I hope that you enjoy the podcast!

I hope that you enjoy the podcast!

I hope that you enjoy the podcast!

I hope that you enjoy the podcast!

My first comments about playing football in high school is that I am glad for the experience, I am thankful for the lifelong friendships that being on my football team provided, and… I would never, ever want my nephews or young cousins to play football. That perspective might seem counterintuitive or hypocritical – it is not, I assure you. I began playing football during my freshman year of high school, which was 1995. Back in 1995, the research and science around the lasting impact of the intense head trauma that one experiences when playing football was not mature yet. That research had not evolved to where we are today, which is the firm understanding that the repeated head trauma that football players endure leads to diminished mental capacities over the course of their lives.

To football’s credit, they have worked to improve the equipment that is used and to enforce new rules to protect players’ heads. I appreciate those improvements and hope that they are the first in many more changes to the game to protect its players. However, I cannot imagine a world where I would endorse the young ones in my family actively engaging in that type of brutality when the function of their brains is what is at risk. No thank you. By the way, both of my brothers were football players (one was a championship football player and the other was the captain of his team) and my cousin was on my football team (we were championship players then and, now, hall of fame players at our high school) and we all completely agree on this point. We all also agree that if one of the next generation of the family wants to play football, then we would talk to them about it and let them make their own decision, but we would discourage them from joining the team.

As for my experience playing high school football, I loved it. I was able to play for one year with my older brother as a senior on the team when I was a sophomore and I got to play all four years with my cousin. In my hometown, I came from a smaller, feeder grade school that fed into a larger high school, so being on the football team was a way for me to meet new friends, integrate into the larger high school, and build a feeling of attachment to the larger community. All of that worked out very well for me and I think it worked out well because I was a good football player (not a great player, but good enough to start on a championship team my senior year). I can never speak ill of the amazing connections that I built from playing football and, ultimately, from wrestling and being on the spring track team (the weight throwing team, not the runners!).

The one area where I have a constructive criticism for high school football and all high school sports is the constant pressing for more reps, practicing longer hours, and doing something “one more time.” In hindsight and across all of the sports that I played, I do not think that there was much benefit to the “one more rep” mentality. In fact, there is a growing chorus of folks who are saying that the “one more rep” mentality is dangerous. I leave that contemporary argument to those who are making it today. In my experience, though, staying a little bit later, pushing to press up a little bit more weight, and spending additional time preparing for an opponent seems like it was a bit much – at least for the high school level of competition.

At some point during my senior year, I started receiving letters from local, small colleges (Division III) to play football for them. I received a few letters about wrestling, too. I did not pursue any of them in a significant way. One day, one of my buddies who was a running back on the team and I were called into a special meeting to meet with a recruiter from a local university that played in what was then-known as Division IAA (today called Division I FCS). To make what could be a long story short, both my buddy and I opted not to play for that college, but both wound up going to school there anyway. I talked to the football coaches at the university at the time and told them that I wanted to get acclimated to college before playing football. They weren’t interested in that, but said if I wanted to, then I could attempt to walk-on to the team after my freshman year and to come and talk to them after the spring semester ended.

As it turned out, I became friends with several of the football players at my college and I even shared a dorm suite with two of them who I became good friends with that year. I also became friends with some of the college freshmen football players that lived in other parts of the campus and they were all really nice guys. At some point, I started lifting weights while in college and at that time the weight room for the students was shared with the athletes. Without gassing myself up too much, I lifted as much or more than the guys who would have been my contemporaries on the college football team. I’m not so arrogant to think that this was purely because I was stronger than some of those guys, but rather I recognized that they were engaged in a specific type of weightlifting where I was just lifting weights for fun. When you become more specific in your training routine, you can naturally reduce the amount of weight that you might lift in certain standard lifts. I think that is what was going on.

After my freshman year, I went and talked to the football coaches and told them I was ready to walk on to the team. I remember talking to one of the coaches and the look of complete disinterest that he had in me and my story (the same guy who was excited about me potentially joining his team 18 months earlier). I think the conversation turned when I mentioned that during my freshman year, I did really well (a 3.9 GPA after my second semester, which he liked) and that I met a bunch of new friends when I joined my fraternity – that went over like a lead balloon. That coach somewhat reluctantly gave me the paperwork that I needed to get filled out from my doctor and told me that once I got him the completed paperwork, he would get me the dates of the walk-on practices.

