Pepperdine Student-Athletes Participate In Ride-A-Wave Event
9/28/2016 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Written by undergraduate intern Ricky Davis
MALIBU, Calif. - This past Saturday, approximately 45 student-athletes from the Pepperdine women's soccer, swim and dive, baseball and men's basketball teams gathered at nearby Leo Carrillo State Beach to be a part of the "Ride-A-Wave" event.
Put on by the Malibu Board Riders, Ride-A-Wave is a day for children with special needs to come to the beach for a full day of fun in the sun. The event included activities such as how to hula dance, participating in obstacle courses, face painting and the main events were surfing and boogie boarding with the kids.
The Board Riders are a group of surfers from Malibu and the surrounding areas who come together and put on events in order to, in their own words, "spread the stoke through promotion of community events, stewardship of the local environment and mentoring kids in a sport setting."
Junior midfielder Bri Visalli of the women's soccer team has been in charge of getting Pepperdine Athletics involved with Ride-A-Wave for the past two years. However, it is not her second time participating in the event. In high school, she attended a Ride-A-Wave event hosted by the Santa Cruz Longboarders Union, her home surf club.
"It changed my life," said Visalli, who has continued that passion for the event into her college years. "I am the main liaison between Pepperdine Athletics and the Malibu Board Riders. I reached out to my contacts with the Board Riders and asked if Pepperdine could be involved again this year. She was thrilled that we wanted to do it again and told us to bring as many people as we could."
"It was a really cool opportunity for a bunch of different athletic teams to come together and help some kids who are going through some tough situations," said senior catcher Aaron Barnett of the baseball team.
Nearly all of the women's soccer team attended, as did most of the swim and dive squad. Both the men's basketball and baseball teams had several players there as well. The athletes that volunteered had the role of being a beach buddy for the day.
"The role of the beach buddy was to partner up for the day with one of the kids that came," said Hannah Seabert, a senior goalkeeper for the women's soccer team. "Aaron and I had a little girl, Gigi, and a little boy, Jacky, who we got to hang out with. We took them into the water and really just wanted to make sure that we spent as much time with them as possible."
"My favorite part of the day was when Hannah convinced the little girl, Gigi, to spray paint my chest with eight different colors of hair spray paint," said Barnett. "If not for the girl being five years old, and one of the most adorable five-year olds I have ever seen, it probably wouldn't have happened."
Seabert said that she was so happy to be a part of this experience because it "gave us an opportunity to see how blessed we truly are. We see these kids with so much less than we have and suddenly, all of our worries about games and tests seem irrelevant. To be able to give back in any way we can is the least that we can do."
Competing with Purpose is a slogan that the Pepperdine athletic department has used for the past four years. When asked if this experience was an example of showing purpose, both Seabert and Barnett replied in the affirmative.
"I don't think that there is any better way to show that purpose," Barnett said. "I think that it is one thing to look at the mission statements and strive to do it, but it is a whole different level to actually live it out."
