The Northeast Conference SAAC

By: Lauren Chapman

The Northeast Conference is one of the smallest NCAA Division I conferences, mainly composed of schools in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, and Rhode Island. During the weekend of February 27 and 28, our conference got together for our first in-person meeting of the year in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Surprisingly, there is more than just chocolate in this town. The area is home to the Cancer Recovery Foundation which has a “Bear-able Bag” program that our conference worked with personally. The program is the largest distributor of gifts to kids with cancer in the world. Huge companies such as Crayola and Mattel donate to the foundation and it was our jobs to put the boxes together that get sent to hospitals all over the country.

Mattel donated around 6,000 Barbie’s to the foundation and it was part of our job to unload them out of the boxes. We spent a whole afternoon there and we all felt very accomplished afterwards. Prior to our meeting we had a conference wide penny wars where $2,803.91 was raised for the Cancer Recovery Foundation as well. It was a great experience and we are looking forward to doing it again next year.

For the first time this year we decided to elect a chair and two vice chairs to run the conference SAAC. This will change the formats for future meetings and it will hopefully be run by only the chair instead of our head liaison.
Along with this change, we decided to add the Northeast Conference Award for Excellence in Community Service which would recognize one institution in the conference annually for their community service efforts. The winner will be decided at our February in-person meeting next year. This is a great opportunity for institutions to be recognized for all their hard work within their communities.

The meeting to start off the year was a great success and we were happy to see some major changes within the conference. Our next in-person meeting will be in November where more conference issues will be discussed and hopefully pushed in the right direction.