Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | fall 2005

FALL 2005
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ATHLETES AND ACADEMICS:
IN TODAY'S COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT, IS THERE STILL ROOM FOR THE 'STUDENT' IN STUDENT-ATHLETE?

Donald Reed hears all the stereotypes.

No, Reed often has to explain, he and the Student-Athlete Services staff he oversees don’t “keep the
student-athletes eligible.” In fact, Reed is quite proud that Iowa State’s student-athletes keep themselves eligible.

For Reed and his staff, helping individuals succeed is the top priority. And the Cyclones are succeeding. Iowa State’s graduation rates and grade point averages are higher for student-athletes than for
the overall student body, and ISU is always near or at the top of the Big 12 Conference in graduation
rate. But, Reed says, there are always new rules to follow and new challenges to take on.

In the last two years, the NCAA has ratcheted up its standards for initial eligibility and progress toward a degree – changes that have sent some coaches and administrators across the country into a tailspin.

“It requires institutions to be very, very meticulous as far as monitoring the students who are
currently participating and ensure at the front end that we recruit students who are able to meet
the standards that are required,” Reed says. One change involves the rules for initial eligibility. Student-athletes must now earn minimum 2.0 grade-point averages in 16 core high school courses in English, history, science, and math. That’s up from 14 courses under the previous rules.

As for monitoring the student-athletes after they arrive in college, the NCAA is now keeping close tabs on academic progress rate (APR), a new calculation designed to more accurately depict the retention and
graduation of student-athletes on a year-toyear
basis. The NCAA’s former statistic of choice, the graduation rate, often pointed back to old data, Reed says. The APR will paint a more vivid picture of each school’s – and each student-athlete’s – current
situation.

Under the new rules, an APR will be calculated for each individual studentathlete, and a cumulative APR will be calculated for each sports program. Each team must maintain a minimum APR over four years or incur penalties that the NCAA is beginning to phase in.
Those penalties can include loss of scholarships,
probation, and bans on participation in championships. In the meantime, the NCAA has already begun issuing warnings to programs that don’t meet the goals, including Iowa State’s
men’s basketball team, which was one of seven
Division I men’s programs in the state of Iowa to
receive an initial warning last year (the other six
were programs at Drake, Northern Iowa, and Iowa).

“Right now we’re in a state of flux,” Reed says. “We have students who were in school before the rule and students who started after August 1, 2003. So we are responsible for monitoring and accounting basically two sets of rules right now.”

While some in college athletics are criticizing the NCAA’s new rules as too strict or as encouraging student-athletes to take less challenging course loads, outgoing ISU Athletics Director Bruce Van De Velde says he feels the new rules have helped
ISU’s Athletics Department focus on what’s most important to the department and to the institution: student success.

“Academics should be your top priority,” he says. “We have always had to balance competitive issues with academic issues. By increasing the requirements, we are saying that academics are our top priority,
and that is okay – that is why we should be
here.”

Assistant Eastern Illinois women’s basketball coach Anne O’Neil, a former ISU academic All-American, agrees. “The purpose of going to school is the education, and the second priority is to be out
performing,” she says. “I think it’s always a good thing when greater emphasis is placed on academics.”

Increased Time Demands
While he supports the NCAA’s initiatives, Van De Velde also admits that they’re tough. “The initial and continuing eligibility requirements are much more demanding in intercollegiate athletics than the general student body,” he says. “So the time
demands on the student-athlete, coupled with the enhanced academic requirements, are the reasons we think we need to give [student-athletes] special support.”

That’s where Reed’s team comes into the picture.

As associate athletics director, Reed oversees a staff that provides individual academic counseling to all of ISU’s student-athletes, administers a learning center, and develops programming for community service, skill development, social awareness, and learning disability
support.

The department’s former assistant director, Lindsay Moser, says the job is all about the students.

“It’s important to understand them, know their strengths, know their fears,”says Moser, who now works as a corporate recruiter for Principal Financial Group. “It’s all individual. I’m not a big fan of the
cookie-cutter system where I have the same conversation with my soccer players that I have with my gymnasts. The best part of the job is the student interaction, the student contact…getting a phone call
from a former student saying [something I’ve taught them] has really helped.”

But why should student-athletes receive extra services? How does the student-athlete services staff respond to criticism that offering special services to a distinct population is unfair?

