The genesis of Cal’s successful annual reading outreach to local students in the community sprung from an unlikely source nearly a decade ago in Berkeley. What began as some playful banter between teammates became an expression of former Cal running back Patrick Laird’s love for reading, with the future NFL running back’s unique touchdown celebration in Cal’s season-opening win over North Carolina in 2017 that continued through the rest of his Cal career before heading to the NFL in 2019.
Bear Insider
“I remember my buddy Chad Hanson had a really good season and he started scoring all these touchdowns for us,” Laird said. “And he starts doing these cool celebrations like the horns down one and one time we were just all hanging out in our living room and we're going around coming up with different celebrations if any of us scored a touchdown and someone jokingly said, 'If Pat scored a touchdown, he'd probably pretend to read a book.’ I was a walk-on at the time and wasn't playing that much so it was a joke to them but I kept that in my mind. And then I did it at the UNC game and people on Twitter were asking about it. And then the next game, I scored a couple more and I did it better. So it literally just started like. ‘I'm gonna get my friends back for making fun of me because I like because I like to read.’"
Laird’s passion for reading eventually turned into the Cal Football Reading Challenge where Laird regularly spoke to local students in the community about the importance of reading and got the athletic department on board, offering four free tickets to any students who successfully completed the reading challenge.
"I took a class my summer my first semester here called The Politics of Education Inequality,” Laird noted. “I came from a town called Arroyo Grande in San Luis Obispo County and I learned that the way I grew up is not the same way that everybody else grew up. My parents went to college. My older siblings went to college. My older sister was reading all the time. So I was just watching her read and I just fell in love with it and I learned that education was really important. And then I learned about how a lot of education systems across the United States don't have the same experience as the one I grew up in. So I had the book celebration my junior year and I was like, 'Okay, Cal fans are enjoying this. How do we try to tie in what I'm doing by my celebration on the field with something I'm interested in?'
Bear Insider
“Summer reading's a problem I learned about in that class. I was like, 'Okay, let's go to the athletic department and see if they'll get on board with this.’ They were like, ‘We'll do four tickets at the time if these kids complete a reading challenge.' I don't think they realized it was gonna hit 2000 kids.
"But that was the genesis, which is kind of the perspective that a lot of kids don't grow up the way I grew up. They don't have the motor. They don't have someone in their household or whatever it is, or the parents both have jobs so they're working during the summer, not able to encourage their kids to read books. And they show up in the fall and are a couple weeks behind. So it's kind of like a feeling like you can get them to open up their world because reading can just open so many doors, their imagination and learning new things, discovering new things.
“One of the things I try to do when I'm when I'm speaking with kids, and I tried to do this back in college, is to show them reading can be cool. You know, like we're football players and people think athletes are cool, but you can't be a good athlete if you're not someone who’s smart and intelligent. Football is actually a more intelligent sport than I think people think. The ability to sit down and study a playbook for 45 minutes is the same muscle that you build when you sit down for 45 minutes and read. So I tried to draw analogies with the kids just to get them to realize like, 'Hey, maybe I don't want to be a football player when I grew up, but maybe I want to be a musician or a lawyer or a firefighter, where you have to have the ability to learn new information processes, so I just tried to make it seem like a reading's cool because football players are reading so reading can be cool. It can be fun."
Yesterday’s activities involved giving the students from United for Success Academy in Oakland a feel for their lives as players at Cal, with the students touring the facilities, spending time on the field to talk about their training routine, a session in a position meeting room analyzing film, Q&A sessions and more.
After Laird’s graduation, the reading challenge mantel has been taken up by several former players, from current tight end coach Mike Saffell when he was a player, to Brian Driscoll, Matthew Cindric and now current players Jaydn Ott, Jack Endries, Fernando Mendoza, Jeffrey Johnson, Cade Uluave and new inside linebacker arrival Teddye Buchanan and all took part in yesterday’s event.
Bear Insider
Ott’s love for reading originated from a different path than Laird’s where his passion for reading sprung from a determined mother, who put the future star running back on a summer reading challenge as a child, much to his chagrin.
“My mom actually forced me to start reading and I really didn’t want to do it but once I gave it a try, I started loving it,” Ott said. “I started out with Diary of a Whimpy Kid and eventually read all of the Harry Potter books and I just loved them all so when I heard we had a reading challenge here, I knew I just had to be a part of it.
“These kids need to hear from people who've gone through what they've gone through and now that I've experienced success, it's not all just about football.”
“I’m thrilled to be involved in a program like the Reading Challenge and to be able to do other things like Golden Buddies for Special Olympics kids and to now have so many other teammates join us, too,” Endries said. “It’s great to be able to be a role model for these kids and maybe inspire them to learn how important reading and learning can be.”
Bear Insider
“I read but I wasn’t a super big reader,” Mendoza noted. “But I saw the tradition of guys like Patrick Laird, Mike Saffell, Matthew Cindric. All those guys were leaders on the team and all those guys were taking the time to do things like the Golden Buddies Clinic or the Reading Challenge and I learned from them. I want to be the best leader that I can be and I always try and learn from other leaders like them.”
The summer Reading Challenge promotion continues today with another event and will be ongoing, with several more promotional events to follow.
This may be the most important thing these guys do in their lives (seriously). If kids are not reading by themselves by the end of third grade, every year thereafter they will find it harder to learn and will develop ways to hide their inability rather than let it be known. We also have to overcome the stigma applied to kids who read (and learn, generally) by those who can't or won't for fear of ridicule, mostly. This has been exacerbated by a theory of reading (Calkins/Columbia Univ) that has been proven a failure, but has persisted due mostly to bureaucratic inertia and fear of change in some educators.
The approach that is being substituted is the Science of Reading. It's not a panacea, but has shown to be much more successful. So, if the guys hear discussions of reading education, they can better see what's going on and act accordingly.
Sorry to be so pedantic (nothing new for me, in the opinion of some), but it's a preoccupation and very important to me.
