Truly Having A 2nd Career Is Beneficial!!!

Thoughts By: Coach Brown

When I checked out the story you are about to read, I was thoroughly impressed! This young man not only took advantage of his college scholarship to Alcorn St., but he has kept his nursing license current while he has been playing in the NFL! Young people, this is what I am talking about! A young man understanding and believing that he should get his degree and secured his a degree in a growing field is awesome!

You see, education is something that can never be taken from you. Once you learn something and you are able to apply it, it usually sticks with you for life! Your education and degree is something that no one or no thing can take away from you. Life has an amazing way of humbling us and we must understand that the only thing that is constant is change. Young people that are Blessed enough to earn academic and/or athletic scholarships should always do their best to graduate and take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to them because of their above average skills. We must all use the gifts that God Blesses us with on a daily basis.

Nate Hughes, I tip my hat to you brother, because you are living and setting a great example for other young people to follow! Keep up the great work and make the Detroit Lions team this season so that you don't have put on the hospital scrubs uniform this year!

One Love!

Meet the Detroit Lions wideout who’s also a registered nurse

By Chris Chase

In between playing football and earning All-America honors on the track, Detroit Lions wide receiver Nate Hughes(notes) got a nursing degree during his college days at Alcorn State. Other than the multiple classes, long days of practice, longer hours studying, three weekly eight-hour shifts at the hospital and the 70-mile roundtrip he had to make between nursing school and the football field, it was a breeze.

The NFL hopeful kept his nursing degree active during three seasons with the Jacksonville Jaguars by taking continuing education courses. In his 2009 rookie season, he had five catches and one touchdown in his rookie season with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Hughes spent last season on injured reserve before getting signed as a roster longshot by the Lions.
During this summer's lockout, Hughes took a job as an on-call nurse in his hometown of Macon, Miss. He plans to go to anesthesiology school whenever his football career ends.

He told the Detroit Free Press:

"I think part of the reason why I've been able to succeed on the football field is because once I get to football practice, it's my avenue to let all of that go. [...] Football is my happy place, so when I got to football practice it's like, 'OK, I'm free of all the work, I can just go have fun.' It made me look at football totally different. I didn't look at football as work, I looked at football as play. I looked at nursing as work because you'd have times you'd have to read 12, 13 chapters a night and have a test on it the next day."

Twelve or 13 chapters a night? I'd feel safe wagering that a number of NFL players made it through college without reading 12 or 13 chapters in total. (NFL bloggers too.)

Hughes told the newspaper that his teammates in Detroit don't know he's a registered nurse but that players in Jacksonville would often call him in the middle of the night to diagnose their ailments.

Despite a touchdown in the Lions' first preseason game, Hughes is considered a stretch to make the team's final roster. Given the team's rash of injuries this preseason, perhaps they could find another way to utilize one of his many talents.

High School Star uses Social Media the Wrong Way!

Thoughts By: Coach Brown

When a young person believes their athletic ability is their pass to do whatever they want to do and the adults around them encourage or support the behavior, many problems may arise!


This is the case of Tony Wroten, Jr. that tweeted about how he was chillin' in a three (3) - person class that really never really met and wasn't an official class as part of his school's curriculum.

Now, I know you're saying, "Why would he do that?" Well, the answer is quite simple if you have spent any significant time around teenagers of today. A lot of them, definitely not all of them, have a terrible understanding of what accountability is and the unbelievable power of cause-and-effect. I always tell young people to just think for at least a minute before you say something or do something because usually you will make a better decision if you just think before you speak or act. Try it, it really works!

So when Tony Wroten, Jr. sent out his tweet, he didn't even think about the consequences of his actions and actually caused a major stir in his school district. Again, adults have a responsibility in this too because we cannot treat our star athletes a certain way that is going to cause them to believe they are above the rules and laws of the land. Haven't we seen that outcome already? It's not a pretty picture and it's usually not a positive ending either.

Checkout the article below, it's something to chew on. One Love!

Top recruit’s Tweet leads to athletic director’s firing

By Cameron Smith

It's become common wisdom to remind everyone to be careful what they transmit across social media. Consider this Tweet sent out in January 2011 by superstar hoops recruit Tony Wroten Jr. exhibit A in what can happen when one isn't quite so careful:

"just me and my 2 bros. we got a 3 person Spanish class. #Niccceeee."

Not surprisingly, officials at Seattle Public Schools, which oversees Wroten's Garfield (Wash.) High, were none too thrilled to get surprising notice that Garfield had established a three-person Spanish tutorial class, particularly as budget cuts force more and more students into crowded classrooms. Soon thereafter, they discovered many more academic irregularities, including the fact that Wroten Jr. and a classmate had been given passing grades for a non-existent class led by the school's athletic director.

According to the Seattle Times' terrific high school sports reporter Mason Kelley, SPS launched a formal investigation into what led to the class being established, eventually finding that Garfield athletic director Jim Valiere had set up the course in conjunction with Garfield principal Ted Howard for Wroten and fellow senior Valentino Coleman, in large part as a way to ensure Wroten would qualify to attend the University of Washington, to whom he has signed a scholarship offer.

Yet the only reason why Howard signed off on the course was because Wroten and Coleman were allegedly given passing grades for a completely non-existent Spanish class led by Valiere in 2010, though both students said the athletic director never formally taught them and rarely did more than offer occasional quizzes in the hallway between classes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Valiere was fired after the conclusion of the investigation, officially notified of his termination on April 11. The longtime athletic coordinator is still fighting his dismissal and has requested a formal hearing into the matter to come.

"The investigation they had going was just to find more dirt to try and bury me," Valiere told the Times. "I was really trying to teach them Spanish. I really wanted them to learn."

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Christian Caple, Wroten Jr. didn't seem to have learn his lesson from the publication of The Times' investigation, as he took back to social media shortly after the publication of Kelley's story to respond ... in a rather inadvisable way. Shortly after Kelley's story was published Thursday, Wroten Jr. responded publicly with this Tweet:

"Lol this guy @masonkelley be lying. Lol we r retarded now? Lol yea OK. I guarantee it wouldn't even b a story if MY name wasn't in it. Lol Its koo though cause you will NEVER get another interview with me. Never again. Now retweet that. Lol."

The superstar recruit has since deleted that Tweet and fired off a series of social media communications telling the world how important Spanish is as a language, insisting that that he fully intends to continue learning Spanish. Evidently he'll do that last part quickly so he can still enroll in Washington in September.

Unfortunately for Valiere's hopes to have his own penalty reversed, there are a number of extenuating conditions that seem to undermine his contention that he was ever licensed to provide an independent study period for the students, let alone help set up the two-student tutorial, which Wroten and Coleman are still partaking in. Howard insisted that Garfield did not ever offer independent study credit, and that he never signed off on any agreement for Valiere to teach the duo himself. In fact, Howard claims that he was the one who initiated the unique Spanish study group for what he considers to be altruistic reasons.

"I felt like we owed those kids and parents credit and also an education," he said. "The question that became a really big issue at Garfield was: How were the kids going to get the credit and not be penalized?" Howard told the Times.

The solution was certainly a unique and virtually unprecedented one, though it's also one that Howard and Valiere almost certainly would have preferred to keep quiet. Unfortunately, Wroten foiled those plans himself in the blink of an eye with one simple Tweet.