Well, I got a physical, had the paperwork completed, and sent it in to the coach… and that’s the end of the story. The coach never got back in touch with me, never let me know about when I could try to walk-on, and never initiated contact again. I did not follow-up with him because I believed then, as now, that some things are not worth chasing. After seeing the utter look of disdain on that coach’s face when I mentioned that I lived a great freshman year and a big part of that was joining my fraternity, I knew that this was not going to be a good interaction and that I probably would not want to pursue a long-term connection with that guy. This is another marked difference between the high school and college settings, for me at least – I genuinely liked each of my high school coaches no matter how hard or aggressive they got with me and my teammates. For the college coach to be jumping up and down enthusiastic about me and my buddy joining his team while we were in high school and then completely uninterested 18 months later, it just did not sit right with me.

Overall, I am glad that I did not play football in college. A few months after that awkward interaction with the football coach, a friend and former teammate of mine from high school began playing football at the college. An old injury of his was aggravated during one of the early practices and he may have been encouraged to play through it (common in both high school and college sports). He opted not to play through it and, instead, protect his body (smart move). And I have heard similar stories like that not just locally, but all over the country and not just with football, but all sports.

What I gained by playing football in high school was provided to me by my fraternity. While I have several friends who had excellent college football experiences, I do not think that I would have had a similar experience playing football at my college. And that’s completely okay for me, especially when considering the brain trauma research I mentioned earlier and the wonderful experience provided to me by joining my fraternity and growing a new group of lifelong friends.

For example, I stopped at the Phired Up table and had a chance to say hello to some of the newer team members that I have not had the opportunity to meet before. Phired Up played a critical role in the development of several of the Sigma Pi Fraternity chapters in the New Jersey Province that I worked with when I served as Province Archon some 10+ years ago. In fact, based on our wide agreement with the principles in their book, Good Guys, our volunteer team in New Jersey actually hired Phired Up to conduct a regional recruitment workshop for our undergraduate chapters back in Fall 2007 and it was very well-received.

At the NIC’s Annual Meeting of Members, I told the young men at the Phired Up table how much Good Guys improved my chapters and they gave me a copy of their Social Excellence book to review. I finished reading Social Excellence quickly – in a matter of days. My big takeaway from this book is that you have to give life a chance! Go out there and take the risk of saying hello to someone, reach out and shake someone’s hand, live a life that is above the norm. The team at Phired Up talks about the four pillars of social excellence in their book. Those four pillars are curiosity, generosity, authenticity, and vulnerability. I want to talk a little bit more about generosity and authenticity in this post, but there is so much that could be said about curiosity and vulnerability. You might consider getting a copy of the book if you want to read more of Phired Up’s take on those two pillars.

On generosity, they write about the power of saying thank you and the power of making a person’s day by giving them something. It is about making someone else’s experience better through your own actions. In my own work with my fraternity, I have tried my best to give back of my time and professional expertise. I have also been a financial supporter of my local chapter, my province, and my international educational foundation. When I mix what I read in Social Excellence with what I know of my own experience as a volunteer and a donor both in my fraternity and with the many other nonprofits that I work with in my state, I find some interesting intersections. For example, it strikes me that the people who are the loudest detractors – those who want to be opinion leaders, but do not have a well-informed opinion – are those who have typically given the least of their time, expertise, and finances to the cause. This is an interesting revelation because it speaks volumes about generosity as a leading indicator on whether or not you are dealing with a well-intentioned individual or someone who just wants the spotlight for the sake of having the light shine on them.

On authenticity and focusing solely on my work for my fraternity, not my work in the larger nonprofit sector, it is critically important to know the true intent of your people before you place any trust in them. Being truly authentic is difficult for some individuals in the fraternity world because they do not have an example on which to model their actions. For example, if you are an undergraduate and your only interactions with alumni advisors have been painfully forcing a smile and a head nod as these volunteers tell stories about their glory days, then your example of being a good alumni volunteer is skewed. Those volunteers are not working authentically to improve your undergraduate experience – their involvement is more about their own experience and reliving what they loved about their time as an undergraduate. Not good.

