 "Photo: Juan Blas/ The Gamecock")
When football players are recruited, they come to the university as student-athletes. From the moment they set foot on campus, a tremendous support group of coaches and teammates is available to help them excel on the playing field. That takes care of the "athlete" part in student-athlete.
With the many hours of practice, games and travel, who coaches these students in the classroom?
"My job is basically to maintain an understanding of the student-athletes that they're not only here to play their sport, but they're also here to get a college education," Jason Pappas said.
That job belongs to him, academic adviser for the football team and overall director of Academic Support. Pappas and his team of five full-time advisers find themselves handling an abundance of duties to ensure each student-athlete is in the position to not only remain academically eligible, but to also advance toward the primary goal of a degree.
"That's what we're about, to make sure they achieve graduation and not just eligibility. When it comes to the University of South Carolina, we truly believe in education," Pappas said.
All new players, from incoming freshmen to junior college transfers as well as students whose GPAs fall below a certain level, are required to check in with the adviser, whose office is located in the Academic Center near the Roost.
His daily schedule includes making sure students attend class, monitoring mandatory study hall sessions, meeting with coaches to discuss individual progression and issues, e-mailing professors for updates and meeting with various students one-on-one to discuss anything related.
"I think that's the part of the job that I really enjoy the most, to be able to have that much of an opportunity to make an influential difference in our students," Pappas said. "Outside the coaching staff, in my opinion, we as academic advisers pretty much have the greatest control opportunity to make a difference in their lives."
Academic advisers are welcomed by coaches to join the teams on road trips, an opportunity to not only help with time and class management on the road, but to also allow the advisers to see what the athletes excel in.
"Coach Spurrier and all of our coaches do a great job of incorporating academics into that situation because they understand how important it is," Pappas said. "Coach Spurrier and (baseball) Coach Ray Tanner allow me to go to practice and the locker rooms and weight rooms. Any issues, any time that I need to meet with our students, they give me freedom to do that, which is wonderful."
One issue Pappas said he hopes to prevent is the negative perception from other students and the media regarding the academic integrity of student-athletes.
The spring 2005 football team GPA was close to a 2.5, the second highest in school history, but that's not what he hears reported in the news. Instead, the staff has to deal with the negative stereotypes from regular students about athletes and reports of players fighting for eligibility as in the highly publicized case of senior Freddy Saint-Preux in the preseason.
"It's tough on the student-athlete because if you're any other student, your academic issues aren't portrayed in the media," Pappas said. "They have to understand that they've got to do everything they possibly can so they won't put themselves in those positions."
Pappas describes the negative stereotypes attributed to athletes and issues such as attendance as "misnomers." With a program that includes receiving updated progress reports on athletes from professors, he has written documents to validate that students are attending class and says the occasional immature decisions of some hurt the entire team.
"You have student-athletes that tend to be more mature than others and it takes longer for others," Pappas said. "What happens is those issues are probably typical of students, but because it's magnified in football or any other sport that gets the media exposure that it does, it allows that to be exaggerated tremendously and stereotype those individuals."
Whether he's dealing with a player in need of extra help or learning that yet another Carolina player made the Academic All-American list, Pappas enjoys being behind the scenes with his philosophy of "don't give me the credit and don't give me the blame." However, he would like it if more credit was awarded to overachieving student-athletes.
"Ninety percent of our kids are well over a 2.9. (Former football player) Watts Sanderson was a great example. He got drafted by the Cardinals, graduated in three years, got his master's degree in five. An overachiever and just a super guy, but nobody wants to hear a story about that. They want to hear about the Freddy Saint-Preux's in the world and whether he's going to be eligible academically. All you ever really hear about is the negative. You don't see the success," Pappas said.
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