What an Art Historian Learned From the Football Team

Cheating. Sexual assault. Physical abuse. These days, it seems, college football is in the news for all the wrong reasons. The scandals consuming some Division I programs are serious, says Gretchen Kreahling McKay, but they can also give professors at Division III colleges like hers a mistaken understanding of the players in their own classrooms.

As faculty mentor to McDaniel College’s Green Terror football team, McKay, a professor of art history, has a view of the sport quite different from that of other professors. Getting to know the college’s football players has given her a new appreciation for the challenges today’s students face — and even changed how she teaches.

McKay, who is planning to write a book on the subject, spoke with The Chronicle about what she’s learned from the team’s members. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q. When did you start to notice the Green Terror football players?

A. In the fall of 2015, I was teaching Roman art and architecture. I walked into class the first day, and I noticed along the back of the room there were these really beefy-looking guys, and my first thought was: Oh, it looks like the gladiators signed up for Roman art! I kind of figured they were on the football team, but I didn’t know — they could have been wrestlers.

A couple of weeks later, our president invited a bunch of us that had been part of a strategic-planning group all summer to see a football game in the suite. And I love football, I’ve always watched football, my mother went to NFL games pregnant with me, so it’s really baked into my whole life.

It turns out that those guys who were in my class sitting in the back were football players; they were all starters. So I got to watch them, and their excitement, and their energy level. And I was like, Wow, I’m going to do something to try to get that in my class.

Q. What did you do?

A. I was not naïve enough to think I was going to get exactly that, because obviously Roman art is not the sport of football that they love. But I knew they took my class for some reason. So I made the decision while I was standing up in the suite that I was going to have active learning in every single class period of that course for that semester.

So I did, and a year later I decided I wanted to test how much especially those football players retained, since they were the reason I decided to make that jump. I was astounded at how much they remembered. If I had lectured that same material, I don’t really think that they would remember it.

Q. Did that feedback change how you taught?

A. Oh, yeah. Any elective class that’s face-to-face I really try to rework everything to have some active learning in it, because that was such an important watershed moment for me in my career.

Q. How did you become the team’s mentor?

A. In the fall of 2016, I went to a home game. They won, and most important they snapped a losing streak. So it was exciting. This is where I often pause, and I don’t know how to explain this. It doesn’t sound very academic. But the next week they were playing in Gettysburg, and there was just this feeling I had, this voice that was saying: Go to the Gettysburg away game. It had to be a rainy day, and it was cold, and I’m like, do I really want to go sit in the stands? But I had this feeling. So I went, and I happened to post on Facebook that I was cheering on the Green Terror.

Well, the faculty athletics representative to the NCAA saw my post, and the next Monday I get an email from him saying: Would you like to mentor the football team? Because you’ve gone to away games, you seem really into it. And I was like: Uh, yeah!

Q. What does the role entail?

A. I work with students who are having trouble in their classes or struggling academically. Sometimes the problem is depression, or it’s financial. And so it sometimes takes several semesters of meeting with these students one-on-one every week to when they finally begin to have that watershed moment of: Dr. McKay, I need to tell you something. And then we get to the root of what’s really been the problem. But the coach believes that once one or two or three of them do trust me with something like that, they tell their teammates, and then the teammate maybe doesn’t take as long.

Q. What have you learned?

A. It’s been very eye-opening in terms of the struggles and pressures that are on students today. When you have a student across from you talking about their housing problems, and their financial problems, and their food-shortage problems, and all these things you’ve heard about as abstract problems, it suddenly becomes real in a different way than just reading about it.

I’m really devoted to the mission of our college, which says we are going to change the lives of these students. If it means getting into some personal stuff, I’m going to do it. Some faculty members do not feel comfortable doing that, and it does take a lot of time. But I am tenured, and I am a full professor, so this is where I feel like I want to use my time.

Q. Have players continued to enroll in your courses since you’ve become a mentor?

A. I invite them into my classes. I explain that I use active learning, and I put all the students that I’d had in the past that were still playing football as my references. I say that I want you to talk to them about what my class is like, because I don’t want you thinking this is going to be easy or the fluff class for the football team. I want to teach you, but you’re going to have to work. I got 12 students in Roman art, and then I think I had five in another class I was teaching. And then last spring, I had 20 football players in medieval art.

Q. Do you think mentoring athletes is any different from mentoring students in general?

A. I’d answer that two ways. First of all, they are just and they are first students. The pressures that they are under are helping me work with other students who are not football players.

But I do think, for the football team, anyway — and I can’t speak for other sports — the players have a lot of stereotyped things about them that some faculty hold and may not even be aware that they have. I think a lot of that filters down from the Division I scandals that we all know and hear about. They’re real. And most faculty do go to D-I schools for their graduate training, so they are more aware of the D-I experience.

I’m not saying all my faculty feel this way. But I did a focus group with a colleague this past February, and one of the things that came up was the players don’t wear any football gear to classes for like the first two weeks, for fear that they’ll be labeled in a negative way.

Q. I understand you’re writing a book about this. Tell me more about that.

A. It’s aimed at administrators and faculty, for them to understand specific pressures that student-athletes have. I can write only about football, but I think that if you were mentoring a soccer team, or a baseball team, a lot of things would carry over. One of them is that the sports-identity marker is very important to these students. And if faculty say things like, Well, you’re never going to play pro, why is it so important that you do this? — that can be very dispiriting.

You don’t think they know they’re not going pro? They know so much more about their sport than any faculty member who’s teaching art history or history or science or whatever. They understand that they have a total of four more years to play the sport they love, and then they’re done.

So the book is for faculty and administrators to not only understand the student-athlete mindset, but also how institutions can support student-athletes to help them get through.

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.