Authentic alumni volunteers are those who the needs of the undergraduates (or whomever they are helping) before their own need. When I train new alumni volunteers, I give them this advice: if you respond to an undergraduate’s question by saying, “Well, when I was an undergraduate…” then you have immediately lost their attention. When today’s students as you about today’s problems, they want today’s answers. It takes someone who is authentically committed to improving today’s undergraduate experience to build a bridge between yesterday’s experience and the future. This is not easy to do.

You can get better at building that bridge by focusing on improving your social excellence. And a great way to build your social excellence would be to read this book and study these four pillars. I think you will enjoy it!

Graduating from the USC Rossier School of Education last spring

Well, that doctoral program has come and gone and I absolutely loved it. Soon, I intend to post an entry talking about the tremendous experience that I had as part of the University of Southern California’s online doctoral program. It was amazing and really rewrote the entire online learning experience for me. Again, though, that story is for another time. This update is about student loans.

To start, I do not intend to write a series of updates about my student loan repayment experience like I did after I graduated from Monmouth University and Rutgers University some 10+ years ago. Writing about my on-going repayment of the $120,603.31 in student loans that I incurred getting a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree was fun, but I have already provided that type of content to this blog and I do not want to write about the same issue in the same manner again. Also, my personal circumstances during this repayment are much different than they were back in 2006 when I started that repayment program. When I started repaying my first set of loans back in July 2006, I did not even have a full-time job yet. Now, I have two full-time jobs and two thriving small businesses… so yeah, my situation is a little bit different.

What is also different is the amount of student loan debt that I needed to incur to complete the doctoral program. All in, I took on $89,286.86 in new student loans. This number is comprised of $87,360.16 in loan principal, $1,878.84 in capitalized interest, and $47.86 in closing and refinancing fees. For those of you keeping count, when you combine all of the student loan principal, capitalized interest, and closing and refinancing fees that I have had to pay off in my lifetime, that number is $209,890.17.

Pretty amazing, right?

Just for fun, if you want to add in the $28,851.81 that I have already paid in interest during the first set of student loans, then the total amount that I have repaid and am still tasked with repaying is $238,741.98.

In terms of repayment, the first set of student loans took me seven years and one month to repay in full. Those seven years did not necessarily go by quickly in terms of financial time. In other words, repaying those loans was brutal to a young professional just getting his career started – in the nonprofit sector no less. Today, my repayment plan is a little bit different as my first payments began in December 2018 and I expect to have these loans paid in full sometime around the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. My estimates are still somewhat off because I am unsure if I want to repay the loans earlier and, to be honest, I am contemplating a few different repayment structures that make more financial sense. Unfortunately, my income is at a point where I can no longer write off my student loan interest as a deduction on my taxes, so paying interest on the student loans really has no financial benefit at all.

But there are other ways to make student loan interest work for you. For example, I own a home now and I have a good deal of equity in the home. If I refinance my student loans into my mortgage, then the interest incurred on the increased amount of the mortgage loan would be tax deductible (up to a point, given the recent state and local Tax limits). Also, I could take out a loan from my 401k and repay my loans that way, too. By doing that, 100% of the interest paid on the 401k loan would go back into my 401k and I would earn all of the interest paid. Either one of these options seems like a better choice than just making payments on the student loans.

That is about it for this student loan update. Again, no regular updates on my repayment this time around, but I might post a random update here and there, so be on the lookout!

As a clarifying aside, Brother Bowen is listed as being from “Delta-Xi,” though that is not possible using the chapter designations that the Fraternity uses today since the Fraternity’s Delta-Xi Chapter was founded at Southern Utah University in 1970 and this article was published in 1919. My assumption is that Brother Bowen is from Xi Chapter at the University of Iowa (the Fraternity’s records show a Ralph Bowen initiated into Xi Chapter back in 1918) which was part of the Delta Province at the time. Today, the Fraternity uses geographic demarcations to name provinces (Heartland Province, New England Province, South Atlantic Province, etc.), but this was not always the case – in the early 1900s, Sigma Pi used Greek letters to name the provinces.

