GAINESVILLE, Fla. – After four years of success and achievements in the water, classroom and as a leader, senior women's swimmer Tori Bindi will end her collegiate career with one final honor that places her in the upper echelon of the Spring 2020 graduating class at the University of Florida. 

UF's Alumni Association honors a small number of students every graduating class, typically four to six, with an award for leadership contributions made to both their peers and to the community of Gainesville over their time at the university. 

Bindi, a Biochemistry major who boasts a 3.94 grade-point average, was named a Spring 2020 Outstanding Leader and becomes the first student-athlete to receive this prestigious, campus-wide accolade since women's swimmer Summer Stephens in 2015. 

"I'm really honored to be able to represent the University of Florida athletics in a leadership capacity that's on the stage of the entire university," Bindi said. 

Bindi's accomplishments in her four years as a Gator is a true testament to the student-athlete ideology and an example of the special success stories that come to fruition at UF in athletics, academics and leadership roles. 
 
The Gulf Breeze, Fla. native was first made of the award after Valerie Flournoy, coordinator of student development at the Otis Hawkins Center, shared that the University Athletic Association wanted to nominate her. She would go on to compile a packet containing her resume, a personal statement and letters of recommendation from women's swimming and diving head coach Jeff Poppell and her academic advisor, Tim Aydt, to show her impact as a leader in many capacities during her four years in Gainesville. 

"As a Division-I student-athlete at the University of Florida, Tori made an enormous impact not only within our swimming and diving program, but throughout the entire UF student-athlete community," Poppell said. "She truly embodied the student-athlete that seeks to challenge herself to the fullest, in various endeavors, to gain the absolute most from her overall university experience."

At first glance, this might've seemed like just another in a multitude of honors and awards claimed by Bindi, who aspires to be a surgeon. Quite the opposite, as she found out.

"After starting to talk to some of the people who have been around long time and they explained to me just how big of a deal this is, that made it hit home a little bit," Bindi said. 

Allison Forrest, coordinator of career development, focuses on enhancing student-athletes' career aspirations on a daily basis at Hawkins Center and thinks the award is even more special due to all the amazing accomplishments of students across UF, a top-10 public university. 

"The award really shows she is making a difference, not just within athletics, but within campus as a whole," Forest said. "There's not a lot of them, and it's a very prestigious award to receive, especially when you're looking at all the amazing things any student on campus is doing. UF has very talented students in general and for her to get this award against so many of them, I think is a huge honor and well deserving." 

RAISED BY LEADERS 

A military dependent who moved about seven times until the age of 14, Bindi was exposed to meeting a ton of new people very often and living a fast-paced life. From an early age, her parents quickly instilled in her the importance of work ethic and communication skills. 

"I really think I am the best versions of my mom and my dad put together because they're both very successful communicators and parents," she said. "They taught me from a young age that if I want to be able to do it all, I can. I just have to be able to work."

Boy, did she work. 

This year, she is the UAA's Student Athlete Advisory Committee president and sits in on the UF Board of Directors' meetings. Additionally, she is one of two women swim members that meet monthly with Athletic Director Scott Stricklin as members of the Gators Leadership Experience and was represented Florida at the SEC Leadership Conference this past June.

"In high school, it was really school and athletics that were my focus," Bindi said. "Then when I got to college, I realized there is such a big world outside of just athletics and academics that I wanted to be a part of change."

As SAAC President, she was able to spearhead change across the student-athlete community, setting up and running hour-long meetings once every two weeks with each sports' team representatives to find out every team's current situation and viewpoint on certain topics that only high-level Division-I student-athletes can relate to. 

"I think my favorite thing is being able to bring together so many people from so many different sports. We see each other compete on the stage, on TV, we hear about it on the news and we are all so busy that none of us get to really hang out for an extensive amount of time," Bindi said. "I think it's nice to have a dedicated time to bring everybody's representative from each sport, get an update on what sport is doing and to hear from them what the SAAC can do for them, or what the UAA can do for them. I really like being able to hear those things and internalize it, and then work with Val to make the student-athlete experience one of the best in the United States at the University of Florida."

Flournoy worked directly with Bindi and other SAAC members throughout their seasons and witnessed the impact she had as a leader firsthand.  

"With SAAC, it's a lot of different student-athletes and a lot of different backgrounds and a lot of different teams coming together and she's really good at unifying different people," Flournoy said. "She's really good at thinking about other people and thinking about their lenses and where they come from [and] how to make a decision that is the best for everyone even if that makes her do extra work."

Without the student-athletes necessarily knowing it, Bindi would gather all the information from their meetings and rehash the climate of the athletic teams at the Board of Directors meetings with Stricklin, University President W. Kent Fuchs and other important decision-makers on campus. 

"Tori has been an outstanding leader for the women's swimming and diving program, Gator Athletics and the University of Florida and it has been rewarding to get to know her as a student-athlete as a member of our Athletic Department board," said Stricklin. "She has truly embraced every opportunity during her four years at Florida and being recognized as one of UF's Outstanding Senior Leaders is a well-deserved honor. "

"For me to have a voice amongst them is very important, especially because I don't know if any of the student-athletes really know that I am advocating for them in front of the other people, it's not just emails being sent, or phone calls," Bindi said. "I'm actually sitting at the table listening to what they have to say about the trajectory of people's athletic experience so I am able to bring attention to things that maybe adults or the president don't know what's going on at the very minuscule level of a team or relationships amongst teammates, so that's really cool."
 
AN IMPRESSIVE RESUME

For everyone, there comes a point when sports are no longer a part of their life. For Bindi, she concentrated on this next step from the beginning of her collegiate experience, something many put off until it's too late. 

