On Dec. 12, 2024, the NCAA announced that Villanova will be awarded the 2025 NCAA Minority Opportunities Athletic Association (MOAA) Award for Diversity & Inclusion during the 2025 NCAA Convention to be held in Nashville, Tennessee from Jan. 14-17.
The award recognizes the school’s commitment to creating an inclusive and diverse environment within the athletics community.
A majority of the work that goes into making Villanova Athletics a more inclusive and diverse environment is led by Villanova’s UNITAS initiative.
Since its creation in 2017, the UNITAS initiative has provided student-athletes with support through events such as the 2021 Black Lives Matter movement.
What separates Villanova’s initiatives from the other 365 Division I schools is the leadership, coaches and staff that all buy into the goals UNITAS strives for. Villanova’s inclusion and diversity goals rely on the fact that people want to foster a better environment.
“What sets us aside is that this is an all-athletic department effort,” Director of UNITAS Leashia Lewis said.” In some instances, institutions implement the UNITAS work or the DEI work just for student-athletes. But our work expands the scope from administrators, coaches, staff, and our student-athletes. I think that structure and organization have allowed us to reach our student-athletes in a way that it might take a longer time to do in other instances.”
Lewis has led the UNITAS initiative since August of 2021. She was once a Villanova student-athlete, winning multiple Big East championships on the women’s track and field team. Lewis has experienced a version of Villanova with and without the UNITAS initiative.
“When I was an athlete at Villanova, it was all about performance,” Lewis said. “It was about winning the championships. Whereas now we look at our athletes holistically. We are centering who they are individually. We are celebrating their differences. The ideal is if we support our athletes holistically in a way that they need us to, then they will perform better in all the places that they are, not just on the field but in every aspect of their lives and beyond the Villanova landscape.”
Since the creation of UNITAS under athletic director Mark Jackson, Villanova Athletics has made it a priority to establish a place that stands for Villanova’s core Augustinian values and makes all student-athletes feel comfortable. Villanova is just one of two Augustinian institutions in the United States. The three core principles include Veritas (truth), Unitas (unity) and Caritas (love). These principles are engrained in the University’s identity.
With Jackson’s departure in August of 2024, Eric Rodel now serves as Villanova’s new vice president and athletic director. During Rodel’s time as deputy athletic director at Oregon, his athletic department also received the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association (MOAA) Award for Diversity & Inclusion in 2020.
“Student-athletes went to Jackson to ask him to do more [about inclusivity] in athletics,” Lewis said. “He listened to those students and took it upon himself to learn more and then to build UNITAS. “I’m excited that Rodell is coming in from Oregon, who is a former recipient of this award. I feel confident Eric [Rodel] will support UNITAS and probably take us to the next level.”
UNITAS is made up of seven various student-athlete-led ally groups: 13 Percent, Athlete Ally, BIPOC, Every Mind Matters, International Student-Athletes, StriVe and Women’s Empowerment. Each group specializes in aiding a certain area of inclusion in Villanova Athletics.
Senior Tommy Johnson, who is on the Villanova men’s soccer team, is the president of the ally group Every Mind Matters. The group’s mission is to increase mental health awareness and advocacy within the Athletic Department.
“We’re just a student-athlete group that’s dedicated to reducing the stigma surrounding mental health,” Johnson said. “We try to find a network within the students, the coaches and all different teams in groups throughout campus to talk about mental health.”
Injuries are a huge part of mental health struggles in college athletes. Alongside Every Mind Matter, Johnson helped create the group StriVe.
“StriVe is a group that is dedicated to providing a safe space for individuals that are suffering any types of long-term disabilities, short-term disabilities and injuries,” Johnson said. “We just try to find that safe space with individuals that can relate. Whether it’s through ACL injuries, hip surgeries or long-term injuries, things are going to happen. Having those other students that you can kind of lean on through these issues is the best thing possible.”
Junior Gabriella Henson-Vendrell, who is on the women’s lacrosse team, is the vice president of 13 Percent—the ally group that represents the black student-athletes who make up 13 percent of Villanova Athletics.
The mission of 13 Percent is to provide a judgemental free space for black student-athletes to speak out and be heard by their peers about the issues they face at a predominantly white institution.
“The group creates initiatives where we are making our voices heard on campus by being involved in social justice efforts on campus,” Vendrell said. “It is really important, especially now. It’s just been great seeing the program evolve from the leaders that created it.”
The UNITAS groups go beyond the student-athletes and welcome every student on campus to participate in their events.
We do also have non-student-athletes come and people of other different backgrounds come in support,” Vendrell said. “It is amazing because I know that we have a lot of allies at this school and it’s just important that everyone keeps educating themselves.”
While Lewis has witnessed how rapidly UNITAS has changed Villanova Athletics for the good, she also recognizes that UNITAS’ initiatives are not perfect and there is still more to achieve at Villanova.
“There’s lots happening in our larger society that impacts us in athletics,” Lewis said. “People change and people evolve and so the work continues, but I’m also noticing that it’s less of a fight, and more of a coming together.