With so many activities and events happening across the Keene State campus, it can be hard for people to get out and support fellow Owls. KSC athletics has implemented the program called Owls4Owls, which encourages student-athletes to support each other throughout the academic year.
The initiative, led by the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), allows each team in a season to choose one game as their Owls4Owls game. Student-athletes are encouraged to attend these games by their coaches to have plenty of KSC student-athletes supporting one another.
Athletics Community Outreach Coordinator Mackenzie Hopkins spoke about the importance of a program like this for athletes at Keene State.
“It’s important just to show how hard these students are working, whether that be in the classroom or on the court or anything like that. It’s important to show the support for them and just to celebrate them as well because this is a really important time in their lives,” said Hopkins.
The program has developed since its origin a few years ago. Associate Athletic Director Abe Osheyack said he believes the program has seen an improvement in attendance through the added efforts of SAAC.
“This year, it’s definitely been a bigger point of emphasis to encourage teams to support each other. In previous years, it was kind of sparsely attended, and maybe not every single team was out there on the chosen day,” Osheyack said. “SAAC and its leadership this year has done a great job making sure people are held accountable in getting people to games.”
The focus of Owls4Owls is on the student-athletes, but Hopkins believes that a wider variety of attendees for athletics is just as important for KSC athletic teams.
“Something that we’ve been trying to do is to get more people, not even just athletes … more students and family members and community members to games. It just really helps with the spirit of the team and everything,” said Hopkins.
Scheduling the Owls4Owls games around numerous KSC athletic teams is difficult. Osheyack said a focus on that aspect was vital to bringing attendance for Owls4Owls up.
“Part of it really starts with picking the dates correctly. Even before we start to talk about getting people to games, we need to have the games organized and chosen as definitively picked as the Owls4Owls game,” said Osheyack.
A recent game that took place on Easter Weekend was scheduled to be an Owls4Owls game, and Osheyack pointed to that game as an instance of scheduling issues, as many students go home for that weekend.
Osheyack said that after the academic year wraps up, the growing program will see some changes with the hopes of improving the program.
“At the end of the year, we’re probably going to sit down and do an assessment within the athletics leadership and talk about what did work, what didn’t,” Osheyack said, “Before we need opt to make any changes, we need to talk about what works and what didn’t.”
When talking about the future of Owls4Owls, Hopkins said she envisions a wider scope for the program that involves more students outside of athletics.
“It would be great to have Owls4Owls be a campus-wide thing and have a musical or a play or something like that. Then we could get athletes to that play,” she said.
Hopkins also added to the expansion of the program, saying, “It would be great if we could make all games Owls4Owls games. Not really have to call it Owls4Owls… to show like ‘Hey, we don’t need to be asked to go to a game, we just want to come out and support,’” said Hopkins.
Jacob Enscoe can be contacted at
