At the NFL Experience on Saturday, September 8, beijingkids got a few minutes to sit down with NFL legend Kordell Stewart and get his take on the family side of professional athletics.
beijingkids: What advice do you have for kids for balancing academics and athletics?
Kordell Stewart: Put your best foot forward, because it’s not easy. Both [academics and athletics]are time-consuming, and it’s great to be able to lend your brain to something else to allow you to start over again when it’s time to start the next thing. If you’re a student, it’s good to get a little out of your brain and do something more athletic, whether it’s running, riding a bike, whatever the case may be. It’s good because it expands the mind a little bit.
When you start dealing with sports, you deal with adversity, being able to persevere and endure, and when it comes to academics you have to be able to persevere mentally and endure as well, especially when you don’t get the grade that you necessarily thought you were supposed to get. Or having to study all night, it’s hard, and if you can create that mental toughness, by being able to do whatever it is you choose to do, it’ll help balance out the mind. I don’t think you want to just be extremely smart and have no common sense.
It’s the same thing in life, you want balance. And it’s not easy, but it helps if you’re capable of doing it and having those extracurricular activities in your life, because if you don’t, things become harder, you take things a little too seriously. Being a student is great, but a student athlete is special, time-consuming, [it requires]management. It’s like life, going into the next phase of it when you turn into an adult. You have to manage yourself and your business around you well to be successful. I think the people who are successful are the people who are capable of managing things really well.
beijingkids: What advice would you give parents of kids who want to be professional athletes?
KS: Allow them to be. It starts with little league, it starts with the recreational sports, they’re going to get help from the coaches, who are somewhat like parents, because they have to give them direction and help them. Just be extremely supportive. You know, sports is not a part of every family’s core values, but it brings a little more well-roundedness to these kids who are capable of being athletes, and the parents should be supportive, not be demanding, because the sport and the life itself is demanding enough. Just be extremely supportive and allow them to make mistakes so that they can bounce back in life as they grow. The best thing that ever happened to me was actually being part of a family unit outside of my immediate family.
beijingkids: You mean, part of the team family?
KS: That’s right. You end up being the leader, in the sense you may come back and maybe help your family. When you go to work, what are you dealing with, you’re working with a family, right? All the time, in some form or fashion, you’re always dealing with family. You may not deal with your family the same way you deal with the workplace family, but it gives you the opportunity to experience it from a different angle. Allowing kids to do that is very important.
beijingkids: So how can really athletic kids handle setbacks like being injured or not making the cut?
KS: It’s just building character. Getting cut doesn’t mean it ends there. It just means it’s another experience in life. You won’t always work at the same place for the rest of your life, at some point you either get laid off, get suspended, or fired, or they don’t fulfill their end of the bargain of resigning you to another contract, or you have to relocate. I know we look at sports as something totally different than life, but it’s the same exact thing. If you get cut, if you don’t pass the exam, it’s all the same, but you get another chance. It doesn’t mean it’s over. It just means that now you have to dig a little deeper.
Every cut, every failure on the test is a wound. The wound heals up, you remember the battle scar, you move to the next one, and you learn [and you]persevere and endure. There are so many different values you get from athletics: accountability, responsibility, loyalty, being able to persevere, to fight and achieve a goal.
beijingkids: How does a kid know if he or she has the talent to go pro?
KS: They’ll tell him. Because when you watch him on TV what do you say? “Wow, look how fast he ran past him, look at him throw! What’s his name again?” If they hear that enough, their level of confidence goes through the roof and they feel like they can’t be denied, and if you’re better than everyone else in your group, you’ll be good.
I was better than a lot of them in my group, for a long time, until there was parity, the higher you go. In college, there are people coming from different places in the country, and everyone has something different to offer so the competition level is so much higher. They may be able to run faster, but I may have better agility skills. Or I may be able to grasp the information much quicker.
The competition is endless in sports and in life. Because somebody wants your job too, someone wants to sit in this seat and talk to you next year. It’s endless, the question is, can you keep it going and keep fighting it and be able to do it again? And the answer is “Yes.” If you have that confidence within yourself, it’s easy. Always look at the glass half full as opposed to half empty. And if you can always look at things in life as half full, the sky’s the limit, you’ll never fail.
Photos courtesy of NFLX
