Growing up in Long Island, Zach Wahl-Alexander knew exactly what he loved.
Baseball.
Pitching? Playing shortstop? Yes, please. Game on.
And the Big Apple boy was good at it, too, even suiting up for some of the higher-end travel teams in the boroughs of New York City. Scholarship offers from NCAA programs came his way, but he turned those down. He had determined that his days on the diamond were over.
So he enrolled at the University of Georgia, where he soon discovered that his next choice wasn’t nearly as apparent as the one to leave his mitt behind.
“I probably had 15 or 20 majors prior to settling on physical education,” Wahl-Alexander says.
“My mom was paying for college, and she was like, ‘Get out there. Enjoy yourself. Figure out what you want to do. Just don’t fail anything, because I don’t want to have to pay for something twice,’ ” he adds. “I definitely got her money’s worth in terms of doing a wide variety of different things.”
Just going to Athens met an expectation of Katherine Wahl for her only child; she herself was the daughter of an Air Force general, Eugene Wahl, who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and who moved his family “all over” during those years.
“When I was looking for colleges, she said that if I wasn’t going to play baseball, she wanted me to go out of state to experience a different aspect or a different section of the United States,” he says. “I really liked UCLA, but my mom was like, ‘That’s too far.’ Georgia was close enough where she felt like she could get on a flight and get down there in two hours if she needed to, and I loved it. I was one of three people from New York in my class.”
Now two decades later, Wahl-Alexander’s ultimate degree decision has proven itself a grand slam.
He has been named the EC Lane and MN Zimmerman Endowed Professor in the NIU Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education, where he has served on the faculty since 2015.
The honor, which comes on the heels of his spring promotion to full professor, is the latest circus catch for the co-founder of Project FLEX and the university’s choice to pilot a virtual reality “metaversity” at NIU in 2022.
Coming one decade in his career, it actually fits the timeline he imagined when he arrived in DeKalb and heard of the title then held by colleague Paul Wright.
“I had heard of endowed professors before, but I didn’t know what that entailed,” Wahl-Alexander says. “For me, it was something that was so far in the future – like when I’m old and when I have a bunch of kids, that it might be something to look to do.”
Now that he and his wife, Katie, are the parents of two – daughter McKinley, 5, and son Lincoln, 3 – Wahl-Alexander is there.
“My mission is to strengthen NIU’s impact across the field of kinesiology and physical education. A key part of that is to build and establish a Young Alumni Network within the physical education department. We will be bringing over 150 recent graduates from the last 12 years together to create a community of practice.”
He plans to “create a space where we can highlight them, connect them with other alumni and our future students, and establish a community of learning where they can essentially learn from each other. We’re bringing them together to amplify the good work they’re doing, to share ideas and leverage their expertise for our future physical educators.”
A second initiative underway is the launch of a mentorship project that already has generated positive feedback.
“We’ve connected 45 alumni who graduated within the past decade with students just entering our physical education program,” he said. “Each mentor commits to a two-year partnership, offering guidance and perspective as their mentee navigates the program. It’s designed to give new students another set of eyes and ears – someone who’s been there – to support their growth both personally and professionally.”
Monthly check-ins via Zoom will allow the pairs to know each other and build nourishing professional relationships where the students will feel comfortable and trusting in turning to their mentors for advice in moments of adversity.
The mentors eventually will become cooperating teachers for their mentees when clinicals and student-teaching begin, Wahl-Alexander hopes.
Doing so will allow the undergraduates to observe high-quality instruction founded in “the practices, the principles and the philosophies that we have embedded in them,” he says, “so that the messages they’re getting in our classes is similar to what they’re seeing when they’re doing in their observations.”
CHOOSING PHYSICAL EDUCATION as a major began with, of all things, a class in international business.
“One of the assignments was to do 20 hours of volunteer work, and it could be pretty open-ended,” Wahl-Alexander says.
“I don’t even remember how, but I ended up volunteering in an after-school program. I did that a couple times a week and I loved it. I got my hours in, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to keep doing it. I love the kids, I love the staff and I really enjoyed my time.’ I did it throughout the rest of the semester,” he adds.
