At South High School in Columbus, Ohio, Greg Bell was a threat to score every time he held a football, but there was never a danger that he would deliver the valedictory address. Bell didn`t think about studying or going to college until his senior year. The only reason he thought about it then was because he could carry a football through a maze of would-be tacklers faster than most people can run in a straight line with no impediments.
When Bell accepted an athletic scholarship at Notre Dame, his friends told him he`d never make it through. Upon arriving in South Bend, he set out making them prophets.
”I really hadn`t learned good study habits before I got there,” Bell recalls. ”My roommate and I decided we couldn`t do both academics and athletics.”
They opted for football only to discover at midsemester that class work wasn`t optional. In danger of flunking out, Bell turned to the university`s athletic tutoring program and turned his life around.
It wasn`t easy. In one subject he spent nine hours a week in tutorials. When the campus cleared for spring break his freshman year, Bell remained, studying. Finally, with help from a handful of tutors he began to decipher mathematical formuli, to organize essays, to discover a world of
interpretation and analysis he never knew existed.
”He came from a heckuva rough background,” says Holly Martin, a Ph.D. in English who has tutored athletes at Notre Dame for five years. ”I tutored Greg in writing and then philosophy. We would talk about hypothetical imperatives and such. He began to make subtle distinctions about Kant. I was astounded.”
Bell eventually made liars of his street buddies. He played football well enough to be drafted as a running back with the Buffalo Bills and was graduated in 3 1/2 years with a degree in economics.
The men and women who tutor college athletes work in obscurity to keep stars before the public in stadiums and arenas. Their charge is one of the most difficult in academia. They must show athletes how to pass tests and write papers without doing the work for them.
The job is neither simple nor predictable. At Notre Dame, which has one of the nation`s oldest, most extensive and successful athletic tutorial systems, tutors are the linchpins in a computerized complex of academic support services offered to more than 600 intercollegiate athletes, cheerleaders, managers and trainers. Tutors not only work with them individually or in small groups but also deal directly with professors, finding out what is acceptable academic coaching and what is not. On rare occasions they may travel with athletes to games away.
This sort of ”full-service” educational help has spread to other campuses.
”When I was tutoring at Northern Illinois University, I went to classes and got paid,” says Shirley Tompkins, now the chief academic adviser to De Paul University`s athletes. ”I did whatever I needed to do to be prepared. It`s good to understand the way the professor presents material.”
At De Paul Tompkins occasionally asks tutors to sit beside the athletes in class so the tutor can monitor the player`s note-taking.
The University of Illinois sometimes pays its tutors to attend classes and take notes for athletes who are hospitalized with injuries, says Terry Cole, director of academic services.
Depending on the institution and an individual`s experience, the pay ranges from $4 to $10 an hour. With the money comes a sense of satisfaction. ”The biggest thrill was when I saw my students getting drafted by the pros and knowing I helped them get through,” says Steven Katz, 28, of Chicago, a lawyer, who tutored in economics as an undergraduate at
Northwestern University.
Tutors, however, rarely become more than speaking acquaintances with their students.
”What I`m looking for are people who aren`t athlete crazy,” says Martin, who as Notre Dame`s athletic tutor coordinator recruits 80 or so tutors each semester. ”The last thing an athlete needs is someone who just wants to talk about the game and meet their friends.”
Confidentiality is another requirement. If a tutor cannot keep an athlete`s grades secret, he cannot keep the job.
Most schools prefer to hire graduate students as tutors or, failing that, juniors and seniors. Good grades are a must. So are communications skills.
”You`ve got to be able to break things down into fine points,” Tompkins says.
However, intimate knowledge of the full-court press or the triple option is neither necessary nor, quite often, desirable.
When Martin started tutoring athletes, she had been to only one football game in her life. She began attending as a courtesy to her students and watched Bell score his first collegiate touchdown. Later, she saw the running back in the cafeteria and ”congratulated him on his home run.”
Most people who tutor athletes keep their distance, regardless of how avid a fan they are.
”When I was growing up, Notre Dame football players were like gods to me,” says Brian Donley, a senior pre-med student, who works with athletes studying chemistry and biology. ”But I don`t see the people I`m tutoring and go, `Wow, this is a football player.` I see them first as my students.”
Instead of deifying, Donley probes for weaknesses and ”forces a give-and-take by asking questions or by asking them to restate something I just explained.”
To guard against a too-cozy rapport, Northwestern conducts most of its tutoring during supervised study sessions. The program is kept small and tightly controlled by design.
”It`s important to have structure so you know what`s going on between students and athletes,” says Cynthia Patterson, Northwestern`s assistant athletic director for academic and student services.
