BATON ROUGE — LSU student-athletes will participate in the Big Buddy “Day of the Mentor” program on Friday, including breakfast and lunch with their Little Buddies and various activities around campus throughout the morning.
Student-athletes from the softball, women’s gymnastics, swimming and diving, track and field, golf and tennis teams will participate in the event. It will last for five hours beginning at 8 a.m. at the Camelot Club in downtown Baton Rouge with breakfast for the mentors and their Little Buddies.
Following breakfast, the student-athletes will return to LSU with their Little Buddies and take them around campus, including taking them to class, on tours of the campus and trips through LSU’s athletics facilities. The event will culminate at noon when the mentors and their Little Buddies return to the Camelot Club for a 12:30 luncheon.
It marks the ninth annual “Day of the Mentor” program, which was established in 1988 to show the benefits of mentoring and to give community leaders a chance to make a difference in the lives of children in our area by mentoring them for a day. Individuals and groups from all around the Baton Rouge area are participating in the event.
The student-athletes are participating in the “Day of the Mentor” program in conjunction with the Shaquille O’Neal CHAMPS/Life Skills program. The CHAMPS (Challenging Athletes Minds for Personal Success)/Life Skills Program was designed by the NCAA to help student-athletes realize higher academic achievement, increase likelihood of graduation and enter a chosen profession with a higher level of vision, knowledge, motivation, self-responsibility and greater overall success. In Spring 2003, the CHAMPS/ Life Skills Program at LSU honored one of the Tigers’ most memorable graduates, Shaquille O’Neal, by naming the program after him.