a collective goal to come out of all of this better than we went into it," Jones said.