Adriana maldonado

SPORT:

YEAR:
MAJOR:
HOMETOWN:

Women's Soccer

Sophmore

Fresno, California

Psychology

Adriana Maldonado is a sophomore on the women’s soccer team here at UNL. Originally from Fresno, California, Adriana is one of the founders of MSAC. Maldonado is also a psychology major and she explains that she wants to become a child trauma psychologist which would help children cope with things like social injustices or family disruptions, among other things.

Maldonado, as part of the original founders of MSAC, saw a need for the athletics department to address and bring awareness to not only problems with inclusion in Nebraska athletics, but with racial inequality happening outside of Nebraska.

“I want to say around 20-25% of our athletes are minorities,” Maldonado said. “And then 10-11% of our staff are minorities. We are wanting to see more representation of people of color within our administration, and as a student-athlete, to be able to see that representation means a lot to us.”

Education is also something Maldonoda finds important in moving forward with MSAC.

“One of the big things for us was making sure that our athletes were educated, especially with this whole topic lot of things are not out of hate, just mere ignorance,” Maldonado said. “So it comes down to educating our student-athletes and making sure that our coaches, administrators, people that are supposed to be supporting us are doing it in the right way.”

With education, there was also discussion about the need for incoming freshmen to have meetings with diversity and inclusion staff and making sure that everyone understands one another.

The Legacy Over Image movement was also another milestone for Maldonado. The letter listed out their requests of the athletics department and detailed the athletes' thoughts and feelings on recent and past events.

“There wasn't a lot of support at the beginning,” Maldonado said. “A lot of people were wanting to protect their image in a time that we didn't really need to be worrying about image… Our entire group wants to leave a legacy that continues to have great progress within our athletics department.”

Maldonado goes on to say that “when we say legacy over image, I think all of us mean, this is more important than me just being an athlete, and the picture is a lot bigger than Saturday night competitions days or fans being at our games. The reward for this is a lot bigger and we see this as the bigger picture over just a little image that we have.”