Inspired by the George Floyd protests, there has been a concerted effort to get college athletes to the polls this fall. A number of programs have done team-wide voter registration drives, and multiple schools have announced they will not hold mandatory team activities on Election Day, which falls on Tuesday, Nov. 3.
In fact, the NCAA has now formally recommended that all teams cancel practices, meetings and workouts on Election Day.
Travis Rundle has a solution that would: A) allow every athlete to exercise his or her right to vote, B) avoid the need to skip an in-season practice day, and C) further engage college athletes in the civic process.
The head coach at Sewanee, a Division III school in Sewanee, Tenn., has partnered with a university-wide effort to register athletes to cast an absentee vote in the state and Congressional district in which they live, rather than where they happen to attend school.
"The inspiration came from our own players. We recently held a team meeting, and the focus of the meeting was on leadership. I wasn't just going to post a message on social media and then not do anything about the issue. I started thinking of how I could help get the ball rolling for change. The area where I felt I could have the quickest impact was on getting student-athletes voting," Rundle told me via email.
"From there, I looked at our roster, and zero of our 90 student-athletes are from the county where our school is located. It was at that point I came up with the plan to get student-athletes voting by mail. Their vote, their voice, their impact should be felt in their hometown, not where their college is located. Change will begin at the local level first. We should allow our student-athletes to vote for the Sheriffs, Governors, Mayors, Senators, Representatives, Judges who will represent their hometown, their friends, their families."
Rundle began compiling relevant voting information for all 50 states into a Google Sheet, and then learned his project had already been completed by Sewanee's Office of Civic Engagement.
Rundle then linked his project to the Sewanee branch of the national TurboVote project, then began spreading the word about his Home Vote Advantage initiative to friends in the business.
"The reception has been overwhelmingly positive," Rundle told me. "I first contacted Brian Norwood at UCLA, Larry Johnson at Ohio State, Terry Smith at Penn State, and they were immediately on board with the idea. Coach Norwood has been amazing at helping spread the word. He put me in touch with Ken Niumatalolo and he has been very supportive of this. We got word out to Gary Patterson and he has been supportive and is helping spread the idea. I have been in touch with coaches at several other colleges and they are fired up to present this idea to their players."
The TurboVote platform allows users to see if they are registered to vote, and to register to vote by mail. Once registered, the platform will send an absentee ballot 30 days prior to the election, with return envelopes provided.
"Once everything came about recently with the George Floyd situation, I got contacted by a lot of like minded guys that see the opportunity to educate young men on something a lot bigger than the Xs and Os," Norwood told me. "I had been on a few different Zoom calls, and Coach Rundle reached out to me and discussed the vision that he had. He had talked about his passion for that and explained the tremendous opportunity to get that done. We just sort of joined minds and reached out to different folks that really wanted to do something and give tools to our student-athletes that they can use and support a baseline effort that a lot of people have given their life for -- Black Americans, women -- and that's the right to vote."
Personally, I used the platform to request an absentee ballot for my state's next election on July 14 -- which I was completely unaware of before writing this article.
"I wanted to find a way to make it as easy as possible for both the coaches and the student-athletes to have the student-athlete vote by mail," Rundle said. "It only takes a few minutes of a team meeting to have everyone get registered if they haven't already done so. Thirty days from the election, everyone will have the application for the absentee ballot sent to them -- you can take a few minutes of that day to have everyone get the forms filled out and mailed back. It is very easy to do as a team."
"We're really passionate about making sure that isn't something that just stops. Our younger people are going to make sure that this doesn't stop," Norwood said. "This is really just the start of it and there's no telling how far it goes."