DURHAM, N.C. - Come this time next week, with the Carolina game in the books and spring break in full swing, most Duke students will have vacated campus for their preferred vacation spot and at least a few days of leisure.
On the other hand, former Blue Devils women’s tennis player Parker Goyer and six other Duke student-athletes will be spending more time on business than pleasure.
Goyer, a 2007 graduate of the university, will be spending Duke’s spring break in Vietnam. Joining her will be six current undergraduate student-athletes: Tad Anderson (wrestling), Kendall Bradley (women’s soccer), Jordan Charles (men’s swimming), Andrea Crane (women’s soccer), Pete Osterland (men's swimming), and Nick Tsipis (men’s soccer).
The purpose of the trip is to conduct advance planning for Coach for College, a program designed by Goyer that will be piloting this summer. Coach for College will bring American student-athletes to rural Vietnam to conduct athletic clinics, help build athletic facilities, and teach sports-themed academic workshops. The goal is to enable student-athletes to use sports to bridge cultural divides and help program participants in Vietnam develop academic and life skills that will ultimately make higher education a more accessible option for them.
In order to ensure the program’s initial success this summer, Goyer organized the advance planning trip in conjunction with Peacework, a Blacksburg, Va.-based nonprofit organization that has worked in Vietnam for 10 years and specializes in connecting American universities to communities in developing countries. While the participating student-athletes may be making their first visit to southeast Asia, there will be little time for sightseeing. They will be called upon to help assess the feasibility and cultural appropriateness of the proposed program activities, evaluate what steps need to be taken to adequately prepare summer program participants prior to departure, and participate in obtaining all of the necessary approvals from Vietnamese authorities.
“One of the goals of the site visit over spring break is to expose the student-athletes to Vietnam and to the specific community where we will be working, so they can gain a greater appreciation for the linguistic, cultural, and political barriers that must be overcome to successfully implement the program,” Goyer said. “But the advance planning trip is also a way of involving student-athletes in the program’s development, so that, by the time summer comes around, student-athletes will have a good idea of what it is like to be in an international cultural immersion program and how to appropriately respond to some of the issues that may arise.”
Goyer and her six companions will depart from Raleigh-Durham International shortly after 6 a.m. Friday. They are scheduled to arrive in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, at 10:20 p.m. local time Saturday. They will spend most of their time about four hours away in the city of Can Tho, the location of the program’s partner university.
Sunday’s itinerary includes a boat cruise on the Mekong River, but from there the schedule is packed with meetings and on-site visits. The student-athletes will visit the locations where summer participants will build facilities, conduct their clinics, and reside. They will also meet with representatives from the local People’s Committee, Department of Education, and Department of Sports in the Mo Cay and Phung Hiep Districts, and with individuals from the Hoa An Research Center at Can Tho University and the Sports Health and Education College at the University of Pedagogy in Ho Chi Minh City. Near the end of the week they will participate in cultural exchange and play sports – likely tennis and soccer, as they are the country’s most popular – against some Vietnamese college students.
“It’s going to be important for us to gain a strong grasp on the culture of Vietnam,” said Crane, who is unique in that she will be participating both in the spring break trip and the summer program.
“That will really determine our success. We need to appreciate their culture if we’re going to have any type of influence on the youth in the program. We have to understand their daily lives and what they react to. Everybody has a different way of learning, and different cultures have different norms, so we’re trying to recognize those to be able to bring them back and inform the student-athletes going on the summer program.”
The idea for Coach for College has evolved over much of the last year. As an undergrad, Goyer was involved in a student organization called Global Grasp, which seeks to raise awareness about global challenges and crises and to provide local avenues to help people affected by those problems. After discussing Vietnam with her faculty advisor, David Brunell – a Duke parent and the Economic Growth Program Manager for USAID in Vietnam – Goyer raised money in the spring of 2007 from the Provost, Office of Service-Learning, and Center for International Studies. She used those funds to conduct a feasibility study in Vietnam during the month of July to investigate whether Duke might develop an interdisciplinary service-learning program there that would combine both coursework and community-based research.