Over the course of her four years in Gainesville, Bindi has gained valuable experiences through internships and shadowing opportunities across multiple hospitals in Florida, while still gaining classroom accolades such as Florida's Anderson Scholar Award with Highest Distinction honors, as well as CSCAA first-team All-America and SEC Academic Honor Roll honors. 

"I'm one of those people where if I have people around me that are achieving more, I want to achieve more," she said. "The classes I'm in, the major that I'm in, everybody wants to go to med school or wants to cure cancer, so if you're around those people constantly, I think that puts the drive in me to do well in school."

Her experiences include being a research assistant under Dr. David Fuller at the UF Brian Institute, intern in surgical services and physician shadowing at UF Shands Hospital and was an orthopedic surgery intern at the Andrews Institute in her hometown. 

Juggling all these experiences with other commitments of academics and athletics is made possible due to Bindi's time management skills, as well the top-notch resources made available on campus at the Hawkins Center. This speaks to the commitment that the university has made to enhance a student-athletes' collegiate experience. 

"I think that's one of the reasons why I chose the University of Florida because they care so much about their student-athletes and they make sure they bring home SEC championships, but also get straight A's in the classroom and become doctors, lawyers, CEO's, CIO's," Bindi said. 

Added Flournoy: "Our job is to help student-athletes become prepared professionals. What we do, whatever they want to be professional in, if they want to be a professional athlete, if they want to be someone like Tori Bindi and wants to be a doctor, we're there to make sure they have the tools so that when they graduate, they can actually be a prepared professional."

With all her commitments, these resources come in handy whenever Bindi feels out of sorts. 

"There are enough people in my life to re-center me and then be like 'What are we going to tackle today?' or 'What are we going to change today to make tomorrow better?' " Bindi said. "That's just how I live my life."
 
CAREER RECAP

Bindi capped off her athletic career on Feb.18-22 at the 2020 SEC Championships in Auburn, Ala. as the UF women captured a second-place finish for the second consecutive year, the first time with back-to-back runner-up finishes since 2011 and 2012. 

"All year we've been trying to win and taking steps that we thought we needed to do to come out on top at the SEC Championships," Bindi said. "Even though we got second, it was one of the most fun meets I've ever had." 

For Bindi it was the perfect way to conclude her Gator experience, posting personal-best times in the 100 free, 200 free and 500 free, as well as competing as a member of 800 free relay. Bindi swam her best, she believed, because she was having the best time of her career. 

This year's graduating seniors' swimming careers have been filled with ups and downs, including a complete shift in team structure after a decision to split the women's and men's teams after the 2017-18 season. 

"Given the women's swim team situation over the last four years, I think the senior class had to grow up really fast when we were freshmen," she said. "We had to become basically seniors really fast because of the leadership dynamic that we were thrown into."

The Gators wouldn't register a point during the group's freshman season at NCAA's and finished in seventh-place during that same year's SEC Championships. 

That adversity paid dividends for the team, and helped push every individual to become a great leader in their own way to create a tight-knit team, shown by their vast improvement in their conference finishes. For Bindi, she saw it as an opportunity for herself and her classmates to make a lasting footprint on the program. 

Along the way, the team was able to be around a great leader and team-builder with Poppell at the helm. He propelled the program in his first two seasons to a level that it hasn't seen in years. Bindi credits him with not only shaping her as a better swimmer, but molding her into a better person because of the culture created. 

"Coming out of high school, everybody is kind of the same. Everybody has been living with their parents for 18 years and I probably had the high school experience as everybody else, but what you do in college determines the type of person you become when you come out of college," she said. "I couldn't imagine having any better person to handle the problems, the highs and the lows, of what it is to be a part of a women's team better than Jeff. Nobody can do it better than him. For that, I'm super grateful."
 
 
WHAT'S NEXT? 
Bindi's leadership honor set a standard to which her successors can aspire.

"I think by her being around so many student-athletes, they can really see that she's living the example of it," Forrest said. "I think people can see her day-to-day lived experience that they can also be a Tori Bindi, or they can get involved in other things that always doesn't have to be huge things, but find something that you're passionate about and making a change and getting involved in it."

Flournoy called the leadership honor "the cherry on top" to Bindi's stellar contributions to her UAA experience. 

"She works hard in everything that she does, and our student-athletes as a whole don't get enough respect in managing in being a student and an athlete," Flournoy said. "This is the capping of what you would want any student-athlete to have here at the University of Florida and to be able to go against students and they're (student-athletes) the absolute most busy students on campus and to be recognized is huge." 

Now, Bindi will turn her attention to studying and passing the MCAT in the near future, while continuing to study with Dr. Fuller at the Brain Institute. She will help the lab come up with a gene therapy treatment for kids who are diagnosed with Pompe disease.

She will also begin to apply for schools across the nation to begin studies in the fall of 2021. 

Once she finds her next home, she hopes to be involved in leadership groups in a position within the school's government to give her more opportunities to connect and network with more people in her field. 

"I was in student government in high school and I really liked it," Bindi recalled. "I think I liked the social aspect of it a lot because you get to meet so many different people from all over and hear so many opinions from other people that maybe you didn't even consider."

Her experiences throughout her internships and shadowing opportunities allowed Bindi to see multiple procedures. Bindi has her eyes set on either becoming an orthopedic surgeon, because of the sports side and "being able to help athletes", or pediatric plastic surgeon because she saw first-hand much a small cosmetic surgery can have on a child's life.

Bindi will be able to practice on her own after four more years of studying and five years of observing, with the Outstanding Leader Award serving as a constant reminder to herself, and current and future Gators, how much of a difference one person — one leader — can make.   

"I think great leadership is ability to motivate people, communicate and inspire others to achieve their goals. Personal accountability has been displayed by some of the greatest leaders that the university has seen," Bindi said. "I am very honored to be considered one of those people based off of what I've shown in my four years at the university."

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