Kelvin Beachum Jr. is keen on spreading the message that while everyone can’t go professional and play in the NFL, everyone can go pro in STEM or STEAM-based education and careers.
The philanthropist, investor and technology enthusiast also doubles as an offensive lineman for the New York Jets. Beachum discussed STEM and STEAM initiatives on the SportTechie Podcast alongside Jesse Lovejoy, Director of STEAM Education at the San Francisco 49ers, while he was out attending the U.S. News STEM Solutions conference in San Diego on Friday.
Beachum explained to host Bram Weinstein that as he entered the NFL in 2012, he saw “just a lack of representation from pro athletes and being able to educate young people on the opportunities that STEM affords them moving forward in life.”
“So, I took the torch,” he said. “This is one of my platforms that I spend a lot of time nurturing and spending time with people who understand how important it is to our society moving forward. You got people like Russia and China that are extremely intelligent, and we as the United States of America need to prepare young people to be the future leaders of the world.”
Lovejoy spoke highly of the 27-year-old Beachum, who has been known to jet-set around the globe for vacation but also sprinkle in some investor and venture capital meetings based on the relationships he’s cultivated throughout the Linkedin.
“What (Kelvin) failed to mention is that there’s not one of them who’s as committed as he is to actually getting on the ground and doing the work and coming to places like this and talking to people,” Lovejoy said about Beachum referencing other NFL and NBA players interested in similar educational topics. “This is what does it. These kinds of efforts are what drive people to do new things and try new things, from hearing from people like him who are in the middle of training for a season and flying coast to coast to come out and talk to a group of people and get right back on a plane and getting back to work to do his business.”
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When asked about the education students receive — like the ones who participate in the San Francisco 49ers program which looks at STEAM through a football lens — and how it parallels the typical curriculum in school systems, Beachum said it “works extremely well.”
“The testing schedule and the testing system we currently have is broken. The education system is broken. Everybody knows it, everybody talks about it,” Beachum said, adding that he struggled with science, in particular, growing up and actually failed standardized testing before he received a full scholarship to SMU (it wasn’t clear what standardized test he spoke of or what area(s) he failed).
“But what can we do to engage the students on a much different level?” he continued. “I think this is the best model to be able to engage the students. You engage them on the front-end in the classroom and then you take them out into the informal learning arena and allow them to apply what they learned in the classroom. The thing is, sports and STEM are married together. Guys like myself and others around the league from a professional athlete’s standpoint use our platform to engage these young people on a much different level than just, ‘Hey, let’s go play football. Hey, let’s go be a basketball player or a professional athlete or just get an education.’ These programs are very systematic and very regimented so kids can learn and be able to carry over what they learn in the classroom.”
From a STEM perspective, Beachum described there is significant overlap between those areas and what happens day-to-day on the football field, most of which young students don’t realize until they’re presented with the information and then realize there’s widespread opportunities within an organization centered around a STEM-based education.
“Yesterday, I saw eight people taking care of the grass outside,” said Beachum of what he saw at the Jets practice field. “You have somebody engineering what the grass is going to be like, how high it’s going to be, how short it’s going to be. You have people that are outside on the practice field that are measuring how fast athletes are running, how much force their putting towards the ground. You have the film crew looking at the production of the players. You have a whole gamut of a number of STEM-based jobs that are on the football field, on the practice field every single day that a child doesn’t even relate to or even understand that that could be them next.”