By Charles Way
Vice President, NFL Player Engagement
Before I began my second year this summer here at Player Engagement, we completed our first year with another new program that may prove to be among our most meaningful.
It was our first-ever NFL PREP ACADEMY, where we worked with 41 of the nation’s top high school sophomore football players and their parents to begin to build tomorrow’s top leaders.
It was a four-day education-based gathering that featured just about everything – except for a football component.
Instead, it included workshops on leadership, character and community service aimed at teaching these teenage boys -- all of whom were chosen through a combination of academic, athletic, and character criteria -- how to become better men.
Best of all, the group learned these life skills at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from the institution’s top-flight faculty, as well as from NCAA mentors and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which included current and former college and NFL players, and also the Jefferson Awards Foundation.
From the feedback we received from parents, who stayed in separate quarters on campus, the approach worked wonders as many of them said that their children came home and were different people.
It was just what we wanted to hear from the people we wanted to hear it from, since developing leadership and character skills were exactly what we targeted with our academic program.
In addition to instilling these critically important life skills, we also introduced them to practical areas that loom in their immediate future, including NCAA eligibility requirements, expectations for college athletes, how to choose the proper school, and also education about domestic violence, sexual assault and drunk driving.
These topics all added up to having the young men, who hailed from 20 different states, look at their life and how they live.
This was presented in the context of looking at how football defines their factors of success, leading to them knowing at the end of the day that their value is determined by their values.
In other words, we made it clear to them that the person you are is not defined by the player you are, but rather that the player you are is defined by the person you are.