The information that Brother Bowen provides in his write-up is interesting from a historical perspective, but also deeply relevant to keep in mind during formal recruitment. Here is Brother Bowen’s advice that you should remember when considering men for membership in Sigma Pi:

As is so often the case with our forefathers in Sigma Pi Fraternity, Brother Bowen writes eloquently about what the Fraternity needs to thrive. He distinguishes between Badge Men and Crowd Men with the primary difference being that Badge Men join a fraternity simply to join. Or, as was common in the 1910s when this was written, some men joined a fraternity just to show off the group’s badge on their chest instead of earning the privilege of wearing that badge everyday that they were honored to be a member.

Do you know someone like that in your chapter? Someone who is more concerned about being a “frat guy” than about living a contemporary revival of the storied history behind the letters on his chest?

Today, think of the guys who come out for rush just because they want to be a “frat guy” and not necessarily because they want to join something bigger than themselves. These are the opposite of the Crowd Men that Brother Bowen notes in his essay. He says that Crowd Men are those who “have courage for others when they are not interested in what should be our common endeavors.” What does this mean? In today’s terms, Crowd Men are those who are constantly working to improve their local chapter, the larger Greek community, and the plight of collegians across the country. They take an interest in what is important for the Fraternity, but they also see the larger battles taking place across our culture and work to improve the standing of their friends, fraternity brothers, and colleagues in the greater struggle.

One of Brother Bowen’s final comments resonated with me in a particular way. He writes, “Sigma Pi is for all of us when all of us cooperate to make it better…” We need more men – young and old alike – who are committed to cooperating to truly making the Fraternity better for all of us, but more importantly – better for the next generation of Sigma Pi men who have yet to join us.

This article is cross-posted at TheEmerald.org.

Undergraduates and alumni from Delta-Beta Chapter in February 2017

Before I became the Chapter Director at Monmouth, our Faculty Advisor held the position. Our Faculty Advisor is probably the best, most engaged Faculty Advisor in the entire fraternity (in fact, when Sigma Pi started giving out a #1 Faculty Advisor in the nation award, our advisor was the first recipient). However, when I graduated in 2003, the position was ripe for a new person to hold it. I spent two years as the President of my chapter and during that time I was required to research the many events, reports, and issues that our chapter was completely out of the loop on. Shortly after I graduated, the new President of the chapter and I traveled to Sigma Pi’s leadership school and talked to the fraternity’s Executive Director about our situation. During our trip, I was asked to become the new Chapter Director and we implemented that change immediately.

What I learned from my time as an undergraduate leader through my time as a young alumni volunteer and now to someone who has some seasoning as a volunteer is that undergraduates are, naturally, not as connected to the on-going workings of the national organization as one might expect. In other words, national student organizations like fraternities and sororities should not expect every single undergraduate leader at every single undergraduate chapter to take an impassioned interest in the finer points of completing and submitting monthly or quarterly or annual reports. There is going to be an equally less-than-enthusiastic understanding of why it is necessary and beneficial to attend national conferences and regional workshops.

It is one of the many jobs of a local and regional volunteer to connect with their undergraduates in an educational, uplifting, and genuine way. The connection must be educational because we need to make the mundane reporting relevant to their everyday experiences as undergraduate leaders. The connection must be uplifting because today’s young men are berated and denigrated by nearly every corner of society just because they are young men. Who will tell our young men, “Good job!” or “I’m proud of you,” if not for us?

But most importantly, the connection must be genuine because undergraduates can see through lies and falsehoods with laser-like accuracy. And they should cut through the nonsense!

I’ll be writing more about mentoring undergraduates soon, so stay tuned!

Temple University around the turn of the century

What I liked best about reading this update from the Kappa Chapter is that they told a wonderful story regarding the history of their chapter. And I might add that they told their story in a beautifully written piece where the language was rich and the content was deep. There are no writers today who put pencil to paper (or fingers to keyboard) in as beautiful, meaningful, and precise a language as what I have read in the old issues of The Emerald.

