Nelson Mandela’s recorded voice affirms the message of the short video: Sport has the power to change the world.
As students in KNPE 393: Sociology of Sport watch and consider that declaration April 14, associate professor Jenn Jacobs asks a question: “Are you buying what they’re selling?”
For at least one of the visitors to her Anderson Hall classroom that morning, the answer is clear: Yes.
He sits in the back, near the windows and their view of Garden Road, but actively participates in each small-group chat and full-class discussion.
During a “would you rather” ice-breaker session, he even speaks on behalf of his cluster with a novel and funny response to a choice between a lifetime of summer or winter: “We don’t think that’s a real question.”
But when Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education academic advisor Tony Calderala arrives to talk the nuts and bolts of attending college – something on the agenda simply because the morning’s guests are incarcerated at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles – the young man truly comes alive.
Project FLEX, he says, speaking of the KNPE-led initiative to deliver structured physical activity along with resources toward more productive lives after sentences are completed, has indeed changed his world.
“I’m really grateful for Project FLEX because it’s really expanded my horizons,” he says. “A lot of people just look at us as we’re nothing – we’ll amount to nothing – because we screwed up. You guys really made me realize there’s more to life than the ’hood.”
The young man has been in the Illinois Juvenile Justice system since 2018, long enough that he seamlessly uses the “IJJ” acronym. But he’s new to the St. Charles facility and to FLEX, he says, and wants to know how and why the NIU faculty and graduate students are doing this work.
“We had a cool idea,” associate professor Zach Wahl-Alexander answers, “that turned into something big.”
Great job, the young man seems to say. “There is a lot of potential in the prison system. It just needs to be exploited,” he says, adding that Project FLEX has shown him that “there’s not just life and death. There’s success.”
Success, he continues unprompted, now means grandchildren, retirement and, yes, even higher education: “I would personally love to come to NIU,” he announces. “I just need an opportunity.”
JACOBS AND WAHL-ALEXANDER are clearly moved by his testimonial.
“Honestly, we don’t hear stuff like that often. Even with my undergrads at the university, they don’t really dole out a lot of compliments very often,” Wahl-Alexander says.
“And especially in the facility, they’re not quick to give the positive phrase, to express their emotions or to share how meaningful it is or if it’s meaningful. I think they view it as a sign of weakness showing that emotion, so we very rarely get that,” he adds, “and, for us, it’s like a high-five.”
Wahl-Alexander gently teased his faculty colleague in the classroom after the young man spoke, telling everyone that he knew Dr. Jacobs was crying.
She does not deny that: “It is emotional,” Jacobs says.
“On the one hand, I feel like over the last couple years of working in a prison environment, I’ve become fairly ‘woke’ to some of the rougher things happening behind bars, and over time you get immune to a lot,” she says. “On the other hand, I can never actually know what it’s like to be incarcerated – the visceral feelings of being locked up, not being called by your name, having each action in your day dictated to you.”
Taking the young men to lunch in the New Hall cafeteria illustrates that powerfully.
“I heard one of our FLEX youth talking about being in line at an NIU dining hall and asking another student, ‘Hey, what’s good to eat here?’ – and getting an answer that ‘the chicken fingers are decent!’ He marked that as a highlight of his day. Why? Because the student talked to him like he was a human.” Jacobs says. “It’s hard to grasp that there are people in this world – talented, goofy, athletic or dorky kids in this world – who made a bad choice that sent them to a place that makes them feel inhumane.”
Both professors appreciated meeting the four young men who came to campus April 14, and the insights that came with them.
“Seeing how impactful the program is was cool, but also to see the impact that our graduate students are having was really nice to see,” says Wahl-Alexander, who compares the positive reinforcement to a swift frying pan wallop to the face.
“We spend a lot of time, either in the facility or prepping – and not to say these field trips are like the Super Bowl, but they’re kind of culmination of a lot of hard work – and to see it play out the way it did was really great,” he adds.
“It’ll be one of those things we replay on the tougher days, or if we’re kind of going through a lull and we can’t get in the facility, or things don’t fall our way. We should say, ‘Don’t forget this. This is why we do what we do.’ I could probably count on one hand the number of quotes that are similar to that; usually, it’s just like ‘thanks’ or ‘appreciate you.’ ”
Jacobs agrees.
“This day really struck Zach and me. We sort of had a glimpse into how FLEX is about more than sport,” she says.
“We’re starting to realize it’s bigger than leadership, bigger than life skills even. We’re starting to recognize FLEX is about giving youth possible visions of their future, and maybe even their present, helping them envision who they are and what they’re capable of. It just so happens to start in the gym.”
NEARLY FOUR YEARS AFTER the pair launched Project FLEX, along with then-graduate student Tim Mack, Jacobs and Wahl-Alexander remain in awe of their creation.
Only one week after the April 14 field trip, Jacobs traveled to Montreal at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.
Graduate students Karisa Kuipers, Gabby Bennett, Kevin Barton, Huntleigh Wozniak and Tim Mahoney accompanied her to Canada; Bennett, Barton and Wozniak joined Jacobs in presenting on Project FLEX while Kuipers presented her dissertation.