Patterson also questions the ethics of expanded tutorial programs. For instance, she never would allow a tutor to contact an athlete`s professor, a common practice at De Paul and Notre Dame.
In fact, Martin, at Notre Dame, sends a form letter to the professors of each athlete being tutored. The letter gives the player`s name, the course title and the tutor`s name and phone number, and invites the professor to call the tutor ”if you have any special suggestions or instructions.”
Notre Dame also keeps a computerized list of tutors, their specialties and phone numbers. Periodically, this list is printed and distributed to players, who make their own tutorial appointments. The list is comprehensive. A recent offering included more than 80 names in subjects ranging from Arabic to theology. Each week these tutors and the athletes they teach file forms evaluating each other`s performance.
Regardless how a school tries to maintain quality control, the effectiveness of any tutorial program hinges on the ability of tutors to teach without being condescending.
”Lots of times you have to use oral techniques because you have a kid who hates to write,” Tompkins says. ”You`ve got to get them talking about things. Then after they`ve told you the story, you direct questions. But they`re the ones with the pencils.
”You have to stimulate without giving ideas.”
Last year Tompkins worked with Dallas Comegys, De Paul`s star forward, on a paper.
”It was supposed to be about a great lesson in his life,” she says.
”He had written about something that wasn`t really meaningful.” Tompkins got Comegys to talk and discovered that the athlete had a friend in a street gang who had been killed.
”How did the gang start?” she asked. ”What happened?”
Soon Comegys had talked his way through a powerful essay and was ready to write.
”You`ve got to get them excited,” Tompkins says.
Relating to athletes is ”half the battle,” says Notre Dame middle guard Eric Dorsey. Understandably, athletes are sensitive to the ”dumb jock”
stereotype.
”When I told my high school football coaches I had a tutor,” Dorsey says, ”they gave me a certain kind of look.”
When Tony Furjanic, Notre Dame`s senior linebacker, came home to Chicago his freshman year and announced to friends that he was working with four tutors, ”They thought I was stupid.”
Ironically, the people in the best position to know about that characterization say that it is overblown and usually untrue.
”I was surprised how smart the athletes I tutored were,” Katz says.
”Their big problem was time.”
”I used to leave my room at 8 in the morning and not get home until after 10 at night,” Bell says. ”All I wanted to do was lie down on the bed for an hour. The first thing I knew, I`d wake up, and it would be 7 a.m.
”The thing tutoring did best was teach me how to budget my time.”
Nevertheless, almost all athletes initially are defensive about seeking help outside of class.
”I don`t know if it`s a stigma,” says Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, who used the tutoring program his first two years at Notre Dame.
”It`s just that you don`t want to go get help. You think, `I can work it out.` Your ego sometimes gets in the way.”
At Notre Dame, Mike DeCicco, a former engineering professor, can take care of egomania in short order. With a father`s compassion and a drill instructor`s vocabulary, he has been reading the academic riot act to athletes for more than 20 years.
Among other things, he tells them that athletes must maintain an overall 2.0 grade (on a 4.0 scale) point average to play. That standard is higher than the National Collegiate Athletic Association`s (NCAA) and higher than the university`s requirement for staying in school, but there are no exceptions.
”I remember hearing him chew out one guy,” says defensive tackle Wally Kleine. ”I said to myself, `I`m not getting caught in that.` ”
All basketball and football recruits must visit DeCicco`s office on the 3d floor of the golden-domed administration building. One wall is covered with plaques naming Notre Dame athletes who have won NCAA scholarships to graduate schools. Opposite are bookshelves filled with the memorabilia of DeCicco`s grateful charges, including the game ball from the Irish`s 1975 victory over Southern Cal, a gift from Joe Montana, and a pair of longhorns inscribed with the score of the 1971 Cotton Bowl–Notre Dame 24, Texas 11.
”When I started this job in 1962,” DeCicco says, ”what I knew about academic advising you could put on a gnat`s behind. I worked with the provost, who gave me access to every department on campus. I told them how I perceived my job, and I asked department chairmen and teachers to recommend tutors. I felt that was a way to get the faculty involved.”
Since then, faculty support has been excellent. And that has smoothed the way for athletes to get unabashedly involved in tutoring.
”It`s all right here at your fingertips,” Kleine says. ”People who don`t take advantage of it are foolish.”
There aren`t many fools at Notre Dame. More than 90 percent of the scholarship football players and 100 percent of the scholarship basketball players earn degrees within five years of entering the university.
”At final exams time my apartment becomes a three-ring circus,” Martin says. ”I remember once I was sitting at the dining room table dicussing Aquinas and Hobbes with a football player. In my study a basketball player was working on a sociology paper. And every 10 minutes another football player would call on the phone asking about an English class.”
