By FHSU Sports Information<\/b><\/p>\n
Courtesy photo<\/em><\/p>\n KANSAS CITY, Mo. – On Monday, Fort Hays State University’s Dr. Jeff Burnett received the 2018 MIAA SAAC (Student-Athlete Advisory Committee) Mentor of the Year Award at the MIAA Awards Celebration in Kansas City. Burnett, now in his 16th<\/sup> year at FHSU, is an advisor and faculty member in the Department of Health and Human Performance and a minister\/director for Encounter, a spiritual group for college students.<\/p>\n The MIAA SAAC Mentor of the Year Award is in its ninth year as it started during the 2009-10 school year. This award aims to recognize an individual who has had an immense impact on student-athletes within their campus throughout their career. Each SAAC institute nominates someone on their campus each year, and a selection committee decides which individual has had the greatest impact during that year.<\/p>\n The FHSU SAAC nominated Dr. Burnett based on his support throughout their lives on and off the court. According to his students, motivation is a common word used to describe the impact of Dr. Burnett. Whether he is teaching, ministering, or just visiting with a student or team, his focus is to help them find motivation to get to where they want to be. Dr. Burnett, while he serves as a mentor to a majority of student-athletes on campus, also holds the role of team chaplain for the football team. In addition to his on-campus impact, Dr. Burnett sponsors a mission trip each year to Haiti to promote community service.<\/p>\n According to his nomination letter, a freshman athlete quotes Dr. Burnett as someone who “cares about my future. He has a very enlightening personality, he’s a great person to talk to and he’s a great all around person and I know that he has benefited other students in similar ways.” Dr. Burnett supports students academically, athletically and personally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By FHSU Sports Information Courtesy photo KANSAS CITY, Mo. – On Monday, Fort Hays State University’s Dr. Jeff Burnett received the 2018 MIAA SAAC (Student-Athlete… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3397,3398,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-area-news","category-campus-news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tigermedianet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/jeffurnett.jpg?fit=300%2C169&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38656,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38654\/revisions\/38656"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tigermedianet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}