SE: K-State P.A.L.S. Program Provides 'Invaluable' Benefits
Feb 20, 2017 | General
K-State Athletics celebrates Black History Month by honoring the trailblazing achievements of past African-Americans as well as recognizing current events and activities that tie into the month's significance. (For the first two parts of this series: K-State led charge in breaking racial barriers and Wildcats take in ‘Hidden Figures,’ reflect on movie’s importance.)
The Legends Room in Bramlage Coliseum, normally lifeless on Sunday evenings, takes on a different form once every three weeks.
Current and former student-athletes from various Wildcat teams stroll into the room along with a variety of K-State faculty members and other representatives from around the community.
The group mingles and converses, catching up on each other’s lives before dining on a catered meal. Soon after, music comes on, prompting some in attendance to sing along and, consequently, some others to laugh at the singing quality.
A unique level of comfort pulses throughout the room, which hosts this specific group for a program called P.A.L.S. It stands for Positioning Athletes for Life-long Success, and is meant to help K-State’s new student-athletes with the transition process as well as providing them with the tools to be successful both as a student and, ultimately, in life.
P.A.L.S., a revived adaptation of a previous K-State Athletics program, creates a strong sense of community. It does this through a three-tiered mentor design, with K-State Athletics faculty and university employees serving as professional mentors while former or older student-athletes take on the role of peer mentors. The freshmen and newcomers involved fit into the mentee positions.
“It’s really like a family, K-State Athletics, but to have this other family within it is sometimes even better. It’s really precious and really invaluable,” said Ifeanyichukwu Otuonye, a former K-State track and field student-athlete who is currently a graduate assistant with the Wildcats. “You can’t put a price on something like this.”
The group meets every three weeks while school is in session and will address different topics each time. These topics will all relate to personal development, community and mentorship.
“It’s beneficial just to see people of color and their diversity,” K-State defensive back D.J. Reed said after his first meeting. “Just to talk to people who are going through the same things you’re going through, it really helps you in college and throughout life.”
Difficult questions can both be asked and answered without hesitation because of the sense of comfort the group feels around each other.
“A group like this is important to me because I can put myself in their shoes,” said K-State’s Director of Ticketing Services Leon Jackson III, a former quarterback/punter at Utah State. “Being a former student-athlete, having someone to be able to reach out to and ask certain questions that you wouldn’t necessarily ask in a different setting, this provides an opportunity for student-athletes of a minority basis to be able to reach out and ask the difficult questions and be able to receive a loving response and be encouraged.”
“It creates the atmosphere where people can talk about situations and be free to express themselves,” said Otuonye, a peer mentor. “It’s a really comfortable area where we can just talk. That’s why we like it here.”
The topics change each meeting, but the intention is always to help the student-athletes become invested in a caring community and grow as people.
“It’s a family aspect,” Jackson said, “but to be even more specific, it’s a family aspect of people that look and come from the same environments and the same upbringings.”
“For them to come and truly have a place where they can be authentic and voice their opinions and also have their opinions respected by their peers and professional mentors, I think that’s really big,” said K-State Athletics Academic Advisor Arin Dunn. “It gives them, also, an opportunity to really see other people’s perspectives. Often times we get so focused on the way we view things and the way we think what should be right and what should be wrong. This gives them an opportunity to put their guard down a little bit and allow other people’s perspectives to be kind of filtered into them.”
Each meeting starts with 30 minutes of conversing and eating. The second half opens with some type of icebreaker to create even more interaction amongst the group. Next, a professional mentor will give a TED Talk-style presentation to open up the topic.
In the first meeting of the spring semester, K-State Athletics Director John Currie presented on the topic of mentoring. Within minutes of Currie’s presentation concluding, his message — which focused on the importance of differentiating between fans and mentors, as well as the value of investing time into relationships — took hold in the student-athletes.
“I liked what John was talking about, how mentors, they don’t want anything from you,” said Reed, listing one of Currie’s points. “I have a mentor like that named Allen Thigpen, who has been following me since my junior year of high school. He’s been a positive male figure in my life. He doesn’t want anything from me and just wants to help me out and see me do well. Honestly, I need to contact him because I don’t really reach out to him and that’s what Mr. Currie was saying, how you need to stay in touch. That made me realize that I need to reach out to him.”
The P.A.L.S. program, which started back up last semester, retained all of its student-athletes from the fall. Consequently, the relationships, in number and strength, continue to grow.
“When our student-athletes start to see their professional mentors on campus or in town, they see a familiar face, they see somebody who knows is invested in them,” said Dunn, who teamed up with Cori Pinkett, K-State Director of Student-Athlete Development, to bring back P.A.L.S. “Our professional mentors give up their Sundays with their families to come spend with our student-athletes, so I think that’s a huge benefit for our students. They’ve talked about having somebody here outside of their coaches and teammates that they know is here to support them.”
“With the mentor and mentee, I realized from the start to now that when you see them in public and when you see them around, you develop a relationship and they can really look up to each other and actually go, ‘How is your day? How is it going?’ So the relationship between mentor and mentee has really developed over the past couple of months,” Otuonye added.
Since meetings began in the fall semester, Jackson said he’s witnessed a developed trust within the group leading to student-athletes embracing the full experience.
“You can see as time is progressing, some of the students that are quiet are now being more vocal because you’ve broken down the barrier of trust. You’re not a stranger, you don’t have to have your guard up because I’m amongst people that care,” he said. “Now that they’re able to see that, hopefully, with them now breaking that barrier of trust, they’re able to receive some of the information that we’re pouring into their lives. Because, at the end of the day, it’s about pouring into our student-athletes so that they can become better people, better adults and they’ll go on and do great things.”
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