A senior athlete for APU, Svagdis also holds multiple important leadership roles for APU’s athletic department.
Recently, ZU News had the privilege of interviewing Azusa Pacific University senior Emma Svagdis.
Svagdis is a member of the women’s volleyball team, along with being a kinesiology major set to graduate in May of 2021. As if there wasn’t enough on her plate already, Svagdis is also the treasurer of the APU Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and a PacWest representative on the NCAA Student-Athlete Advisory Committee.
Throughout the interview, we discovered more about Svagdis’ responsibilities, what she’s learned and what she’ll take with her when she graduates from APU.
Explain all the positions you hold/have held at APU.
For APU SAAC: “I started that my sophomore year and that year I was just learning. It really is just representing my teammates. Through the APU SAAC we put on different fundraisers for Make-A-Wish and we hold different events. We like to focus on athletes supporting other athletes, so we hold events where certain teams will go to other team events.”
“We have brother/sister teams where we support each other, and that’s kind of the main thing we do with that. We hold ‘Stars Nights’ where we sell little stars and that money goes to Make-A-Wish, and then our big event every year is called ‘King and Queen of the ZU.’ It’s kind of like a talent show we host and we sell tickets to it and have raffle prizes and have three boys and three girls do little talent activities and that’s our big event of the year.”
For the National SAAC: “National SAAC is a little bit different. That one is centered through the NCAA. Every Division II Conference has a representative, so there are 26 of us on that committee. It’s similar to APU SAAC in what we do there, we just have a wider range of student athletes that we represent.”
“We’re just the voice of the student athletes. We are able to vote on NCAA legislations, so we can speak on behalf of student athletes through that. We go back and forth with our conference (I represent the PacWest Conference) and I go back and forth with our commissioner and administrators in the conference and get feedback from them and relay information about what’s going on in the NCAA.”
“Really what we do is enhance the voice of the student athletes and promote opportunities. With that we also collaborate with the Make-A-Wish foundation.”
What have you guys been able to do during this COVID-19 season?
“We’re really limited in what we can do. We decided as a group that we were going to push for voter registration and voter education, so our goal right now is to get 100% of our student athletes who are eligible to vote to be registered and to go out and vote.”
“We are creating t-shirts that have a slogan and a Bible verse on them. They’re APU shirts and we’re selling them to student athletes. The money we’re raising from that, we are donating to Be the Bridge which is an organization that promotes racial reconciliation and racial justice. It’s a Christian organization, so it aligns with a lot of the values we hold as a committee and as an athletic department.”
Would you say there have been visible results during your time with the National SAAC?
“Yeah, I would definitely say that! One thing that we’re currently working on right now is the ‘Name, Image, and Likeness’ Legislation. That’s something we’ve been discussing for over a year now, which is allowing student athletes to be able to profit off of their name, image, and likeness. We’ve been able as a committee to provide a lot of good feedback to the NCAA and to the National Office in what we’re hearing at the conference and institutional level. That’s something that will be voted on this January at the NCAA Convention.”
How have these leadership positions helped you grow? What qualities, if any, do you think have improved since your time in these positions?
“It’s helped me step out of my comfort zone. I am not usually someone to go out and try different things or put myself out there like that, but it’s made me comfortable just communicating with other people.”
“We talk a lot with our compliance administrators, our athletic directors and other people in authority so it’s helped me in that way. In a leadership capacity, just being able to put on these events or come up with these ideas is something that’s helped shape me.”
What’s one of the biggest takeaways you’ve had from these experiences?
“I think just learning how much of a voice that you can have. Just on this committee, I didn’t realize the things that we were able to accomplish. I thought this was just a committee where we were just getting updates and sharing information with our teams and everything, but there’s a lot that we can do with this and there’s a lot that we can do on campus and in our community and that’s one of my biggest takeaways.”
Besides voting for the ‘Name, Image, and Likeness Legislation in January, Svagdis is waiting for news on whether or not volleyball will return this year. After college, Svagdis plans on attending graduate school to become a high school science teacher. She hopes her time communicating with others as a SAAC representative will translate to working with students, teachers and administrators in the future.