Central Methodist University would like to recommend Dan Martin as our nomination for the HAAC Commissioner's Champions of Character Award. Dan is a sophomore letterman baseball player from Sublimity, Oregon. Dan has a cumulative grade point average of 3.2 and is majoring in athletic training. Dan indicates he chose this major because he wants to help persons who are in need of health services.

Dan represents the baseball team as a member of the CMU Champions of Character Council. The role of the Student-Athlete Champions of Character Council is to enhance the total student-athlete experience at Central Methodist University. The council members do this by promoting the opportunity for all aspiring student-athletes to participate in athletics; protecting student-athlete welfare; and fostering a positive student-athlete image, while maintaining the core values of the NAIA Champions of Character Program. We ask each of the members to organization one service project on campus and one off campus during the academic year.

Dan did more than expected; he organized six service projects. One of the most unusual and perhaps socially rewarding service projects was undertaken earlier this year by all of the members of the CMU baseball team, who spent a week working alongside 10 inmates from the Boonville Missouri Correctional Center. A total of 72 CMU student-athletes traveled in small groups each day to Boonville for a week to work with the inmates. The inmates had been selected by the correctional facility to participate in the National Organization of Prison Fellowship program, through which the inmates in good standing are allowed to work outside the correctional facility on community service projects.

The community service project included completion of facilities at the Boonville city's Harley Park baseball field, where the ball players and inmates tore out an old concrete walkway and built a new sidewalk around the pavilion and a concrete structure to hold a trap backdrop. They also refurbished a wheelchair ramp at the Boonville YMCA and painted facilities.

Each day of work with the inmates the CMU baseball players began at the Nelson United Methodist Church in Boonville with fellowship, prayer and breakfast. At the end of each work day, the players and inmates would return to the church for refreshments and to share personal stories and feelings.  

One of the other community service projects Dan helped organized was the CMU "Angel Tree Project" a ministry program that involves local churches and reaches out to the children of inmates and their families. The CMU baseball team adopted a number of children from the Angel Tree this Christmas. The baseball team took donations and used some of their own money to purchase gifts for a number of children who has one or both parents in prison. 

In addition to these service projects Dan has helped organized projects such as sodding the new CMU softball field, painting the CMU baseball outfield wall, cleaning the CMU weight room, assisting the Howard Country Food Pantry, getting CMU student-athletes to attend a community prayer breakfast and organizing our CMU Athletic Holiday Food Baskets that are given to needy families in the Howard Country area during Thanksgiving and the Christmas Holidays.  

Dan also will be seen leading prayer before the team meal during the CMU baseball trips.  Dan represents all five core values of the Champions of Character Program. Dan is also the first to give a helping hand in all of the large and small projects/programs on the campus of Central Methodist University. 

The CMU baseball program needed a strong student-athlete to help gain the respect back from the CMU, Fayette, Missouri, HAAC and the NAIA communities that we lost late last spring and Dan helped lead the CMU baseball team in that direction. In order to win you must first win in life by doing the little things first.