Former IU Columbus baseball players Casper Clark, left, and Austin Martin unbox and organize finisher medals at the finish line during the Mill Race Marathon in Columbus, Ind., Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023.
Last year, IU Columbus was named a NAIA Champions of Character Five-Star Gold Award recipient in only its second year of having an athletics program.
The Crimson Pride recently were awarded the same honor for the second year in a row.
“As I mentioned last year, that’s the floor,” IUC athletics director Zach McClellan said Wednesday at the school’s fall sports media day. “We expect to do that every year. It’s an expectation we set for ourselves, so it’s exciting to be acknowledged for that again.”
The award is based five core values — integrity, respect, responsibility, sportsmanship and servant leadership. NAIA members are evaluated on character training, conduct in competition, academic focus, character recognition and character promotion and can earn points for high team GPAs and no or minimal player or coach ejections from contests.
“It’s all because of the tireless work our coaches and student-athletes put in day-in and day-out, prioritizing consistency over heroic efforts,” IUC assistant athletics director Matt McCarroll said. “Our coaches and student-athletes live out the values of Champions of Character on a daily basis. This means more than wins and losses to us because this will directly correlate to our student-athletes being productive leaders in the community and leaders of their families. That is the whole point of all of this.”
Since starting its athletics program in 2022, IUC student-athletes have served more than 15,000 service hours in Bartholomew County, including more than 9,000 hours the past school year. Among the services they have provided are reading, tutoring and mentoring kids at Parkside Elementary, and volunteering at Ceraland, Nexus Park, Columbus Animal Care Services, Chuck Taylor Day and the Mill Race Marathon.
“It’s not an easy thing to achieve,” McClellan said. “It involves community service, types of ejections you go through, and hopefully, you don’t have too many of those. But a lot of things you see from our players and from our coaches is a high level of commitment to the community, and that’s why we continually achieve that award. So I don’t see that going away for awhile.”