First, says Moser, there are increasing time demands and personal pressures on the Division I student-athlete in today’s era of college sports as big business. Among the main pressures she’s noticed
are the fact that college student-athletes
are often viewed as public figures, the increased demands from the NCAA, the pressure to create successful athletics programs (and therefore generate revenue for the university), and the fact that student-athletes sometimes feel marginalized
by other students on campus. Dealing with these pressures, as well as the ins and outs of a student-athlete’s daily schedule, can make things like time management and high GPAs a big challenge.

“You have a lot of people pulling you in different directions, so you have to be really good at being able to separate and prioritize,” says Chad Grotegut, the associate director of student-athlete services
who works with ISU’s football program. Grotegut says the growth that he sees when he invests his energy into his students – sometimes in student-athletes who would never have had the opportunity to
attend college without football – is the joy of his work. “For a lot of these guys that I work with,” he says, “[attending ISU] is the first time they’ve been pushed from an academic standpoint.”

Sometimes it takes convincing
Some student-athletes are easier to push than others.

Reed, Moser, and Grotegut all say there are plenty of student-athletes who arrive at Iowa State looking forward to their professional sports careers. Of course, many of them arrive not having gotten the
memo that you have a greater chance of becoming a brain surgeon than an NFL quarterback and that fewer than 1 in 75 NCAA men’s basketball players, 1 in 50 NCAA football players, and 1 in 100 women’s basketball players are drafted into the professional ranks.

That initial memo is sent out in a packet for new student-athletes, and the entire staff works to reinforce the point each year – “throwing it up there until it sticks,” Reed says.

“If they can [go to the NFL], that’s great,” Grotegut says. “But they also need to have an education. Unfortunately, a lot of the student-athletes I work with are either first-generation college students
or come from a low socioeconomic background
where they haven’t had that expert or mentor who can explain to them what it takes to succeed in college.”

It becomes Grotegut’s job – actually, the most challenging part of his work, he says – to do some convincing of those individuals who haven’t necessarily bought in to the idea of higher education. He says other student-athletes are often the best
messengers. “They expect to hear that stuff from me,” he says. “It means a lot more coming from a peer.”

Reed says it’s important to drive home the point to the skeptics that, in these days of big marketing and big bucks to be made in professional sports, it’s the Michael Jordans of the world who will truly come
out on top. “Michael Jordan made $10 million his last year of playing basketball,” Reed says. “He made $200 million that same year marketing himself, speaking, and doing other things that with an education you’ll have the opportunity to do. So
your body can only make you $10 million. Your brain can make you $200 million.”

The brain usually works longer than the body, too, Reed emphasizes. “You can only play for so long,” he says. “That time will end, and if you’re blessed enough to live 20, 30, 40 years more, what will you do?”

Van De Velde says he is particularly proud of three recent ISU graduates who were able to focus on both professional sports and academic achievement: football players Ellis Hobbs and Seneca Wallace
and men’s basketball player Jared Homan.

“They all elected to stay here and handle both,” Van De Velde says. “Seneca and Ellis didn’t drop everything and run; they said, ‘I am going to keep that dream alive, but I am going to finish this other dream, too.’ And now both of them are graduates
of Iowa State.”

‘You have to want it enough’
Despite the distractions that went along with being one of the country’s most popular college football players and one of the state of Iowa’s most recognizable names for two years, Seneca Wallace says the motivation to earn his degree was always there. Part of it, he says, was wanting to be the first person in his immediate family to earn a college degree. Another motivation was his mother, for whom he moved from Oregon State University back to his native Sacramento to attend junior college after she became ill.

And then there was just the plain old motivation to prove the “dumb jock” stereotype wrong.

“People always say that college athletes don’t care about getting their degrees and only care about trying to get to the next level in sports,” Wallace says. “That kind of motivated me to prove that wasn’t always the case.”

Wallace admits that, among his NFL teammates on the Seattle Seahawks roster, he is in the minority as a college graduate. With many student-athletes coming out of college early or leaving after their final
seasons to pursue training camps, Wallace says many lack the time to make a college degree a reality.

You also, he says, have to want it enough. Wallace did.

“Throughout college I always made sure that I stayed a step ahead,” he says. “I would start on work early. I always made sure that I didn’t have to spend all
night writing a 10-page paper. I always tried to be a week ahead of schedule.”

Some might say that’s quite a responsible attitude for someone who was so popular that he could hardly shake the sports talk radio guys and MTV camera crews off his trail during his days in Ames.

