How I Learned to Love Athletic Recruits

College is a big adjustment for first-generation student athletes, but mentoring them can be an even bigger life change.

By Mike Sacken

I don’t think of myself as a logical candidate to help first-generation college athletes graduate. I’m fifty-nine and middle class, not a former athlete or a first-generation college graduate, and obviously not hip. More to the point, I’m white and Texas-born, and I attended segregated schools my whole student life. I was even at the University of Texas in 1969 when the Longhorns had the dubious distinction of becoming the last all-white national champions in football. Yet I have become involved in the lives of many young men and women athletes over the past decade, most of them African Americans. This unofficial role is an incredibly meaningful part of my teaching life, mostly because it still surprises me.

My entry into the world of athletics was inadvertent. When twin women basketball players whom I advised arrived to get my signature on an already-completed form transferring their advisement to the athletics office, I refused to sign it. I told them that if athletics was going to advise them, athletics could sign the form. It was an impulse of pique. In return, a large African American man showed up at my office to say that if I was concerned about the advisement of athletes, I should help him with his 240 charges instead of complaining. He was the head academic coordinator for athletes, a position of which I had been unaware. Embarrassed, I agreed, and my journey began.

Milton, the academic coordinator, had graduated from a Fort Worth high school and gone to university to play football. No one expected him to do much else, including graduate from college. Not only did he do that, but he also completed a master’s degree and embraced a vocation in which he helps young people leave universities with degrees in hand, not just altered dreams about their athletic futures.

We got to know each other, and I was entranced by the passion and optimism he brought to his work. I was also a little surprised that we had become friends and trusted partners. I had been at universities for more than twenty years by then, and in truth, I had had few experiences with athletes, first-generation students, or even African American students, not a particularly encouraging background for an athletics adviser on my campus.

An Alien World

The world of athletics was alien to me, as it has been to most of my faculty colleagues over the years. Most of us have occasional interactions with student athletes in class, not always fruitful, and little to no contact with coaches or others in the athletics department. Many of us are annoyed or embarrassed about the athletics programs at our universities, and few of us feel responsible for young men and women athletes except for the occasional exceptional scholar-athlete. Moreover, the fact that many campus athletes are first-generation African American students makes us feel awkward, frustrated, or touched by racism and hypocrisy. The athletes reciprocate our feelings for the most part, staying remote and disconnected. They rarely come by our offices to chat or seek to know us.

The first semester I began working with athletes, Milton sent ten young men, eight football players and two basketball players, to my undergraduate writing-emphasis course, which had about thirty students total. Eight of the athletes were African American, and two were white; the nonathletes in the class were almost all middle- or upper-middle-class white women majoring in education. It was the most diverse class I’d ever taught.

I quickly realized that my experience had not prepared me to deal with this diversity. The athletes sat in the back of the class, segregated from the education majors, and there was little contact between the two groups of students. I felt like a Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver in the era before Rosa Parks; I had no clue what to do. The athletes rarely made eye contact with me or spoke to me; it seemed as if they were trying to be invisible.

As the semester unfolded, however, a few experiences sealed my commitment to the task I had taken on. One of the athletes in class was a serious Heisman Trophy candidate, and I asked him one day whether students encouraged or spoke to him as he walked across campus. He said they did so occasionally but not often. This young man’s isolation, even as he represented his university nationally, seemed bizarre. He missed class regularly for football games, public appearances, and marketing duties associated with the university’s Heisman campaign.

I suspected that he would be gone after his last university game and not finish the course. Instead, on the day he left campus for the National Football League (NFL) draft, he brought me all his written work and told me that, no matter what else happened, he would graduate to satisfy his mother’s expectations (a story I have heard many times since in various versions). After his first year or so in the NFL, he got back in touch with me, and he finished his last course for graduation online. He’s a source of enormous pride for the university, the NFL, and presumably his mother, too.

Some of the other student athletes in that class were wayward without such glorious reasons. At one point, I called Milton and asked him to make sure that all of them would appear in class the next day for a “come to Jesus meeting.” That was a mistake, one of many I’ve made from inexperience. They arrived at the 8 a.m. class looking exhausted after having been made to run the stadium steps since about 6:30. I learned that any professorial calls to the athletics department led to punishment at practice. Of course, that would only reinforce the students’ sense of caution and distance from me. I discovered that if I didn’t deal with these young men without resort to coaches or even Milton, there would be no relationship.

