FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.– Nova Southeastern University Student Athlete Affairs Educational Workshops hosted an event where student-athletes celebrated the Title IX 40th Anniversary.
Lura Fleece and Rene Carls of Exchange It! led the workshop, which focused on recognizing and understanding different challenges and the step to take to move through them and into a better place. Student-Athletes who attended the workshop were:
Gina Bondarenko (Jr., Pembroke Pines, Fla.) of the softball team, junior
Dilja Olafsdottir (Jr., Reykjavik, Iceland) of the women’s soccer team and sophomore Kaitlyn Baran of cheerleading.
“For workshop, we discussed important communication skills that will be valuable to our lives far beyond our years of being student-athletes at NSU,” said Baran. “Creating a positive culture within our team, reaching out to my teammates, as well as building personal bonds with individuals are among the many communicative actions we claimed imperative. As a group, we decided that an effective team dismisses the negative and works with the positive to improve and become stronger. To say the very least, today's workshop was a very useful and memorable experience.”
“During the Exchange It! Workshop, we discussed the implications of reacting to a challenge, rather than pausing to think about the best direction to take in order to move toward a solution,” said Bondarenko. “As a group, we discussed scenarios where being faced with a challenge was particularly hard. I learned that having a clear plan and knowing how to approach others with the plan and articulating the vision in a motivating manner are usually very helpful.”
“Having the Exchange It! team help us develop and hone in on our team challenges was a huge help as I grow into my position as a team leader,” said Olafsdottir. “We started off by discussing how we've been faced with injury and team challenges and how we plan to further our initiatives. The next step included some hands-on activities where communication and rational decision-making were imperative for successful completion. We also worked on handling potentially difficult situations that cause friction between teammates. We discussed the best ways to communicate and diffuse these issues, going over how to know when listening is more effective or when the situation calls for a more proactive, vocal response. Every person in attendance voiced opinions and made suggestions throughout the workshop, furthering the notion that as we progress through our action plan, we're going to be a more cohesive team because of it.”
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