CORTLAND, N.Y. - Over the course of the past two weeks, Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC) representatives from each of the 10 State University of New York Athletic Conference (SUNYAC) institutions worked to develop their own Yards for Yeardley events on their campuses with the hopes of reaching SUNY's total goal of walking Around the World for Yeardley.
On May 3, 2010, Yeardley Love of the University of Virginia women's lacrosse team was brutally beaten to death by her former boyfriend who was a member of the men's lacrosse team. Since that fatal day, Sharon Love, Yeardley's mother, has developed the One Love Foundation in response to her tragic loss to raise awareness about the consequences of relationship violence. Through the use of workshops on college campuses, including an app individuals can download, the foundation has created innovative ways to make people aware of this important issue.
College campuses are also contributing to this cause and the effort to raise awareness about relationship violence. One way that SUNYAC is creating awareness is through the Yards for Yeardley campaign. This campaign challenges student-athletes to create awareness on their campus communities by walking, running, biking, leaping in hopes to put an end to this violence. Last year, the ten SUNYAC campuses came together with a goal of 10 million yards to honor Yeardley Love. The ten schools ended up shattering their goal with a total of 25.7 million yards in just 10 days!
This year the SUNYAC schools partnered with other SUNY insitutions with a goal of walking Around the World for Yeardley. All 10 of the SUNYAC schools held succesful events filled with educational aspects, fun games, prizes, free t-shirts, and good times. Two of the schools with oustanding totals were Cortland and Oswego. Cortland opened the campaign of events on April 15th with a total of 4,185,448 yards! A week later Oswego posted the highest total on April 23rd with 6,277,000 yards in just eight hours!
Overall the 10 SUNYAC schools combined for a total of 29,566,195 yards! That total contributed over half of the goal of going around the world for all SUNY institutions! All together the participating SUNY institutions surpassed their goal and hit over 50,000,000 total yards!
The SUNYAC would like to congratulate all of the member institutions for hosting successful Yards for Yeardley events!
