Dorfman: McBrides Provide Direction

By Sid Dorfman
For the Star-Ledger
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
© 2006 The Star Ledger

The letter appeared the other day in the NCAA News, house organ for the educators who run the billion-dollar intercollegiate sports program. Written by a Julie McBride, it read:

"When University of Missouri student-athletes talk about their plans after college, I like to bring up the story of a pretty good football player who is an alumnus.

"After college, he signed with the Cleveland Browns. He did okay, earning a living and getting a taste of the big time. Then he was cut. So he signed with the then-St. Louis Cardinals. He played for one year, and was cut.

"While at Missouri, he had thought only of football, and left well short of a degree and without any practical career experience.

"After the NFL, he was in and out of jobs, which included the night shift at UPS and cleaning up at a meat-packing plant. He worked as a hotel bellhop and realized that in just six months he'd gone from being a guest to carrying other people's bags. It was honorable work, but not what he had imagined.

"He was directionless, broke, and despondent over the realization he'd wasted a golden opportunity to prepare himself for the world after sports.

"I know him well.

"He's my husband."

That's where Julie McBride abruptly ended a wife's lament. But lamentations aside, what Julie McBride really wanted to do, as a bit of honest deception, is send the common message that education may be costly, but ignorance costs more.

Julie, I discovered, withheld what would have been a redemptive postscript. Her husband is Adrian McBride, and Adrian no longer is down. Instead, he has lifted himself from the dehumanizing depths of his lost years into the role of an educational missionary.

He and Julie, herself a former All-American gymnast at Missouri, are now in the business of helping other misguided athletes avoid what he did to himself. They are proprietors of the McBride Group, a recruiting and career-placement business which Adrian started when he discovered that other former athletes and friends had concentrated essentially on two majors in college: football and spring football.

Julie, as it turned out, also could have written such a letter about herself. A member of the University of Missouri sports Hall of Fame, she spent hours every day training in the gym, and, like her husband, left herself unprepared for a viable post-college career. But she did rescue herself by returning to Missouri for a master's, which helped her develop a business career in sports.

She became a coordinator of events for the Big Eight Conference, and then the Big 12 Conference. In 2000, she joined the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs as director of special events.

Now, she and Adrian will help athletes make the transition from the sports world to the real world, something Adrian had neglected to do in college.

Is all this relevant to some sort of problem? Darn right it is.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of athletes quit college each year, often prematurely, after enjoying a free academic ride as a favored athlete, at least in the NCAA's Division 1 of major powers, and enter a world they neglected to prepare for.

Adrian McBride was one of them. Some superb athletes go on to make millions in pro sports. But they are relatively few. Adrian came up short in both football and education.

His file goes to the heart of the outrageous scholarship culture, in which many a subsidized but academically deprived athlete has spent most of his time in the weight room, leaving a far more qualified student to wonder why he or she can't get the same break.

Adrian McBride was such a privileged athlete. He told Rus Baer of the Columbia Tribune of Missouri, "I was never thinking of life after sports."

Neither have a lot of other solicited athletes. During a job fair on campus for engineering and business, not one University of Missouri athlete showed up.

Most any day, the sports pages report on athletes uncertain over what college offer to accept, or whether to quit one school for another. Why? They want to make sure they'll be playing for the right coach.

Of course, they are free to choose. If the colleges are giving, they're taking. And many athletes are intellectually bright. But if their grades are from hell, they don't have a right to a free ride. It ought to go, instead, to the real student, the one needed by a country that prospers in relation to its educational level.

Adrian McBride, himself, had been a wandering athlete, devoted to playing football. A wide receiver, he started at Tennessee in 1981 but switched to Missouri the following year.

Out of school, he tried for the Cleveland Browns in 1986 but didn't make it. So he tried the Cardinals in 1987 and played some before getting cut. And when that happened, he looked into his future and saw nothing.

Today, recovered from his post-college inability to make a living, he is a consultant to both former athletes and corporate clients, and working with more than 80 per cent of the football youths in eastern Missouri.

Even better, both Adrian and Julie can't wait for the Fall semester at Missouri, where they will tackle the incoming athletes with a "Life After Sports" program, designed to make their academic careers more relevant than anything else.

If they succeed, it could be a help of some measure to college presidents, who need all the help they can get to educate their students.

Sid Dorfman appears regularly in The Star-Ledger.