The thing that surprises me the most at my age is that I’m still able to be surprised.
About the time that I start thinking I’ve seen just about everything, something new comes up that makes me scratch my head. Wow. I haven’t seen THAT before.
I’ve been teaching at Penn State for a long time. I figure with approximately 120 students each semester, I’ve had almost 5,000 students in class – not including my academic advisees or students I supervise while they are off campus doing internships. From incredible talent and creativity to lame excuses and cheating, every semester seems to provide a surprise.
This semester’s surprise was Evan Royster. (I asked Evan in advance if he minded my writing about him.)
If you’ve been living on another planet, Royster is a football player who, this past season, broke the all-time rushing record at Penn State. Despite the early press and the armchair quarterbacks squawking about his pre-season weight, his motivation as a fifth-year student and his reserved interview style, his name is now at the top of the Nittany Lion record books and he is likely looking at a career in professional football.
He also sat in my class every Tuesday and Thursday for 15 weeks.
Athletes are nothing new to those of us who teach in Recreation, Park and Tourism Management. We are used to being teased about being the “basket weaving” major for athletes. In reality, our program requires the same number of credits, the same level of rigor and statistically has similar enrollment of scholarship athletes as other majors at Penn State.
Admittedly, our kids are definitely more people-oriented than some of their more technically focused colleagues across campus. Our students end up in amazing jobs in tourism, in entertainment, in the military, on cruise ships, in the golf industry, in camps, in state and national parks and in sports. It’s those commercial recreation careers related to the sports industry – management, marketing, promotions, sales – that attract the athletes.
We’ve had students in our program who later went on to play in the NFL. I’ve had Olympians and Paralympians. I’ve had students move on to the WNBA and some who went to Europe to play professional basketball. I’ve had student-athletes from every sport at Penn State.
News alert: The student athletes are pretty much like the other 18- to 25-year-old kids who sit in my class. They have all the same issues, needs, concerns, challenges and joys as other undergraduate students but have the additional responsibilities of working for their scholarships.
The biggest difference between a scholarship athlete and a regular student is sometimes how the other students react to them.
I should have seen the warning signs when, on the first day of class last August, one of the students saw Evan’s name on my attendance sign-in sheet and pulled me aside after class. He quietly asked: ‘Can I be in his group?’
As the semester progressed, I was pretty impressed with Evan and his partner in crime Mike Zordich. They came to almost every class and participated in the course assignments just like everyone else. No attitude, no egos. They came to out-of-class assignments, extra-credit opportunities and spent the day with their classmates at Shavers Creek for team-building. They balanced their classwork around practices and team expectations. They seemed fairly oblivious to the attention of their peers.
As the football season progressed, and their popularity both on and off campus increased, the class comfort level at having such celebrity in our midst increased as well. Evan and Mike maintained the same countenance throughout. They were just two regular students who regularly joked that they hoped to get out of class early so that they could go find food.
And then it happened. On the last day of class, as people were debriefing their final group project and were saying goodbyes and starting to leave the classroom, several students pulled T-shirts and jerseys out of their backpacks and asked Evan to sign them. Evan and Mike were asked to sign autographs for a line of students who had been their classmates for 15 weeks.
I was shocked. I had never seen it happen before. A Penn State student, who may or may not have worked directly with another student, feels comfortable enough and plans in advance to pack a jersey or T-shirt in his or her backpack and then has the guts to pull it out in front of peers and asks that classmate for an autograph?
Have I mentioned the class is a study in leadership and group dynamics?
Was it because of inherent interaction in the class? Was it Evan and Mike’s easy style and willingness to participate that gave their peers permission? Was it the once-in-a-lifetime access to the level of celebrity that most of us will never understand? Was it the insanity of this sports-focused university community?
Evan and Mike were both very gracious to their peers. As we chatted afterward, they said that they had been asked for autographs by other students, but not at the level that we had all just seen. They talked about how weird it is to be considered a celebrity among their peers and how “we are just students like they are.” Both of these young men clearly understand the benefits and the sacrifices of living in this bubble that we call Penn State athletics. I was impressed by their respectful response to their classmates and to me throughout the semester.
As I near the half-century birthday milestone, I sometimes think I’ve seen it all. It’s nice to know that life can occasionally still throw me a surprise every now and then. Wow.
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