This project investigates the adjustment to college life that first-year athletes must face. Through personal essay, a comprehensive survey of current college athletes at Arizona State University, and one-on-one interviews with self-selected, current athletes, the project presents the collection of challenges confronted and best practices adopted (and also missteps to be learned from) along the way in a college athlete’s first year and transition from high school to college. By looking systematically, this project brings awareness to the common stressors that athletes face and shares coping mechanisms in which these stressors can be overcome. This project also brings the survey statistics to life with individual stories, including both the author’s personal essay and interviews with individual athletes. While the first purpose of this thesis is to make clear to athletes struggling with this transition from high school to college sports that their experience is commonplace and expected, the second purpose is to set these athletes up for success: providing them with a one-stop shop of resources to assist athletes and any of their needs. The project analyzes athletes’ current use of resources and brings together the available resources for athletes into a single catalogue. This “guidebook” blends previous research on the adjustment to college for collegiate athletes, a new study analyzing the specific resource usage of the current Sun Devil athletes, and personal testimony. What this project revealed was that not only are first-year athletes experiencing common stressors and underutilizing resources available to them, so too are athletes in the second, third, and fourth years. All athletes would benefit from increasing awareness of the challenges and stressors often experienced by athletes and increased accessing of resources available to athletes that continue to be underutilized.

I love to work with numbers and data. Learning to solve equations and extrapolate points to predict outcomes will help me hone the talents I want to pursue a job based in an area I enjoy. Solving problems and creating solutions is like a puzzle or a game to me. Games are a big part of my life… from family game night to chess to computer games and math problems. This concept of problem-solving and solution-finding is what led me to this thesis. My Data Analytics and Supply Chain Management majors both involve these concepts as well, so revolving them around my thesis project helped to give me more experience that will help me in my future career. When looking into the field of games, people enjoy many different types around the world. Games can range anywhere from card and board games, to video games, and even sports and the Olympics. These are all considered games, and my goal in taking this thesis course is to become a game designer and start my journey into providing entertainment for my audience to play. Due to the already enormous amount of games in circulation today, I was creative and used the game-making skills I learned in this class when making my game. I focused on developing a strategy board game. Since I have played games all my life, I know that game development is not a simple task to undertake. That is why this Honors Thesis Course is important to me since it was beneficial to gain the skills necessary to create my own game. Making sure the game I created maintained the proper mechanics, story, aesthetic, and technology was paramount to creating an enjoyable board game. Figuring out a cohesive theme was also necessary to sufficiently market the game so people will want to add it to their collection, and more importantly, spend hours of their time playing. Those are skills I learned in my honors-directed study. I used my research by examining different genres of board games and determining which aspects in each influenced my own game design. Once I figured out the general concept of my project, I looked into how already existing games in this genre or other games that are related to my idea function and why they became popular. It was important to understand exactly how these games operate and function in order to be intuitive enough that most people can understand how to play them. I also had to make sure the game wasn’t so basic that people wouldn’t have fun playing them over and over. Once I figured these things out, I started construction of the game prototype, which served as the final deliverable for my Honors Thesis. My purchase list consists of the supplies I needed to construct my board game. I purchased a variety of materials that I needed for this project. I needed to make three copies of it, since my professor requested I give her and my second a copy if I was able. I needed a box, which turned out to be the most expensive single item on the list. The player cards I made doubled as a dice pad since I needed to use dice during the game. I bought plastic gemstones to simulate my currencies, of which I had five types. Four of those came from the same package while the diamonds I bought separately. The bags I bought are used for storage of each type of gemstone, and then they become the player bags when setting up the game. The little cubes I bought are for the quest boards so players can track their actions and certain quests. When constructing the board tiles as well as the quest boards, I needed to buy the wooden blocks, paint, brushes, glue, and lamination sheets. I first painted half of each block with either royal purple or gold to signify what tile it would become. Once I completed that, I printed and laminated the fronts of each tile and glued them together with the blocks. My goal for my thesis project was to create a board game that I would want to buy, and I believe I have accomplished this. Of course, many things will have to change when I work towards publishing my game, such as commissioning artwork, working on different marketing strategies, and lowering the cost of production per game. For a prototype though, I believe that I have done as well as I could with making as good a game as I could. Thank you for this opportunity, it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot that will help me in the future.