Today and Friday Iowa State athletes will visit area elementary schools to give presentations on how students can make educated decisions.

Today at 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. at the Meeker Elementary School, athletes will make presentations to the fifth- and sixth-grade students. On Friday, athletes will make a presentation to the Kate Mitchell Elementary School at 12:45 p.m.

The athletes are part of a program called COED TEAM. The program stands for Cyclones On Educated Decisions. The program was created by the Community Outreach Committee of the Iowa State Student-Athlete Advisory Board.

COED TEAM consists of students from all sports. Its purpose is to educate students about health- related decision making.

Emily Martini, a sophomore in exercise and sport science and a cross country/track runner, is a member of COED TEAM.

Martini said she was motivated to help children in the classroom because of a younger sibling in the sixth grade and her concern for educating young students.

“The main goal is to help them make better decisions in their lives. We show how you can use it [better decision-making] in all type of activities to show that they have many options in life,” Martini said.

Martini said they could inform students about their own experiences. One could not change what may have already happened, Martini said, but they can learn and change for the better from the experience.

Martini also hopes to introduce the younger students to other athletes from sports other than the popular sports. She said they were not taking many football players.

Most younger children are not very informed about other college sports other than basketball and football. Martini said they often have questions about about sports and college.

Pam Hayes, the adviser for COED TEAM and student athlete counselor said, “We get tons of requests from area schools for presentations. These young kids look up to the athletes. The presentation is geared toward that age group.”

She said the group will discuss gossiping, cheating and bullying. “We create skits to dictate or depict the situation.”

Sara Riemersma, a track team member and co-chair of COED TEAM, said the organization did a presentation in Nevada last Friday.

“Its a lot of fun. Basically we go in and do skits. We give them a situation and we act it out,” Riemersma said.

She said they get six kids from the audience to help them out. The kids use COED TEAM’s six-step decision-making process called ELPCAT to solve the problem. Once the problem is solved they reenact the skit showing the better decisions that could be made.

Most importantly, Hayes and Martini both said, the presentations are not meant to preach to students about avoiding activities such as drinking and smoking. The purpose is to try to help them make better decisions in order to have a better life.

“In my opinion, the goal is to reach the kids at a younger age,” Riemersma said. “They look at athletes as role models.”