Then, Goyer was invited to be a Robertson Fellow, allowing her to spend time as a post-graduate working on a project of her own creation. During the feasibility study in Vietnam and subsequently in teaching health care education camps to primary school children in rural Belize, Goyer had found that youth in rural parts of developing countries often do not have access to sports equipment and infrastructure, information about issues critical to their personal health and success, or to higher education. These observations, along with conversations with university and government officials in Vietnam, contacts in the Department of State, and the corporate responsibility office of Nike – which has upward of 30 factories in Vietnam – helped convince her that a program such as Coach for College could succeed.
From there, it was a matter of securing funding for Coach for College, which entailed discussing the program with just about anybody who would listen.
“It’s really mind-boggling all the people that helped to make this happen,” Goyer said.
Several individuals were particularly instrumental in helping the program get off the ground. Senior Associate Director of Athletics Chris Kennedy helped Goyer get in touch with the NCAA Vice President of Education Services to make sure the program was in compliance with NCAA Rules, and Director of Student-Athlete Development Leslie Barnes helped to make Duke student-athletes aware of the program. Provost Peter Lange facilitated the project from an administrative angle and helped Goyer find a home for the program in the Center for Civic Engagement, the university’s new umbrella organization for all civic engagement activities at Duke. And Dean of Undergraduate Education Steve Nowicki offered support as well, attending the initial advisory meeting held in December and most recently serving on the selection committee to choose participants for the summer program.
With help from those leaders, along with many others, Goyer was able to raise $130,000 at Duke to fund this summer’s pilot program. That money will allow a total of 10 student-athletes – five per three-week period – to participate in two sessions of Coach for College. The student-athletes will work with bilingual Vietnamese college students, high school students, sports coaches, and athletes to conduct the sports clinics and educational workshops and will collaborate with Vietnamese engineers and construction workers to build the all-sports court next to a middle school in the host community. Goyer hopes the program will help connect the partner university to the surrounding local communities and eventually serve as a source of economic empowerment for several groups of people in rural communities in Vietnam.
While Goyer’s fundraising is obviously impressive for a start-up, she continues her efforts so that even more student-athletes can participate in the program. It costs approximately $4,300 to fund one student-athlete for three weeks. The NCAA recently committed $10,000 to her efforts – though it is unclear when that money will become available – and Goyer is hopeful that individuals or corporations may also wish to fund a student-athlete.
There is no shortage of interest in Coach for College. Goyer received some 60 emails about the program during January and February and 40 applications for the 10 guaranteed scholarship spots in this summer’s program. After she submitted the idea for Coach for College to Nike’s “Sport for a Better World” competition, 20 Duke student-athletes filled the comments section of the web page (http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/3450) with enthusiastic testimonials.
“I’ve always been told to look for a win-win situation,” wrote Duke runner Ben Bubnovich. “The Coach for College program is that situation. I can apply the years of training in education and athletics I’ve benefited from, and help pass what I know down to others. I can see this program being of great value to people in Vietnam because of the trickle-down effect of education. A handful of people who know how to apply to college, speak English, or assess their own health can help spread what we have taught to their family and their peers. If we achieve the goals of the program, we could see the relatively few people we have reached balloon into many more.”
Added Duke lacrosse player Tony McDevitt, “As student athletes, we sometimes take for granted our position in life. Coach for College will allow us to appreciate our position and help those who have not been given opportunities like us.”
That sentiment is important. While the primary goal of the program is to have it positively impact the children of Vietnam, Goyer also designed it specifically for student-athletes whose commitment to their sports often prevents them from participating in the numerous study abroad and cultural immersion opportunities available to Duke students.
“Student-athletes are often unable to benefit from these opportunities the University offers due to their training schedules,” Lange said. “The Coach for College program overcomes this difficulty, giving student-athletes the chance to become civically engaged via the shared cultural passion of sports in ways compatible with their athletic commitments.”
Said Goyer, “The biggest idea is that student-athletes have great traits they develop through sports – the ability to persevere, work hard, set goals, manage their time, focus, and collaborate with others – which have enabled them to become high-level varsity athletes. But they don’t always apply these traits which they perfect on the playing field in other settings. I want American student-athletes to realize that, by virtue of being highly skilled sports players in some of the best higher education institutions in the world, they have tremendous power to make a difference. Their athletic training balanced with their undergraduate education has uniquely equipped them to be social change agents who can bring about solutions to some of the world’s problems.”
And it all starts on spring break.
Check back with GoDuke.com in the coming weeks for an update on these athletes’ experiences during their spring break trip to Vietnam.
