Players Coalition panel communicates importance of athlete activism at SXSW

Activism in sports is not new, and certainly didn’t start with Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality back in 2016.

Los Angeles Rams director of player affairs and Players Coalition member Jacques McClendon lists Jesse Owens, John Carlos, Muhammad Ali and Jackie Robinson as trailblazers who found their voices as professional athletes and kindled critical conversations in both the living room and on the floor of Congress.

While many minority athletes had posters of Carlos and Tommie Smith holding up their fists at the 1969 Olympics hanging in their bedrooms or chose No. 42 as their little league jersey number in admiration of Robinson, present-day professional athletes can’t emulate the same type of activism that Ali did, according to panelists at Saturday's Sports for Culture Change and Impact session at SXSW.

And that's for the best, they said.

“I think (an athlete’s) platform has come to a point where (they) have their own voice,” McClendon said. “When we look at Twitter and we look at Instagram, (athletes) control the message, so I think that provides a unique opportunity to be more open.”

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The Players Coalition was established in 2017 by then-NFL players Anquan Boldin and Malcolm Jenkins after Boldin’s cousin, Corey Jones, was shot and killed by an officer in plain clothes after standing on the side of Interstate 95 next to his car in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., while waiting for a tow truck. Boldin and Jenkins formed the coalition with goals of improving police and community relations, pursuing criminal justice reform, bridging the resource gap in K-12 education and driving economic advancement.

The Players Coalition has grown from two men to 1,400 professional athletes across the globe.

Trying to make changes, have an impact in the classroom

Former NFL athlete Ellis Wyms said the athlete buy-in is natural. Many athletes who come from marginalized backgrounds and attended under-funded, under-resourced schools build communities of people that look out for one another and try to develop that capital on their own. So when those athletes “make it,” they feel a responsibility to pay their knowledge forward.

“You’re so grateful for that opportunity,” said Wyms, who played from 2001-08 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Seattle Seahawks and Minnesota Vikings. “If you get that opportunity and you come from that environment, you know how (those) communities lack support. They lack the inspiration (and) the knowledge base.”

To maximize its impact on low income, marginalized communities, McClennon and Wyms focus their efforts on just that: their communities. Wyms said if he can enter a community and help people become both better educated on the political process and build stability through the Coalition’s pillars, the population is more likely to experience economic upward mobility and therefore able to impact local government and policy themselves.

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One of his favorite ways to pay knowledge forward: developing community K-12 education. Wyms teams up with Houston ISD and local organizations to provide students with fundamental financial literacy programs and computer science courses, which build necessary skills to accumulate wealth and power in society.

Now, Wyms sits on a Houston board with powerful business owners, advocating for equity in resource allocation.

“You get to choose your leaders, your judge, choose your mayor,” Wyms said. “You get to put people in positions of power that you want, but a lot of times you have to be economically empowered to be able to do those (things.)”

For athletes, knowledge is power

Former Toronto FC fullback Justin Morrow says that current athletes have greater access to their platform than ever before. Athletes who possess star power or have luxurious guaranteed contracts are more likely to influence power over an organization, followers or even front office executives. Because those athletes understand their power, they feel comfortable reaching out to powerful people for resources, backing, critical conversations or with grievances of their own.

However, most athletes wouldn’t feel confident that if they called their owner on the phone, they would pick up, Morrow said, and they also were scared to rock the boat; historically, white men were both the primary consumer and the primary decision-makers in professional sports. Often, Morrow said, it was intimidating going against the grain due to the prominent power imbalance and a fear of consequences from higher-ups if they protested or engaged in activism.

But following both Kaepernick and the development of professional sports campaigns that align with the Coalitions’ pillars in recent years, players feel that they have the backing and understanding of ramifications if they want their voices to be heard.

Combined with the collaboration that social media grants, athletes feel more empowered then ever.

“You realize that the influence that you can have over multiple markets, maybe multiple continents, multiple industries is so large,” Morrow said. “I think athletes are taking advantage of that.”

The Coalition then and now

Despite the Coalition losing some momentum after the nation quieted following the Summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, McClennon pointed out that the NFL culture from five years ago feels dramatically different than it does now. With the league extending its partnership with the Coalition through a five-year, $15 million grant, franchises like McClennon’s Rams have frequent conversations about systemic racism and education inequity and how their organization can help combat those forces.

The buy-in from front office executives just fuels athletes’ desires to find their voices and use their platforms without fear.

“I can confidently tell you that there were a lot of guys that wanted to kneel but didn’t,” McClennon said. “Fast forward to 2022, I think people are more in tune and more empowered. They have the freedom to act how they want to act.”

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: SXSW panel talk: Former pro athletes encourage local athlete activism