Some other interesting notes and observations from the January 1916 issue of The Emerald:

Who Should Be Elected to the Grand Council?
This is of particular interest to me since I am running for the Grand Council next month. There was an editorial in The Emerald that gives good advice on the type of person who should not be elected to the Grand Council. The magazine says: “…the distance between good intentions and actual results from hard work is so infinite, that to elect or reelect a man simply because he appears to love the Fraternity; to propose the name of a man simply to get chapter representation or to hold on to a man who has proven his worthlessness, not only injures the Fraternity at large but seriously handicaps the Grand Chapter.”

What to Expect at Convocation
Next month’s Convocation will be the eighth one that I have attended. Before attending my first Convocation in 2002, I had no idea what to expect. Well, for brothers who find themselves in a similar position to the one that I was in 14 years ago, here is what the editors of The Emerald wrote to prepare Sigma Pi Fraternity for Convocation 100 years ago: “The coming Convocation is the logical and appointed time to shoulder all your grievances, protests or recommendations and go after the ‘powers’ without gloves. All delegates should come ‘armed to the teeth’ with sound arguments to propel their pet hobbies through the ranks of the ‘enemy.’ The man who has to stop to think is going to find it rough sledding.”

What is the Executive Council?
In this issue as in prior issues, The Emerald lists both the Grand Council as well as something called the Executive Council. It seems to me like the so-called Executive Council is either the group of people who worked for the fraternity at the time or an expanded governing body of volunteers, which we sorely need today. Seven Grand Council members just does not cut it in 2016 – we need more.

The “Father of Chapters”
The brothers at the Kappa Chapter referred to themselves as the “Father of Chapters” because they set up two iterations of the Delta Chapter at the University of Pennsylvania and the Theta Chapter at Penn State University. Back in 1916, there were only 9 active chapters so Kappa Chapter’s claim was pretty legitimate.

Who was the First Grand Sage?
Throughout their update, the Kappa Chapter talks about so-and-so being elected as the Chancellor of the chapter. Based on what I’ve read, it sounds like the position of Sage used to be called Chancellor. At some point in their update, they mention that Kappa Chapter alumnus M. Atlee Ermold attended Convocation at the end of October 1910. During that Convocation, Ermold was elected as the Grand Sage of the fraternity and was “the first man in Sigma Pi to hold that title.” Interesting. So were Francis L. Lisman and Winford L. Mattoon not the “Grand Sage” but, instead, the National Chancellors of Sigma Pi Fraternity?

No Love for the Herald!
Incidentally, they refer to the chapter’s Executive Council as the Sage, First Counselor, Second Counselor, Third Counselor, Fourth Counselor, and “fifth member.” No love for the Herald position back in 1916!

Fall and Spring Convocations – Not Summer
Also, whenever Convocation is referenced in the old issues of The Emerald, it never takes place during the summer months. Rather, the Convocations seem to have taken place during the months of April and October. Why did this change? The fraternity appears to be so disconnected during the summer months and most of today’s undergraduates are busy working summer jobs to pay increasing tuition, textbook, and off-campus living costs that it seems like holding an event during the school year might actually generate higher attendance along with some cost savings. Who knows? It’s probably worth some research. Here is a screenshot of the invitation to the 1916 Convocation that was included in the magazine:

Kappa Takes a Shot at New Jersey!
As a New Jersey guy I have to take issue with Kappa Chapter’s comment that one of the negatives about a recent initiate is that “he hails from Camden, NJ, that barnacle which clings to Philadelphia’s water line.” How dare you?! We didn’t even have any New Jersey chapters back then to defend our good name!

The Worthiness of Inter-Fraternity Councils
I laughed out loud after reading this line in one of the editorials: “We sometimes wonder whether local Interfraternity Councils are of any real value or not.” Ha ha! Oh, if the editors of the magazine could only see some of the IFCs on our campuses today…

That is all that I have for this review of the January 1916 edition of the magazine. If you are interested in this type of stuff, then I encourage you to check out the online archive of The Emerald by clicking here!