Days later, Wahl-Alexander was in New Orleans for the SHAPE America National Convention and Expo, where he also talked about FLEX.
Between themselves, the two professors actively continue to imagine the possibilities.
And they’re huge.
“When I dream big about FLEX, I think about taking down the prison walls between prisons and universities,” Jacobs says.
“Someday, I want to teach a blended college class with youth from the facility and our own NIU students. I want FLEX youth to have the opportunity to attend NIU and to be standout members of the Huskie community,” she adds. “I want NIU to lead the charge in decreasing the stigma around incarcerated youth and maybe even in reimagining juvenile justice.”
External validation is motivational.
“Dr. Kalyn McDonough, a researcher who just did an international survey on sport programs in youth prisons, recently told us there is no one doing what Project FLEX is – so what’s next for us is changing that,” Jacobs says.
“And we know we’re at a crossroads – we’re shifting away from being a grassroots program,” she adds. “Now, we’ve got a crew of graduate students and several undergraduates involved. We’re starting to get in the room with policymakers and politicians, including an on-campus meeting and presentation to Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton. We’re growing our social media base. We’re getting calls from other universities and prison systems. Our students are producing a podcast on what it’s like working in a prison.”
One of those calls is putting FLEX close to entering a new facility, she says, adding Chicago to the roster that also includes St. Charles and Warrenville.
“We want to keep doing what we’re doing well, share our measurable impact, and hopefully encourage others to do the same,” Jacobs says. “An ironic goal is to put ourselves out of business someday – if we keep doing good work, maybe youth prison populations will decrease, and eventually disappear.”
THAT SOUNDS GREAT to the young visiting from St. Charles.
During an end-of-the-day debriefing session in an Anderson Hall conference room, participants from NIU and St. Charles answers questions about their experiences together.
Prompted for his “standout moment,” he doesn’t hesitate.
“My favorite part of the day was being in the classroom. It’s the first time I’ve been in a classroom since sixth-grade,” he says, adding that he appreciated the “real, live, intellectual conversation and debate. Everyone was cool. There was no tension. It was chill. Everybody’s being themselves. I might as well be myself.”
He felt that way immediately, he says.
“My adrenaline was through the roof. I didn’t know what situation I was walking into,” he says. “But we walked in, and we fit right in with everybody. They looked like me. They talked to me like a normal person. I haven’t been talked to like that in a long time. It felt good. It reminded me I’m human.”
Jacobs asks him if that’s why he was so comfortable in sharing – but his response credits her.
“The vibes you were putting off – the energy you were putting off – it was like, ‘You can say something,’ so I said something,” he tells her. “I never figured I’d be in a position like this and experience something like this. That’s why I tried to speak up. If I go to college – when I go to college – I want a teacher like you. I felt like we did that every day of our lives.”
It seems to encourage him to say even more.
He was a pass/fail student in middle school, he tells the group, and relegated to a behavioral disorders class where he “never really learned anything” with permission to sleep the day away on a beanbag. Lunches, he says, were spent on his phone.
At age 15, as a self-described “hothead” who believed he “could take a bullet to the heart and live,” he was arrested. That was 2018; his visit to the NIU campus was the first time since his incarceration began that he left any secure facility without shackles.
But he’s matured in the facility, he says, and is already taking online college-level courses.
Spending a day in DeKalb has fueled a fire for more, especially if the professors are like Jacobs.
“I messed up, but God gave me another chance to do what I want to do,” he says. “I actually want to go to college now. I wish we could start the day over.”
“Part 2?” someone asks him.
“Part 2? We need Part Infinity!” he answers. “I’m convinced that this works, and proud to be a part of it. I appreciate y’all. We’re showing y’all how we really are. Kids that are incarcerated aren’t as bad as they seem.”
FLEX is helping him to develop life skills of leadership, self-control, communication and perseverance, he says.
Yet the program is also revealing to him, he says in a later interview, that society hasn’t discarded or forgotten him.
“There are people who don’t even know us who care about us – who actually want better for us. They don’t even know our names, or know who we are or what we are, but they always want better for us. They want the best for us. It’s made me realize that the world is a good place. It’s not hell like I think it is.”
Meanwhile, this earned opportunity helps him to look inward.
“It means everything to me. Everything today opened my eyes and made me realize what life is; that there’s more to life than what I’ve become, and where I’m from,” he says.
“I just want to exploit it to the fullest and be able to take college courses and get a college education and become a professor or have a profession that I love,” he adds. “Man, I can’t even describe it honestly. It just made me feel like I could do this. This is where I really should be. I should be in this type of institution, not a correctional institution.”
What would a college degree do for him?
“It’d do everything. It’d help everyone around me,” he says, “and I would try to help kids who were like me. I feel like I would make a different on the world, honestly, at least the world that I’m from.”
He hopes to expand that sphere.
“There’s more to the world that I can explore,” he says. “I don’t want to be in a cell. I don’t want to be dead. Death is not in my future.”
