SEATTLE — A certain failure is coming, Nigel Burton said, for every one of the 30 or so Washington Huskies football players seated before him — and, too, for everyone they’ll ever share a field with.
Intellectually, they already know this. There just is little reason, in their athletic prime, to think much about the inevitability that Burton, a former UW player himself, describes in plain language.
“At some point, you will not be allowed to play anymore,” Burton said. “You either choose to walk away, or someone will tell you you are done.”
The former safety was on campus with seven other UW alumni as part of the football program’s “Montlake Made” programming earlier this year, a two-week program in February for sophomores and juniors led by Cameron Elisara, the program’s director of player development, and Syndric Steptoe, senior director of player engagement.
It was at this point that Elisara, a former defensive lineman who played under Tyrone Willingham and Steve Sarkisian, wanted to spin Burton’s message forward.
At his first job out of college, Elisara taught math at a small high school in Mississippi. He hadn’t taken a math class himself since his junior year of high school. On his first day, the morning bell rang, and reality set in.
“I got steamrolled for an entire year,” he told the players, eliciting laughter.
But he kept at it, eventually moving back to teach and coach at Skyline High in Sammamish, where his students consistently achieved high test scores, he said, “because I learned to get good at it.”
Elisara invited me to sit in on the alumni panel and, the next day, a session built around interviewing, storytelling and professional dress. On the third day, players learned how to build a proper LinkedIn profile. The week concluded with a “Draft Day” event in which players met for 15 minutes at a time with representatives from 10 different companies — “part career fair, part company speed dating,” as Elisara described it — before selecting their top choices for visits the following week to workplaces like UWPD, Seattle Fire Department, UW athletics, Microsoft, Windermere and CBRE, the commercial real estate firm.
Each player made two visits — one to an employer of their choice, and another to an employer selected for them, all with an eye toward whatever comes after football, whenever that might be.
“Be mentally ready for that failure,” Burton said, “and it won’t be failure.”