On May 8, BPSN published a profile on retired NC employee Ray Sarkis who was inducted into the Welland Sports Hall of Fam builders category.
Sarkis started out at Niagara College in 1986 as the men’s volleyball coach and six years later he began a 30-year-plus run as the athletic assistant and then intercollegiate coordinator.
The article highlights that Sarkis is most proud of Niagara College becoming one of the top academic schools in the Canada. Sarkis is quoted in the article:
“We started to graduate students first and athletes second. There were a lot of OCAA and CCAA honour students. We had 140 athletes and we had scholar athletes in the 40s. We held our student-athletes to a higher standard academically than the normal student at the college. At the beginning, the college couldn’t see that. They wondered what we were doing but if we were going to be successful that is what we had to do. When I started, students were jumping from one program to another just so they could stay. There was no academic policy in place and we instilled an academic policy that also became a policy in the OCAA years later.”
Read the May 8 article here.
