BATON ROUGE — LSU baseball player Clay Dirks and football player Peter Dyakowski spoke to students at Northeast Elementary on Tuesday morning as part of the Shaquille O’Neal CHAMPS/Life Skills program.
The pair spoke to a school assembly at the elementary school boys as part of “Guys Read” campaign. The student-athletes spoke about how important it is to read and how much they enjoy taking books on road trips with them when they can.
“Guy’s Read” is a national campaign calling attention to boy’s literacy, since boys are much higher than girls to have literacy problems. The U.S. Department of Education reading tests for the last 30 years show boys score worse than girls in every age group, every year and eighth grade boys are 50 percent more likely to be held back than girls.
The program uses male role models to show the importance of literacy and to motivate boys to read by choosing books that they will enjoy. It exposes them to boy-friendly literature including nonfiction, humor, comics, graphic novels, action- adventure, magazines, websites, and newspapers in school reading.
A senior pitcher for the baseball team, was a 2005 Second-Team All- Southeastern Conference selection and a member of the SEC All-Freshman Team in 2004. A native of Hernando, Miss., he finished the 2006 season with a 5-4 record and ranked second on the LSU staff with a 4.70 ERA with a team-best 84 strikeouts.
Dyakowski, a senior offensive lineman from Vancouver, Canada, is a two-time member of the SEC Academic Honor Roll who earned his bachelor’s degree in history in the spring of 2006. After missing most of the Arizona game with a broken hand, he returned to play all of LSU’s 60 offensive snaps against Auburn. In eight games, he has only been whistled for three penalties.
Both Dyakowski and Dirks are members of the Student-Athlete Advisory Council. The council serves as the governing body for the LSU student-athletes. Council members sponsor many community service events including the Halloween BOOzar and the Christmas Toy Drive.
SAAC members also serve as liaison between student-athletes and athletic & academic support staff playing an essential role in creating regulations and keeping their teammates informed any changes with respect to the Cox Communications Academic Center for Student Athletes.
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 honored one of LSU’s most memorable graduates, Shaquille O’Neal, by naming the program after him.