“The thing for me was just to put all the distractions aside,” Wallace says. “I had a great support system of my family, the coaches, and staff at Iowa State, so my main focus was really just on playing football and going to class. I played hard on Saturday, did my schoolwork during the week, and that’s it.”

When the dust had settled after Wallace’s final record-breaking season at Iowa State, he needed only two more classes to graduate – thanks to friends like Grotegut, he says, and the student-athlete services like study halls that were in place at ISU to help him juggle his crazy schedule.

“I only needed two classes to graduate,” he says. “So it was either knock it out right then or come back later to finish up. It was important for me to have that degree.”

Wallace worked out with ISU strength coach Matt McGettigan while he finished his sociology degree. Then, in the spring of 2003, he got his first job out of college: professional football player.

Today, Wallace says his life is uniquely focused on football.

“All through my life I’ve felt like I’ve had to overachieve,” he says. “When I got [to Seattle], I just had to be patient and be positive and wait for my time to come.”

Wallace says that, perhaps more than anything else, his experiences dealing with the hectic, exciting, up-and-down lifestyle of a Division I student-athlete taught him to stay positive. It built his character, he
says.

Skills for life
Character building is not something ISU’s Student-Athlete Services staff ignores as a critical part of the educational process.

In fact, a huge part of Moser’s role as coordinator of ISU’s popular “Life Skills” program revolved around developing programming on a variety of practical
subjects.

Moser says the NCAA mandates that ISU sponsor annual programs on alcohol use and abuse and on responsible sexual behavior. In addition, Moser says she tried to bring in speakers to cover topics such
as resume building, how to get into the workforce, nutrition, financial planning, and fiscal responsibility.

“Most people, when they think of [Student-Athlete Services], think of tutoring, eligibility, textbooks,” Reed says. “There’s more to it than that. We use the
student-centered holistic approach. You’re not only working with [students] on math; they have lives. They do other things. They need to be able to interact in different ways.”

There are things you can’t read in textbooks.

Reed says he’s particularly proud of ISU’s Life Skills program, as well as the Student-Athlete Advisory Council and the COED-TEAM (Cyclones on Educated
Decisions – Together Everyone Achieves More), in which student-athletes go into the community to talk to area youngsters about the “six pillars of character.” These programs have gotten tremendous
response.

“Students initially think they don’t have time to participate,” Reed says. “But once we introduce it to them and they see they have this window of opportunity, they do it.”

“We all know we’ve got wonderful student-athletes here,” Moser says, “but it’s nice to show other people. A lot of our students really enjoy being seen in the positive light.”

‘A great learning environment’
Van De Velde says the services that ISU offers are second to none, and they will only be enhanced in the future with the construction of the Hixson-Lied
Student Success Center, a $10 million project currently underway in the Richardson Court residence area. The building will house the Christina Hixson
Opportunity Awards program and the Rod and Connie French Athletic Academic Center, as well as general academic support space for the whole student
body – an intentional blending of interests, Van De Velde says, that was especially important to ISU president Gregory Geoffroy.

“I see it as a great learning environment and community where our student-athletes can interact with the general student body, but also get the help they need academically,” Van De Velde says. “It’s going to be wonderful for the staff,” he adds. “They will be able to plan and program and provide services that will be state-of-the-art.”

Grotegut sees a number of advantages to the new facility, including the doubling of the number of computers available to student-athletes, centralization of the Student-Athlete Services staff, opportunities for expanded hours of operation, and
a centerpiece for recruiting.

“It sends a message,” Reed says of the new facility. “It sends a message to current student-athletes, prospective student-athletes, parents, and the community. It sends a message that we are serious about academics and we’re committed to providing
the best possibilities and opportunity for our student-athletes to receive services.”

An unforgettable experience
For alumni like O’Neil and Wallace, participating in sports at Iowa State has helped make them who they are today.Whether it’s the chance to shine, or just
the chance to have a chance, their scholarships
and their collegiate careers have been a part of life’s big learning process.

“It teaches you intangibles that you can’t just learn any other way,” O’Neil says. “It encompasses the whole package. “It’s been an experience I’ll never
forget. It feels great to be a part of the alumni community. To say that I’m a Cyclone is something that I’ll always be really proud of.”

Read on | Steve Paris: 'I don't want to have any regrets'

About the Writer | Kate Bruns is the assistant director of communications for the ISU Alumni Association.