Originally posted by Brown Athletics and Linus Lawrence
PROVIDENCE, AUGUST 9, 2024 – On May 27 — the day after commencement marked the conclusion of the 2023-2024 academic year — twenty-one student-athletes and five staff gathered at the Logan International Airport in Boston. Each of the students, almost all the sole member present from their team, were at that point largely strangers to one another.
“I didn’t know a lot of these people,” said sophomore Adolfo Diaz, a midfielder for the men’s soccer team. “Going into the trip I was nervous, because I’m not really great at building those connections super quickly.”
Nine days later, when the group returned to the same airport after concluding a first-of-its-kind international trip to Spain and Portugal — dubbed the “Student-Athlete Impact Tour” — they had formed an unshakable bond made possible only by having undergone such a unique experience together.
“Our group was absolutely amazing,” Diaz reflected, calling the journey a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for him. “Looking back, I only have positive memories.”
According to Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Student-Athlete Development Sean Hendricks, the Impact Tour’s genesis traces back to last summer, when select student-athletes and athletics staff embarked on a successful community service trip to Panama. While reflecting on the “tremendous value in cultural immersion” and “learning about different parts of the world” following his time in Panama, Hendricks was concurrently approached by a company called Global Sports & Events to begin brainstorming the basic blueprint for a potential international student-athlete experience.
Together, Hendricks and Senior Associate Director of Athletics, Wellness and Performance, Joe Walsmith settled on four major themes for the trip: leadership, performance, well-being and teamwork. Using these objectives as a guide, the pair helped select the trip’s destinations and assemble its itinerary.
The next step was selecting the participating students, which was accomplished through a competitive and extensive application process.
“One of the big questions that we asked was how do they plan to take information that we’d be discussing on this trip and apply it to their life, school and sport,” Hendricks said.
Applying athletes also shared a wide range of personal reasons as to why they wished to participate. Tommy Dunn, a freshman linebacker from the football team, said he wrote about his “love for nature,” his experience “connecting with underserved communities,” and his time as a member of the boy scouts when he was younger. Jessie Golden, a rising captain of the volleyball team, said she “focused on leadership” and mentioned being inspired by her sister’s experiences traveling to help children in Africa and Australia. Nimrit Ahuja, a sophomore on the cross country and track and field teams, spoke about her desire to work in global spaces as an international and public affairs double-concentrator while also noting the importance of being able to better understand the experience of incoming international teammates.
Diaz, meanwhile, explained that it was his lifelong dream to go to Spain, the site of his parents’ honeymoon. He was so outspoken about his desire to go on the trip that, when the time came for application results to be released, Friends of Brown Soccer Head Coaching Chair in Men’s Soccer, Chase Wileman told Hendricks not to send him the regular acceptance email. Instead, Wileman unveiled the news as a surprise while the team was gathered for a practice.
“The entire team congratulated me, and that was pretty cool,” Diaz recalled. “It was really exciting.”
Once the group was finalized, the selected students attended four preparational sessions to cover things like safety, well-being and culture. By the time the group arrived in Madrid after a layover in Amsterdam, they were ready to hit the ground running with days packed full of sight-seeing tours, local meals, and activities aimed at the trip’s core themes.
One such activity was an over two-hour session with the True Athlete Project, a company promoting mental health and mindfulness for athletes. Oz Marginean, a former basketball player who struggled with injuries, led the group through a series of movement and meditation exercises which Hendricks described as a combination of yoga and tai chi.
“Because it was so new and different, none of us really had a clue how to do it, but it was also not as demanding,” Dunn said. “So we had the mind space to really explore how our body can move in different positions.”
On the travel day from Madrid to Lisbon, Brown staff also got the opportunity to lead mindfulness activities. Student-Athlete Development Senior Manager, Academic Services and Career Development Jen Miller-McEachern led a movement, mobility, and stretching exercise, while Walsmith ran a session on the importance of active listening in leadership and teamwork.
“It was about how to be a good listener,” Ahuja said of Walsmith’s lesson. “Someone’s not always going to be talking to you because they want advice. You need to find where and how you’re needed in a certain conversation.”
The student-athletes also had the opportunity to write letters of gratitude to people they were thankful for, while encouraged to say affirmations about themselves, someone else, and something general. Golden said the exercise has “really stuck” with her.
“I feel like every student-athlete struggles with mental health. I’ve definitely struggled throughout the past two years,” she said. “Saying something that I’m grateful for about myself, and about others, and about a random thing — it honestly has helped me so much, because gratitude is something that I feel just makes you a happier person.”
In Lisbon, the group spent a morning at a local farm, extending this emphasis on mindfulness to nutrition by learning about the process of growing food, feeding animals, and later helping cook a meal with items they’d harvested.
“Seeing where (the food) came from, how it grows from the ground beneath us, how it’s going to our bodies, being aware of how it feels on your tongue and how it feels when you chew it…being hyperconscious of all those aspects bring you more grounded and give you a different appreciation for it”, Dunn said.
“It was an amazing, nourishing meal because it had so many fresh vegetables,” Ahuja recalled.
While the student-athletes spent the majority of the trip on vacation from their typical highly competitive on-field environments, two of the most intricate and fondly remembered activities saw them broken up into small groups for immersive contests.
