Wolverines join USC Shoah Foundation leadership program, visiting Washington and Auschwitz-Birkenau on a journey that challenged them to use the platform of college athletics to confront hate, antisemitism, and injustice.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. | For Michigan gymnast Sophie Parenti, the enormity of Auschwitz-Birkenau was difficult to comprehend in statistics alone.
So she started counting her steps.
Over roughly five hours at the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland, Parenti estimated she took approximately 10,000. In her mind, she began imagining each step as representing one person whose life had been taken.
"And that's just 10,000 people," Parenti said.
The exercise could not capture the full scale of the Holocaust, but it gave the University of Michigan student-athlete a deeply personal way to confront a history that suddenly was no longer confined to textbooks, documentaries or museum exhibits.
"You get there, and you feel the weight," Parenti said. "We step off the bus, and you feel the weight of that place immediately."
For Parenti and fellow Wolverines Jahzara Ranger and Penelopea Gordon, that weight became part of a larger lesson about leadership, responsibility, and what it means to have a platform in college athletics.
Michigan participated for the first time in the USC Shoah Foundation Student-Athlete Global Leadership Program, joining student-athletes from USC and UCLA for an immersive experience in Washington, D.C., and Krakow, Poland.
The journey centered on Holocaust education and confronting antisemitism and hate. But for the Michigan contingent, it also raised a distinctly modern question for college athletes:
What responsibility comes with having a voice?
From Wolverines to Witnesses
Before the student-athletes reached Poland, the program began in Washington with workshops, museum visits, and discussions designed to challenge participants to examine history and themselves.
They visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and heard firsthand testimony from Holocaust survivor Irene Weiss, bringing a human dimension to events that can otherwise feel distant to a younger generation.
But before confronting some of history's most difficult subjects, participants first worked on building trust with one another.
An early exercise asked the student-athletes to reflect on different aspects of their identities — including race, gender, religion, sexuality and physical appearance — and consider which characteristics made them feel empowered and which left them feeling vulnerable.
Ranger said the exercise quickly changed the dynamic among students who had only recently met.
"We were able to be vulnerable with each other, and we were in a space where we could just trust each other," Ranger said.
That trust became essential as conversations grew more complicated.
Brian Townsend, director of Michigan Athletics' Leadership Development Program, accompanied the Wolverines and viewed those exchanges as an important part of developing leaders.
Rather than describing them as "tough conversations," Townsend offered another term.
"Courageous conversations."
The distinction matters. Leadership, in that context, wasn't about having the perfect response. It was about possessing the courage to listen, ask questions, and engage when the subject matter became uncomfortable.
Auschwitz Changes the Conversation
The program's lessons became considerably more visceral when the group traveled to Poland.
In Krakow, participants studied Jewish history, toured the city, visited a synagogue, and spent time at the Jewish Community Center of Krakow.
Then they traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
For Ranger, one realization was especially difficult to shake: She was free to enter the grounds, witness what remained, and then leave — a freedom denied to the people imprisoned and murdered there.
"You get to walk through it. You get to go in and leave," Ranger said. "We became witnesses, whether we wanted to or not."
That idea — becoming a witness — emerged as one of the defining themes of the experience.
"We bore witness, and we can say it is real and it happened," Ranger said. "We have something to fight for. We have people to stand up for."
Rather than experiencing everything immediately, she found the significance of the visit continuing to surface afterward. She thought about the individuals who had once occupied the places where she now stood and about the fragments of humanity they tried to preserve under unimaginable conditions.
The earlier conversation with Weiss also took on greater meaning.
Hearing testimony directly from a Holocaust survivor reinforced why remembrance depends on each generation carrying those stories forward — particularly as the number of living survivors continues to decline.
For the Michigan athletes, the concept evolved into what Parenti called a "second witness": someone who did not personally experience the Holocaust but accepts the responsibility to preserve its truth and challenge hatred.
"I used to not really have that confidence," Parenti said of entering difficult conversations. "But now it's like, you know what? No, I have to stand on what I believe."
A Different Definition of Leadership
College sports often define leadership through familiar measurements: captains, championships, personal discipline, performance under pressure, and the ability to rally teammates.
Michigan's experience with the Shoah Foundation expanded that definition.
For Gordon, leadership increasingly means listening to people whose experiences differ from her own and being willing to advocate for them.
She described a leader as "someone who wants to learn more about others, to advocate for them."
That perspective also changed the way she views the visibility that comes with wearing a Michigan uniform.
"I feel like we need to be better as young student-athletes to use our platforms to advocate for injustices and be social leaders," Gordon said.
Her message to future Wolverines participating in the program is similarly direct: understand that having a voice entails the opportunity to use it.
Parenti returned to Ann Arbor with much the same realization.
College athletes operate in an environment built around the next challenge — another meet, another race, another workout, another class, and eventually another decision about life after sports.
The trip offered a reminder that athletic identity is only one part of a much larger life.
"We're student-athletes, but we're also just people who are navigating society and trying to find ways to make a difference," Parenti said.
That difference, she learned, does not necessarily require a massive public gesture.
"Nothing I do has to be huge or on this grand scale," Parenti said. "But every day, I can do something that will make a difference, and that will make my community better."
Why the Lesson Matters in College Sports
The experience arrives at a time when college athletes have greater public visibility and individual influence than ever.
Social media allows athletes to communicate directly with thousands — sometimes millions — of followers. Name, image, and likeness opportunities have expanded their commercial profiles. At the same time, athletes increasingly face expectations about when and how they should address issues that extend beyond the field of competition.
The Shoah Foundation program presented Michigan's participants with a framework that went deeper than simply encouraging athletes to speak.
It emphasized learning before speaking, listening before judging, and understanding history before applying its lessons to the present.
Townsend believes that is precisely why such an experience belongs within an athletics department.
"Any athlete that's competing at the University of Michigan has a platform," Townsend said. "At the end of the day, the athlete is inside the person."
The goal, he said, isn't to send student-athletes back to campus believing they must solve society's largest problems.
Instead, he wants them prepared to confront hatred when it appears within the communities they can influence.
"We don't need them to save the world," Townsend said. "We just need them to be a role model when they see hate being displayed in their sphere and in their communities."
Carrying the Experience Back to Michigan
There was no final whistle when the Wolverines returned to Ann Arbor.
If anything, that is when the most difficult portion of the experience began: determining how to translate what they witnessed into everyday choices.
For Parenti, leadership now stretches beyond helping teammates become better gymnasts. It includes encouraging the people around her to recognize their responsibilities beyond sports.
For Gordon, the takeaway centers on refusing to become passive when witnessing injustice.
"If you're a bystander, then you're not doing enough," Gordon said. "You need to stand up and advocate for things you see that are wrong right in front of you."
And for Parenti, the question still returns to those thousands of steps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
She arrived trying to comprehend history.
She left understanding that witnessing it creates a responsibility to remember it.
"What can I do with this now?" she asked.
For these Michigan Wolverines, answering that question may become one of the most consequential leadership lessons of their college careers.
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-- By Lakisha Brown
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