After class we talked. I apologized for the punishment their coach had assigned them and said my relationship with them had nothing to do with coaches and never would; it was between us. Then I said that if any more absences occurred, I’d drop them. If that ruined their eligibility for the season, it was not my problem. Not a pleasant morning, to say the least.

Still, at the end of the next class, one of the students asked that I not give up on him, saying that school had always been tough for him. The vulnerability he allowed in that moment stunned me. He began to make a habit of coming to my office to talk, mostly venting a lot of cumulative anger at schools and teachers. As a rural white athlete, he came from a group that fit my university’s culture about as poorly as many urban African American students. A few years after he had graduated and moved on, a young woman came to my office saying her brother had sent her to me. This same young man had told her that I would help and could be trusted to listen. It was an amazing moment in my career.

Of course, things don’t always end up sweetly or successfully. One young man who kept his walls up the whole semester showed up at my office the next semester to apologize. He sad that he realized that I’d really wanted to help him, explaining that he hadn’t been able to trust me or be open. He regretted having wasted the chance. We ended up writing back and forth for a while about his anger and its effects in his life.

One exceptional player came to talk to me about finishing his degree after he had started a pro career. He began sweating profusely, telling me that he had never asked for help before and hated to do it. His brother, another player and an exceptional student, had talked him into seeing me. His path to graduation was fitful, with some disappointments, but he persisted and ultimately made it.

One of the great moments in our work is graduation, especially at a smaller university, where each student walks across the stage. I love to meet my players as they come off the stage and exchange a “man hug” (a corollary skill, along with mysterious handshakes, that I have added to my teaching repertoire). I wondered whether the pro football player who had finished his degree would attend. He didn’t. Despite my disappointment, I understand the bittersweet nature of a delayed achievement and knew he’d made the best decision for himself.

A New Understanding

As I’ve come to know young men and women athletes as individuals and learned about their complex lives, I no longer see them as symbols of anything. I no longer associate them with the problems of collegiate sports or look on them as examples of “resilient young people who make it despite troubled experiences.” Even when there’s a wall, it’s not about their being African American, first-generation college students, athletes, or whatever. It’s personal, as are my efforts to earn their trust and offer assistance. I am as affected by my categorical identity as they are, and if we are going to pull the wall down, we both must commit to risk and trust.

To say that we learn as much from our students as they learn from us is a cliché among teachers, although not so much among professors. I balk at the statement because it sounds condescending. But from the first with these young people, I realized that I needed to learn from them before I could invite myself into their lives or them into mine. From these students, I’ve learned about things that I’ve read about for decades. But up close, the difficulties they experience lose their abstractness.

The current academic adviser for football, a first-generation college student himself and a master’s student in my program, told me I have a perfect record: every student who has been in my class and returned to finish a degree has ended up graduating. I don’t feel undefeated, however. I feel as though I don’t always find the gate in the wall and that the student athletes who have slipped away have perhaps read my desire to help as my being a sports groupie or maybe just manipulative and dishonest. In one sense, I could say some have acted like other students who have been equally annoying but more traditional.

But, once again, one of my returning athletes this semester put things into perspective for me when he repeated something I’ve heard before. When he graduates, he said, it will change his family’s history, raising the bar and making real the challenge of college to his children, nephews, and cousins. It’s a true ripple effect. I already look forward to meeting him after he leaves the stage, to exchange the man hug and hear him thank me for my help. I doubt I can explain how he and his predecessors have affected my career and led me to growth unlike any I’ve experienced across my quarter century as a faculty member. I don’t know if they’ve changed my family’s history, but they’ve certainly changed my life.

Mike Sacken is professor of education at Texas Christian University.

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Comments

An outstanding article!!  Thank you for sharing your experiences. 

F.C.

Thanks for a well delivered accounting of your experience.  May your experiences be communicated to colleagues possessing the capability to learn vicariously that they may reach out to these sometimes underprepared and overtaxed student athletes.  Years ago I fit the description of the norm you serve and I can tell you that you are changing their world in a very special way.  You are not only changing their world, you have created that veritable ripple in the waters that just keeps on touching lives. 

Because someone reached out to me I have been inclined to continue the tradition.  Thank you.

Clifton M 

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