By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com
Earning a degree from the University of Illinois has always been considered prestigious, but a promising new program instituted by the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics' academic services staff will soon propel its student-athletes into an entirely more influential stratosphere.
Branded as "The Illini Way", Illinois's more than 500 student-athletes will quite literally be provided with a "game plan" to become career ready.
Dr. Brian Russell, Associate Athletics Director for Academic Services and Student-Athlete Development, is a driving force in initiating this new program.
"For years, we have done an incredible job of graduating student-athletes at a high level, engaging them in community service, and putting them out into great careers, all based on them having a wonderful degree from a top-15 public institution," Russell said. "But, in today's world, how do we get more intentional about developing leaders among Illini student-athletes? How do we get more intentional in serving the community at a leadership level and taking deep dives into passions that our student-athletes have?"
As Russell's student-athletes development team designed their programming for the 2019-20 academic year, they critiqued what they had been doing and concluded that a change in their strategic plan was necessary. Their new objective—strikingly similar to that already being employed by the coaches and strength and conditioning staffs—was to advance each student-athlete, individually.
"We want to concentrate our strategy on developing careers," Russell said. "The Illini Way is a simple process for our student-athletes to understand the culture of being a student-athlete at the University of Illinois. There are things you do as freshmen, as sophomores, as juniors, and as seniors, related to career development, personal development, branding and strategy. In time, our future student-athletes will understand that those who preceded them did the exact same thing to prepare them for the right next step."
A generous financial gift from the Allegretti family and the support of Deloitte, will allow Illini student-athletes access to an online platform called Game Plan. It includes a variety of eLearning courses that cover topics such as academic time management and study skills training, sexual violence prevention, financial literacy, networking, and social media awareness.
Russell says that The Illini Way will mirror the mission statement of the DIA: "Unify. Develop. Inspire. Achieve."
"As you think about what 'unify' means within The Illini Way, this is about diversity and inclusion programming, and learning how to be a responsible citizen in a global world through community engagement," he said. "We're teaching how we fit into society, how we give back, how we use our platform of sport—wearing the Block I—how we use that platform for good. How do you use it to impact people positively?"
The second segment of the mission statement, "develop", is where personal and career growth will be housed.
"This is an area in which you'll see some of the biggest changes," Russell said. "Each student-athlete will be on a four-year career development plan. Every first-year student will emerge with a resume and an inventory about their strongest interests. They'll understand how majors and careers align. Every freshman will end their first year with a plan of what the future looks like for them."
Russell says "inspire" relates to the area that involves leadership development. It's being taught through a partnership with UI's Illinois Leadership Center.
"We look at it in two frames," he said. "First, as freshman student-athletes, what are the core values and competencies they need to know to understand who they are as a leaders and what it means to be a leader. Our Leadership Center is an incredible resource that already teaches these designed leadership competencies.
"The second frame is allowing students to self-select deeper dives into understanding themselves as leaders. We'll be developing a model where our student-athletes will go through an application process, be selected, take course work revolving around sport and leadership, and then have some sort of a culminating experience of either domestic or international service in sport."
"Each of our teams will have a couple of members who will go through that training. We believe that they will greatly impact their teams from a leadership perspective."
Russell says that the final element of the mission statement—"achieve"—fits perfectly within the student-athlete development and academic arena, and will be targeted in many ways toward the Illini's highest achieving student-athletes.
"These individuals need our support in figuring out graduate school, preparing for the GRE or other graduate entrance exams, and positioning them for placement in competitive internships," he said. "We want to make them competitive for the national awards, for the Rhodes Scholarship, or to earn post-graduate scholarships through the Big Ten and the NCAA. We have to start identifying them early as freshmen and sophomores, and really build their profiles."
Soon, Russell says, Illini student-athletes will have their own personalized online career network, using Game Plan and a network of former Illini alumni to secure upper-level mentoring opportunities.
"I am very fortunate to have an incredible staff and, through the gift of Carl Allegretti and the Allegretti family, excellent resources," Russell said. "We hope that we're able to set the national standard in how we teach leadership and develop careers."
UI Director of Athletics, Josh Whitman, is excited about the direction in which Russell and his staff are implementing The Illini Way.
"The Allegretti gift and the Game Plan initiative allows us to augment a very important space for us: the personal and professional development of our student-athletes," Whitman said. "As the advertisements say, so many of them are going to go pro in something other than sports. We have an obligation to them to make sure that they are as prepared as they can be to tackle those new challenges."
