The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh football team plays its first football game of the 2018 campaign in less than two weeks.
The Titans, ranked fourth in the d3football.com preseason poll and picked to win the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC), have been working hard on the practice field since Aug. 10 but on Monday took a break to prepare themselves for the 2018-2019 academic year.
Titan Foundations is a yearly orientation put together by Jesse Smith, the director of football operations. The day-long instructional meeting allows members of the football team to learn about campus services, programs and departments available to them and provides them with information to be successful while at UW Oshkosh.
Unique to this year’s Titan Foundations was the opportunity for the team to watch the not-yet-released documentary Roll Red Roll. The film, directed by Nancy Schwartzman, is about a high school sexual assault in small-town Stuebenville, Ohio, at a preseason football party.
UWO’s Women’s Center Director Alicia Johnson, in conjunction with Voices of Men, worked to bring this rare opportunity to campus.
“The Roll Red Roll documentary provided a unique opportunity for the student-athletes to get a disturbing glimpse into the depths of rape culture and how it is perpetuated through jokes, victim-blaming, passive bystanders and more,” Johnson said. “The documentary also provided us with the opportunity to talk about technology and social media, which helped highlight again what was discussed with them in the morning portion of Titan Foundations.”
Joe Samalin, co-founder of MenChallenging, facilitated a guided discussion with the nearly 100 student-athletes after the screening with the mission to help “change the culture before it happens in the first place.”
The discussion not only focused on the film but also helped educate UW Oshkosh student-athletes about responsibility and safety as it relates to sexual assault.
A powerful moment happened when Samalin asked the group to raise a hand if they knew somebody who was sexually assaulted. Half of the student-athletes in the room raised a hand.
Johnson is hopeful the student-athletes “carry the conversation forward,” especially through the Red Zone, a period of the first six weeks of a new academic year where a disproportionate number of sexual assaults occur.