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Ed Suriano, a senior linebacker at State University of New York in Brockport, was a freshman in September 2012, when Alexandra Kogut, a freshman swimmer at the school, was beaten to death by her boyfriend in her dorm room.
The team heard about her death over breakfast on game day that weekend. Two of Suriano’s teammates were close friends of Kogut. “To see the shock in their eyes, the terrible feelings,” Suriano says, was hard. “These are two very tough guys . . . I'll never forget it.”
Suriano and Kogut had recently partnered on a project, and had met up multiple times in the library in the first three weeks of the semester. Her death, he says, “really was the first experience I had with relationship violence.”
According to Love is Respect, a project of the National Domestic Violence Hotline that works to end dating violence among young people, 43 percent of women in college report being in a violent or abusive relationship. Critically, “57 percent say [abuse] is difficult to identify and 58 percent say they don’t know how to help someone who’s experiencing it.”
43% of women in college report being in a violent or abusive relationship, 575 say abuse is difficult to identify and 58% say they don’t know how to help someone who’s experiencing it.
Kogut’s death led Suriano, who is president of the State University of New York Athletic Conference’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee, to commit himself to working to prevent athlete violence on campus. Much of his support has come from the One Love Foundation.
One Love was created in 2010 by the family of Yeardley Love, a lacrosse player at the University of Virginia who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, also a lacrosse player. According to Jaklyn Van Manen, manager of Campus Campaigns for One Love, the ultimate goal is “to end relationship abuse by educating young people about really healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors and empowering them to be leaders in their communities.”
The warning signs for dating violence can be hard to spot because they start off small, happen in private, and troubling behavior is often covered up or dismissed. Some of these signs include a person who gets jealous of a partner spending time with other people and isolates her from family and friends; insulting a partner, calling her names, telling her what to wear, monitoring her social media or reading her email without permission. Abusers will also violate a partner’s consent and pressure her into sex. At times, the physical abuse will end in murder.
According to the Violence Policy Center, “more than 90 percent of women murdered by men are killed by someone they know” and “63 percent [of those] were wives or other intimate acquaintances of their killers.” That is equivalent to two or three women being killed every day in the United States by their partners.
One of those women was Kelsey Annese, a senior captain on the SUNY Geneseo women’s basketball team. She and Matt Hutchinson, a senior on the men’s ice hockey team, were stabbed to death in her apartment by Annese’s ex-boyfriend in January 2016.
When student-athlete leaders from the SUNY Athletic Conference got together at a retreat in April, only a few months later, the murders of their friends from Brockport and Geneseo were weighing on their minds.
They participated in the One Love Foundation’s Escalation Workshop. The workshop centers on a film that chronicles a fictitious college couple in an abusive relationship, and shows how easy it is to miss the warning signs if you don’t what to look for.
At the same time, the Student Athlete Advisory Committee leaders decided they wanted to do something big and splashy beyond the workshops to start campus-wide conversations. They agreed to participate in Yards for Yeardley, an awareness campaign where students at a campus spend all day running, tallying as many yards as possible.
Van Manen says the campaign celebrates the life of Yeardley and her love of competition. It is also a rallying cry for One Love’s work, and gets people interested in the foundation,. So far, students have run more than 132 million yards in Yeardley’s honor.
Student athletes in SUNYAC have begun the single largest Yards for Yeardley event ever and the first one coordinated across multiple campuses. They are calling it 10 Million Yards for Yeardley. Each of ten campuses has pledged to run 1 million yards in a day—ten million yards conference-wide. Each school has chosen a day between April 20 and April 30 to complete the goal.
And there is more going on off the field. Taylor O’Halloran, a golfer at SUNY Cortland, helped bring escalation workshops to campus. “We made it mandatory for all the athletes,” she says. More 500 participated. “I had teammates text me saying, ‘Thank you for doing this because it really does mean a lot and I’ve experienced it myself.’ ”
“Student athletes are leaders on campus,” Suriano says. “If you can get your leaders on campus not only motivated but to be stakeholders in promoting healthy relationships that's the best first step to creating an excellent atmosphere . . . . This is actually changing people's lives—and we might be saving people's lives, too, along the way.”
Jessica Luther is an independent writer and investigative journalist, and author of Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape. She lives in Austin, TX.