Like prized recruit Travis Hunter, Jackson State coach Deion Sanders has a lot of gall.
The nerve of them! They
clearly don’t know their place in college football’s billion-dollar industrial
complex. The tippy-top talent ALWAYS congregates at the biggest universities with
the highest profiles. Power 5 schools consider it their birthright to
monopolize the crème de la crème. It’s a time-honored tradition, one that dates
to integration’s baby steps.
Yes, a very long time ago
(1969), No. 1 Texas played No. 2 Arkansas in the “Game of the Century,” with nary a Black
player on either roster. Yes, one week earlier, all-Black Florida A&M beat virtually
all-white Tampa in a veritable groundbreaker. And, yes, the turning
point by Hollywood’s measure was way back in 1970; USC, the first fully integrated
team to play in Alabama, clobbered Bear Bryant’s
boys
and the Crimson Tide subsequently revised its admissions policy.
A new custom took root around
the country, including in the laggard deep South. An aggressive, invasive
species, it has choked the fertile soil at HBCUs that produced generations of athletes
once forbidden elsewhere. Given that evolution, we figured powerbrokers would be
astounded if a school like Jackson State flipped the script and landed a player
like Hunter, the nation’s top recruit.
Like
multitudes of students around the nation in early 2020, Elise Franchi had to
take virtual classes as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. But studying dance on
Zoom might have contributed to what eventually was diagnosed as a partially
torn labrum in her left hip.
“We think because I didn’t have proper
flooring and it was slippery, it caused me to grip in my hips too much to stay
stabilized,” says Elise, an 18-year-old trainee in the Charlotte Ballet
Pre-Professional Program. “ That’s when the problem started.
Elise
has a little pain here and there, and eventually it progressed into intense
pain. “This was my first major injury, and it was very terrifying. I have a
high pain tolerance, so it took me a few months before the pain got bad enough
to see the doctor.”
Charlotte Ballet referred her
to Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, where she received care from David
Popoli, MD, and Allston Stubbs IV, MD, at the new Performing Arts Medicine
Clinic in Winston-Salem, N.C. One of few programs in the country offering unique
performing arts and sports medicine services, it provided the specialized care that
Elise needed. She since has has resumed dancing and is participating in a
treasured December tradition.
“I’m back to performing in the
Nutcracker this holiday season!” she says. I’m able to do everything I need to
do, and I’ve worked on modifying my technique and performances in a healthy
way.”
Professor Tim Banks has always been passionate about maintaining a growth mindset, especially since becoming department chair for the Howard Community College (HCC) Center for Hospitality and Culinary Studies in 2018.
His personal philosophy is necessary more than ever as society copes with a global pandemic that has upended the food, travel, and event management industries. Banks said HCC is well positioned to pivot and transition as it prepares hospitality and culinary students for careers now and in the future. The curriculum has been realigned, courses have been added, and a new certificate in restaurant/hospitality management is being offered.
“We always want to be a step ahead of what the industry is doing and what the industry is talking about,” Banks said recently on HCC’s Dragon Digital Radio. “We want to teach our students the classics, but we also want to emphasize the contemporary way of doing things. We’ve gone through this whole shift of face-to-face events turning into virtual events. Some of that is going to be a permanent fixture in our landscape.
Professor Michelle Sotka grew up in a family business but fell in love with her first accounting course in college. Now she chairs the entire accounting program at Howard Community College.
Professor Adriano Lima e Silva majored in mechanical engineering and once envisioned a lifetime in that pursuit. However, he decided to switch careers to become a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Now he coordinates the college’s CPA candidacy certification.
Sotka has seen the same change of direction in students she’s taught. “One of my most successful was a biology undergraduate,” Sotka said recently on Dragon Digital Radio.
“He thought he wanted to go on to med school. But at a career fair, he met with some folks from one of the big four accounting firms. They talked to him and said he’d be a great candidate. He hooked up with our accounting program and now he’s doing wonderful things” as a CPA.
Students come to the HCC accounting program from different paths and for varied reasons.
In the 1975 disco hit
titled “Free Man,” a guy makes a pass at a sister who wants to make sure he’s not
married. She’s apparently had experience as the other woman and wants to avoid a
repeat scenario.
O.J. Simpson wasn’t singing Tuesday as he parted with the Nevada penal system, discharged from parole 13 years after his conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping, a verdict delivered 13 years after his infamous acquittal. Simpson is free, a quarter-century after making Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman household names.
But I wonder how much
of Black America is interested in hooking up with him on a cultural level.
Even if Simpson steps up disavowals of racists he openly embraced, even if it’s finally clear that, um, he’s black, too, can there be a warm homecoming within the greater community? The relationship was complicated in 1995, when both a gulf and a bridge emerged during the Trial of the Century. Determining Simpson’s place on the current landscape – where the ends fall apart and the middle vanishes – is especially challenging.
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