NEW ORLEANS – UT Arlington Athletics won the Sun Belt Conference's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee Community Service Initiative Award for 2019-20, as announced on a league-wide membership call Wednesday morning.
UTA Athletics – which completed more community service hours than any other Sun Belt school – has consistently made community service a focal point of its department, and this past year was no different as the Mavericks have now claimed either the Sun Belt's Community Service Initiative Award or its Community Impact Award every single year since 2015-16.
In 2018-19, the Mavericks swept both awards, winning the Community Service Initiative for the first time. They defended that honor in 2019-20 thanks to a wide-array of volunteering which impacted not only the local Arlington and DFW communities but established a global footprint.
Included among those volunteer initiatives were the following orchestrated by UTA student-athletes:
- Volunteered with the Navajo Reservation doing outreach and putting on events.
- Canned food drive to donate to Mission Arlington.
- Raising money and donations for foodbanks to help with COVID-19 relief.
- Serving food at the Ronald McDonald House in DFW.
- Educating people in the community about alcohol awareness.
- Volunteer work with Mission Arlington, Special Olympics and Churches:
- Playing with kids, teaching them, reading to them and teaching them how to play different sports.
- Giving donations to Mission Arlington.
- Local events: Math-o-ween, CASA superhero run, MAV Move-In, Girls in Sports and Fun Fair Clinic.
"We pride ourselves on community involvement, and we're honored to be recognized once again as a leading institution in the Sun Belt for our student-athletes commitment to service," said UTA Director of Athletics
Jim Baker. "These initiatives all begin with our great SAAC leaders and
Tim Kennedy, and I can't thank them enough for all the hard work they put in behind the scenes to make an impact."
Beyond the aforementioned local volunteer initiatives, UTA Athletics had an impact globally by donating 253 pairs of shoes as part of the Soles4Souls drive which provides footwear for those in need in Africa. Additionally, men's tennis player Edu Simo volunteered with Health Warriors in Barcelona, Spain, to help with COVID-19 relief by delivering and providing meals to health care workers and first responders.
Click here to learn more about Simo's volunteer initiatives.
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