In Madrid, the student-athletes participated in a timed Amazing Race challenge — an exercise cited as a standout memory from the trip. Tasks in the race included visiting specific landmarks, riding the metro, filming a tik tok with locals and attempting to purchase the cheapest horchata possible.
“We were just sprinting all over Madrid,” recalled Diaz, who claimed his team’s completion time of about a half hour was the fastest recorded among various schools that had participated in the past. “My team was super enthusiastic…we mapped out where we were gonna go.”
“We all play sports. We’re all ultra competitive,” Dunn said. “So we’re just trying to find ways to give us the fastest time and be as efficient as possible.”
In addition to providing an entertaining mechanism for cultural exposure, the activity also allowed student-athletes to practice the teamwork and leadership skills prioritized in the trip’s mission. The race was preceded by an hour-long morning session which tied in “elements of leadership, elements of performance, elements of what it means to be a good teammate (and) what it means to build a culture,” according to Hendricks, in the hopes these skills would be applied to the exercise which followed.
“I felt like I was reflecting on a volleyball game I just played,” Golden said, describing the post-race atmosphere among her teammates. “We all took notes and were talking about how we could’ve done better and won.”
In Lisbon, the student-athletes were once again broken into small groups for an activity which challenged them to locate, explore, and report back on a specific local neighborhood.
“It was more of an immersion practice,” described Dunn, whose group was assigned to Bairro Alto. “It was taking in the whole neighborhood and absorbing it, and then explaining to our ‘judges’ why they should move there…It was one of my favorite parts of the trip.”
“We were just walking for forty-five minutes up a straight hill,” Golden recalled. “All four of us felt like we were never gonna get to the little town we were supposed to find, and then we did and it was so beautiful.”
But perhaps no activity was more instrumental in strengthening the student-athletes’ connections to local culture — and to each other — than one which was unorganized by nature: exploration time.
“Some of the moments that I got to experience the cities the best was when we had that time,” Ahuja said. “The groups went and explored based off things friends had told us, or what we looked up on google.”
“When we were out in Madrid, all the girls got together and we went shopping,” Golden said. “It was really cute. We got to see each other’s style.”
Diaz, along with freshmen N’famara Dabo of the men’s basketball team and Ryan Oshinskie of the baseball team, went on a local sporting expedition to visit José Alvalade and Benfica Stadium, the latter of which was later revisited with the full group.
“We were able to watch their basketball team practice, we saw their football courts, we saw their runners and track athletes — I think everybody really enjoyed that because there was a variety of different sports there,” Diaz said.
Diaz and Dabo, one of the many new friendships forged by the trip, also watched the Champions League final at the hotel, celebrating when Real Madrid secured a 2-0 victory.
In a survey disseminated to participating student-athletes following the trip, 100% of respondents indicated forming “lasting connections with other Brown student-athletes that they didn’t know prior to the trip,” according to a feedback summary compiled by Brown Athletics.
“We were all able to really open up to each other, which is surprising since nobody really knew each other before we went,” Golden said. “All of us have the experience of being a student-athlete, and I feel like we all appreciate each other and really respect each other for how much we have to grind in sports and in academics.”
“A lot of us share similar experiences of being student-athletes,” Ahuja explained. “We kind of live parallel but different lives, and I think that’s something that’s easy to connect with off-the-bat.”
“Everyone had the chance to be themselves and let us know about who they are, where they come from, and different identities and different backgrounds all coming into one,” Dunn said. “I felt like that was very special. I definitely made a lot of new friends and formed a lot of close bonds from this trip.”
For these student-athletes, making new friends also means having a slew of new games to attend in support when the group returns to College Hill for another academic year and Ivy League season this fall.
With players from across seventeen different sports represented on the trip, “I’ve definitely got a lot of games to catch,” Dunn said.
“I’m going to be going to (baseball) games all the time, and Ryan is gonna be coming to my games,” Diaz remarked.
Even this summer, athletes from the trip have remained in contact, with plans apparently already in motion for staff and students to reunite when they return this fall.
The group “was super, super special,” Diaz said. “These are people that I just met on this trip, and I still talk with them now that I’m at my internship and they’re all at their internships across the country.”
“Experiencing new cultures really makes people bond, and I’m really excited that Brown Athletics now has this new group of people (who) are so close,” Golden said. “We have a group chat that we all still text in sometimes.”
Hendricks also highlighted the importance of providing a vehicle for student-athletes to experience international travel, given they may have a harder time studying abroad than other Brown students.
“A lot of times our student-athletes don’t get a chance to study abroad just because of the way the seasons are structured,” Hendricks said. “This creates an opportunity for them to get abroad and connect with other student-athletes.”
“The overall commitment from Brown investing in staff and student-athletes in this way is pretty special to see,” Hendricks said.
But for now, the twenty-one student-athletes will look to get ready for a new season riding the momentum of a memorable, meaningful nine days — or, as Golden called it: “one of the best experiences of my life.”
About Global Sports & Events
Global Sports & Events (GSE) is the leader in producing unique events and experiences for athletes to develop inside and outside sports. With over three decades of practice and a deep sports network around the globe, the GSE team has organized hundreds of high-profile events spanning collegiate and amateur athletics. With a specialization in athlete impact and international logistics, GSE prides itself on creating cultural and educational experiences for athletes, coaches, fans, donors, and university partners. For more information, visit www.globalsande.com.
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