“Then, at the end of the semester, the people there said, ‘You know, we can hire you, and you can do this for extra money, right?’ – and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ I ended up doing that and working there for three extra years, and that was sort of my foray into working with kids and knowing that it was my passion.”
Given his countless innings spent on the mound and the basepath, physical education became the obvious discipline.
“I had always loved sports, and I parlayed my interest and passion for sports with working with kids and building relationships with kids,” he says. “In between my undergrad and master’s, I actually ran an after-school program back in New York for a year – and then I got a call from one of my advisors at Georgia, saying they had an opportunity for me to go a different university.”
Wahl-Alexander enrolled at the University of Alabama, where in 2012 he earned a master’s degree and in 2015 a Ph.D. in kinesiology with a specialization in sport pedagogy.
Teaching came courtesy of serving as in instructor in activity classes and methods classes and, importantly, during a year of work at a female detention center. Details of his time spent with those young women behind bars eventually found their way into a conversation with Anderson Hall officemate Jennifer Jacobs and, yes, led to their creation of Project FLEX.
Project FLEX’s adherence to the ideology of Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility is key to all of Wahl-Alexander’s work.
“You can learn so much about yourself, and so much about the world, through sport,” he says.
“So many life lessons can be taught – or just come up – within sporting experiences. So many different experiences that you can get through sport translate to the rest of your life,” he adds. “I think back to all of my experiences with sport and how that shaped me into the kind of person, adult, husband and parent that I am.”
His list includes perseverance through challenging circumstances, healthy interactions with teammates and coping with unachieved goals despite hard work and commitment.
Graduates of NIU’s Physical Education Teacher Education program absorb that idea.
“I teach a curriculum model called Sport Pedagogy that, essentially, mimics real-world sporting experiences. It puts your students – in a K-12 P.E. setting – on teams and sort of provides them with opportunities for that same sort of authentic sporting experiences,” he says.
“Research shows that there is such a small amount of people who actually participate in a JV or varsity sport, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still get those same benefits in another way,” he adds. “I’ve seen those positive benefits so much in my own life, and I want to provide those for others.”
While Wahl-Alexander is not personally making that difference in the K-12 sphere, he cherishes the knowledge that he is multiplying his impact for those students by preparing their teachers.
Call it “the analogy of molding clay,” he says.
“Our preservice teachers come to us with all of these norms and experiences that they had with sport and with physical education – some good, some bad – but they’re still like a wet piece of clay. I like being able to mold them and try to round out some of the rougher edges and try to indent in spots that need to be indented – but then also to let them grow in areas where they want to grow,” he adds.
“It’s really cool to see what they enter our program as – as teachers and educators – and then how they leave the program and what kind of impact we’ve had on them. This is my 11th year, and I’ve been able to create this network of students who have gone through, have graduated and are practicing in the schools – and to see the impact they’re making has been really profound.”
WAHL-ALEXANDER ENJOYS a front-row seat with one of those alums.
His daughter, McKinley, is now a kindergartner at North Elementary School in Sycamore, where 2019 graduate Bret Lucca teaches physical education and Samantha Perri is student-teaching.
“I like to grill Mac on all things P.E. to see how those two are doing and, obviously, they’re doing really well,” he says. “Bret’s an amazing one.”
That’s great news for Wahl-Alexander and Katie, who teaches social studies at DeKalb’s Clinton Rosette Middle School. The couple met at Trails End Camp in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania, where they started as counselors for the sleep-away summer campers and, years later, serve on the staff.
But the professor also keeps tabs on legions of his former Huskies, often reuniting with them when they visit the DeKalb campus or at the annual convention of the Illinois Association for Physical Education, Health, Recreation and Dance.
Reports of how they routinely implement the sport education model in their gymnasiums, or the instructional methods he taught them, “demonstrate that they deem that they’re valuable and important enough to follow through on.”
“I like hearing stories about them developing and cultivating relationships with their students, whether that’s in class or whether that’s during coaching or going to sporting events,” Wahl-Alexander says. “In seeing how excited they are about these positive experiences with their students and these impacts they’re making, I sort of see myself in them. Living that through my former students is really cool.”
