Vaibhav Sharma, Senior Photographer

As both students and athletes gear up for the fall, the new board of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee is preparing for a new year. 

SAAC’s membership consists of student-athletes and the organization aims to represent this community at Yale. More specifically, this means advocating for student-athletes at conferences, organizing community service events to increase engagement, as well as providing a platform and channel for players to voice their concerns. The News spoke with some of SAAC’s members in order to better understand the organization’s function both as a part of the athletic department and as a group at Yale in general. 

“My goal for this year is to support our president, [Chelsea Kung ’23], as best I can and work with administrators and other leaders within athletics to foster a community where student-athletes are proud to represent Yale,” SAAC vice president and football player Bennie Anderson ’24 said. “We have a great group and I’m excited to work alongside this talented group of leaders.”

Over the summer, Anderson and Kung worked to develop plans and goals for the SAAC executive board and the school year. Kung, a women’s tennis player, is in her second term as SAAC president while Anderson served as the DEI subcommittee chair last year. 

This year, field hockey player Rachel Brown ’24 will serve as events chair while women’s golfer Ashley Au ’24 will serve as communications director. Also representing women’s golf, Ami Gianchandani ’23 is SAAC’s representative to the NCAA DI leadership while track and field runner Kaity Chandrika ’25 is the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, or DEIB, Council Chair. 

“I’ve always wanted to be more involved in the leadership of the athletic department, so I thought the [SAAC] would be a good opportunity,” Bharathi Subbiah ’24, the Bulldog Cup and Community Service Chair and women’s track and field team member said. 

The Bulldog Cup is a yearly competition in which individual athletes complete tasks to collect the most points. Historically, tasks have been centered around fostering inter-team bonding, with an example task being attending another team’s game and posting images online.

However, Subbiah aims to pivot this year’s Bulldog Cup to focus on community service given the large number of athletes on campus.

Helen Tan ’25, a member of the women’s fencing team, is the SAAC’s Ivy League representative. The Ivy League functions as an independent sports league, with its own governing body and regulations on top of DI NCAA regulations.

“My main role is to attend meetings with other Ivy League [teams] and representatives in order to talk about new legislation concerning student athletes around the country,” Tan said. 

Tan’s focus also includes bringing concerns that other student-athletes have had to these conferences to ensure that their voices are heard at the highest level. At a fundamental level, Tan aims to “be an approachable spokesperson for all student athletes at Yale and advocate their ideas at these meetings and conferences.”

While the SAAC focuses on helping teams at Yale develop, its director of administration is responsible for helping the SAAC itself run smoothly. This year, gymnast Sherry Wang ’24 will take on the role. Her duties include “being the main point of internal communication among the SAAC members and communicating all relevant information.”

In 2020, the SAAC launched a new project titled YUMatter to promote mental health. Women’s lacrosse player Marymegan Wright ’25 is leading this initiative and hopes to increase its presence.

“Over the course of the year, I hope to mobilize the student athlete community to amplify mental health advocacy across campus, provide student athletes with mental health resources and create initiatives that reinforce the importance of prioritizing mental health,” Wright wrote to the News. 

The first iteration of a Student-Athlete Advisory Committee was an association-wide organization that was launched by the NCAA in 1989.