08/24/18 – KHSAA To Host Annual HYPE Student Leadership Conferences Next Week In Lexington

August 24, 2018 2018-2019 News Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 24, 2018

The 18th Annual KHSAA HYPE Student Leadership Conferences will take place next week, with both sessions taking place at the Lexington Convention Center (Aug. 27-28). The conferences are a free service provided by the Association for student-athletes to learn teamwork exercises and sportsmanship initiatives, and discuss current issues.

The first conference will be held Monday, Aug. 27 at the Lexington Convention Center in the Bluegrass Ballrooms. Tuesday’s conference will also be at the LCC, but will take place in the Heritage Ballroom and Elkhorn Meeting Rooms (A/B & C/D).

Assisting with this year’s conference will be a group of eight student-athletes that represented the KHSAA at the NFHS National Student Leadership Summit in July: Ethan Barnett (St. Mary), Hannah Heile (Assumption), Connor (CJ) Johnson (Marshall County), James Kalso (Muhlenberg County), Rhiona Marshall (Bryan Station), Misty Thompson (Fort Campbell), Brooklyn Willis (Muhlenberg County) and Seth Wright (Lewis County). In addition to helping facilitate this year’s conference, the group will help plan the 2019 HYPE Student Leadership Conference.

Topics for this year’s breakout sessions include seminars on Brain Mapping (Omari Pearson), Team Building (Kara Mattingly, Asbury University) and Relationship Building (Deb Hult). This year’s keynote speaker will be Adrienne Bulinski (Perseverance with Grit).

“We are one of about twenty-eight states that conduct a similar student conference, but one of only a handful that provide the service free of charge,” said Associate Commissioner Butch Cope. “Based upon input from our student-advisory group, we try to plan a conference that allows students to take back practices and information and use it at the local level.”

The conference is free to attendees and primarily funded with the receipts from the Association’s corporate sponsor program. More than 500 student-athletes attended the two-day session last year. The 2018 HYPE Student Leadership Conference marks the eighth summit since the event was split into two meetings to better accommodate students across the Commonwealth.

-KHSAA-

About the Kentucky High School Athletic Association
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association was organized in 1917 and is the agency designated by the Kentucky Department of Education to manage high school athletics in the Commonwealth. The Association is a voluntary nonprofit 501(c)3 organization made up of 280 member schools both public and private. The KHSAA sanctions 44 state championships in 13 sports and 5 sport-activities, licenses and trains over 4,000 officials, provides catastrophic insurance for its more than 70,000 member school student-athletes, as well as overseeing coaching education and sports safety programs.