Naveen Jindal School of Management marketing major and soccer player Joseph Weber has been elected vice chair of the NCAA Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), moving him one step closer to his dream of launching a career in sports administration.
Weber, a senior and starting goalkeeper for the Comets soccer team, was nominated by his fellow National SAAC representatives and then elected by a majority vote at the Nov. 13-14 SAAC Leadership Council meeting. He will take office in January and serve until his two-year committee member term ends in December 2017.
A year ago, when Weber was appointed to serve on SAAC, he thought he would be lending his voice to minor issues and might be able to make a small impact at the campus level. He soon realized that he would be at the forefront of nationwide movements and governance that make a real difference in people’s lives.
“I thought I would be involved with little things like getting key-card access to the training room or rearranging our team’s budget so we can eat more nutritious meals on road trips, things like that,” he said. “After I got involved, I realized that there was a much bigger picture. Being able to make a difference on a grander scale and see how it affects people’s lives, that’s fulfilling.”
Weber has worked on committee initiatives such as the It’s On Us campaign — launched by the White House in 2014 in partnership with the NCAA and other organizations to bring awareness to and prevent sexual assaults on university campuses.
“Now I see students on campus wearing the It’s On Us T-shirts all the time,” Weber said. “My friends on the committee have seen them on their campuses, too. At first we thought it would be something small but a point that needed to be made. Now, seeing it come to fruition with spin-offs on campus and as a national movement in which students all over have better awareness about the issue — it’s been rewarding.”
More recently, the committee has focused on mental-health awareness and solving such game-environment problems as inappropriate behavior by fans and parents toward visiting teams and participants.
“We expect heckling from students,” Weber said. “We see them as our equals, so it isn’t a big deal. We portray their remarks as just trying to get in our heads to help their team win — also, they are attending that university and thus representing it. But we draw a line when parents and other family members display inappropriate behavior toward students and referees. We see it as coming from a degrading and derogatory place. They are not representing their institution and really should be more mature than that.”
As a committee member, Weber also has a voice in influencing NCAA legislation. He spoke on the floor of the NCAA convention last January in front of 1,500 people about allowing student-athletes to use student-athlete only facilities outside the playing and practice season and spoke in opposition to allowing student-athletes to participate in university fundraisers involving athletics ability. He also got to witness committee members as they changed the minds of conference commissioners, athletic directors and university presidents when they gave voice to fellow student-athletes’ concerns.
“Seeing how much a student-athlete’s voice is represented, particularly in Division III, is amazing,” Weber said. “It’s already given me a glimpse into what I want to do as a career,” he said. “I’m looking into getting a master’s in sports administration now.”
Weber has applied for a postgraduate internship with the NCAA. The position would help move him toward his goals of continuing to be involved behind the scenes in athletics, perhaps in governance within the NCAA or in compliance or development at a university, and eventually becoming an athletic director or conference commissioner.
For now, Weber is focusing on his studies and his new role in SAAC leadership after having completed a successful soccer season with a record of 13-5-2. The Comets won the regular-season American Southwest Conference (ASC) title as well as the ASC Tournament title. They went on to compete in the NCAA Division III tournament, where they lost in the opening round. Weber was named the ASC’s Goalkeeper of the Year — all while maintaining a GPA above 3.1.
