Special Olympics, Student Athlete Fellowship, Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, Swishes4Wishes, gameday operations. For Meghan Arigo, the winner of this year’s Individual Mission Award, the key to the enjoyment and the fullness of her collegiate career has been getting involved, in any and as many ways as possible.
Her biggest piece of advice for those who want to make the most of their college experience is to “get involved with the campus; however it works best for you. And to get involved as you can with athletics, because all of athletics is great and there are so many people here.”
This year, Arigo tackled two of her biggest service projects to date, taking a lead role in both. Planning SAAC’s annual Swishes4Wishes charity basketball game, now in its 10th year, to benefit the Washington and Alaska branches of the Make a Wish Foundation, she found out the week of the event that her co-chair would be leaving a day earlier to compete in their conference tournament. So Arigo took the entire event upon her shoulders, but doesn’t like to take the credit.
“It’s just fun and I like it and it’s something that I do because I like to be involved and it feels good. It’s not rocket science. [Community service and charity] is just something I like to do, so I do more of it. I was really surprised and really honored [to win the Mission Award] because so many people do different things in the community. It was really nice, I felt honored.”
In conjunction with an internship at Special Olympics, she played a large role in the first annual Special Olympics Washington Unified Soccer Invitational, hosted by Seattle U, where colleges from around the Pacific Northwest gathered to compete in a tournament to raise awareness for the Unified movement. Working in adaptive sports is a cause close to her heart.
“I got involved with Special Olympics because I like to work with kids and athletes in adaptive sports. It was really fun to put something on where others got to have that experience of working with people with intellectual disabilities and getting to work side-by-side. At home over the summers, I’ve worked at a surf camp that works with kids primarily on the autism spectrum. We’ll take kids out for three or four hours and teach them how to surf. Some kids will come just for a day, some will come back for a week, and some come every day all summer.”
Her involvement on and off campus has led to some of her greatest memories and friendships over the past four years.
“I really like being a part of SAAC and getting to be involved with all the student-athletes and get first hand stories of what has happened since the last meeting. I’m more in the know and there’s another aspect of community and that was a big way I was able to get involved with athletics, which made my experience so much better.”
She was also a founding member of Student Athlete Fellowship (SAF) at Seattle U, a group created during Arigo’s sophomore year where student-athletes can gather to fellowship based on sport and faith. It became a place where she could not only bond with her own team but with others throughout the athletics department.
“I slowly became involved and it slowly grew, especially within our own team. In the beginning, it was just a couple people and then after a little while, it became conversation during weights – who’s going to go and getting more people to go with you. It was something our team bonded over and it also let us intermix with other people.”
Competing as a part of the women’s cross country team, especially winning the Western Athletic Conference title during her senior season, is also a memory Arigo will never forget from her Seattle U career.
“The moment we got the text [that we’d won], we were jumping up and down and screaming. We were in two separate groups on the golf course and then we were able to see each other just jumping up and down and screaming. It probably took us four or five minutes before we found the rest of our team, but we finally found each other, and then it was like a weird slow motion coming together thing and then we collided and just fell into a pile.”
Those friendships, not the competitions and races themselves, will be what she remembers long after graduation.
“It’s a lot of people who want to push themselves to the same extent that you do. You don’t have to convince them to have that same work ethic. You have a common goal and everyone wants it the same and they’re sacrificing just as much as you are.”
She continues, “We came a long way this year in the aspect of being a team. We definitely had a different type of comradery and focus than we have before and it’s been progressing over the years. It was kind of the icing on the cake for my senior year. It was pretty awesome.”
It’s the people and the experiences that she will carry with her and that have taught her lessons she will never forget.
“On the one hand, I would say don’t take yourself too seriously. Try to take something away from every aspect because it’s a lot of time. Also, I love the phrase, ‘The older I get, the better I was’ because you spend so much time doing the same thing over and over again, you might as well make yourself better over time.”