Call an Audible: Let My Pivot from Harvard Law to NFL Coach Inspire Your Transition

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INTRODUCTION

JUST GET IN THE BUILDING

During the summer of 2006, I was stuck on a conveyor belt that churned through Harvard Law School and made frequent deposits at corporate law firms across the country. Sandwiched between my classmates, I looked to the left and to the right for my own destination. The firms seemed indistinguishable to me—all of them shared an affinity for ampersands in their names, featured a uniformly boring clientele, and reeked of monotony. But I was a student at Harvard Law School, the most prestigious school in the universe. People at Harvard Law School clerked at law firms. That was the arrangement. So, I returned to the state of my birth—Texas—to work in the salt mines of a prestigious law firm.

On my first day at one firm, a junior associate strolled into my office and asked, Hey, Daron, wanna grab lunch? I was blown away. Perhaps I was on the fast track to becoming a partner? It was the first day of my clerkship and I was already getting invitations for lunch. After barely stammering a yes, I attempted to get back to the day’s work. When noon arrived, we jumped into the associate’s something-series BMW and headed to the restaurant.

During an overpriced lunch at a swanky Houston steak house, I started asking questions about how the associate enjoyed his work. The answer I feared most rolled right off his tongue like an easy layup: It’s fine. The slight altar-boy pitch accompanied by an effortless shrug gave away his ambivalence for the work.

When the check arrived, he concluded our lunch by saying, The best part about the summer is being able to eat on the firm’s dime. In that moment it all became clear: Taking a summer clerk to lunch was literally a meal ticket, and I was the write-off.

Accepting my immediate fate, I did what any overachiever would do. I gorged for the rest of the summer on breakfast tacos, Kobe beef, and swordfish. I returned to Massachusetts for my last year of law school with an extra ten pounds around my waist and a profound uncertainty about my future.¹

At the end of my clerkship, I sat on my couch with my eyelids shut as I hit the replay button on my summer experiences. Unlike most of my fellow summer associates, I had somewhat enjoyed my work. By enjoy, I mean that typing at my desk each day did not feel like the pain of a thousand needles shooting through my fingers. Nevertheless, I was struck by the endless reel of testimonials I had heard from young associates during overpriced and underseasoned lunches. None of my colleagues seemed excited about their careers, and the overwhelming majority of them were truly unhappy.

It wasn’t just the firm that was sending them down the drain. Each seemed to have a tangible sense of regret about choosing law over another route. At some point in their lives, the internal GPS had said take a left but the external GPS told them that taking the right was the more practical route. Now, overburdened with sandbags of law school debt, mortgages, and private-school tuitions for their kids, they were merely punching the clock and phoning it in. Like them— though earlier in the trajectory—I was also completely ambivalent about my chosen profession. And, in the moment of reflection as I headed into my last year of school, my disinterest scared me.

As I looked back at the pivotal moments in my life, one feeling stood out above all others: unbridled anticipation for the next step. When I graduated from the University of Texas and boarded a Greyhound bus for the cross-country ride to an internship on Capitol Hill, my stomach did flips for the entire 1,200 miles. I couldn’t wait to see the Washington Monument. Similarly, when I set foot in the Texas Capitol on my first day as a legislative intern, I was giddy with excitement.

But as I reflected on my future as Daron K. Roberts, Esq., my heart rate was nearly flatlining and nothing seemed to send it spiking. That’s when I received the phone call that would turn my linear life into a Jackson Pollock production. My high school football buddy, Alfonso Longoria, had a simple suggestion: Let’s take a road trip.

Alfonso and I had formed a bond as players for the Mount Pleasant Tigers. Unfortunately, we were both victims of the insurmountable size-deficit disorder that claims the college-football dreams of so many high school players. He was a short offensive guard and I was a skinny strong safety.

But in that moment, Alfonso was inviting me back to the sport I had divorced after high school graduation.

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Growing up amid the piney woods of East Texas, I was practically born with a passion for Friday-night showdowns. Football games were the landmark events of my childhood. Every weekend was like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, with marching band and drum line performances. One by one, the players would enter the stadium as if conjured by some high priest of sport. First, a distant but incessant thumping would give way to a legion of band members, punching the Texas air with sharp notes and thuds of anticipation. Then the color guard arrived, flanking the band. Next came the dance team and cheerleaders and then, finally, the football team emerged from the locker room.

I spent the autumn weeks of my childhood in anticipation of watching my hometown heroes take the field on Fridays. That my athletic skills were limited is an understatement. With average speed, average quickness, and average size, I seized the only category that could make me competitive—work ethic. As a country boy, I didn’t have a bevy of neighborhood kids with whom to play impromptu basketball and football games. If you stood on my roof and drew an imaginary circle with a half-mile radius, you would have a grand total of five potential pickup guys. Most of them were considerably older than me and had better things to do than play with a scrawny son of a preacher. This lack of playing experience created a mild form of insecurity in my athletic skills.

The two driving forces in my life didn’t leave much room for sports, anyway. Academics and church were the uprights in the Roberts family’s end zone. If I wasn’t at choir practice or prayer meeting or usher meeting or any other meeting for that matter, then I was probably studying. My parents didn’t just read to me; they managed the Roberts School for the Boy. Writing assignments, computer projects, and themed road trips (most notably a trek across the South to visit Civil War battlefields)—not football training camps—were my summer activities.

Another thing that had a lasting impact was that my dad never watched an entire NFL game from beginning to end. Much of his drive-by viewing can be attributed to a schedule that called for him to visit the sick and attend afternoon services. But part of it had its roots in an honorable indifference. As the son of a Baptist preacher and an elementary school principal, I lived in a household where there was little room for deviation. Both of my parents had bachelor’s degrees and placed a great emphasis on education. So, while I loved football, I always knew that my boarding pass for success would be issued by academics.

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Knowing that I’d never play a single down in college, I turned my sights toward achieving academic excellence.² Stanford University had been my first choice since my parents had taken me to Dallas for an informational session during my freshman year. Sitting near the front of a nondescript hotel ballroom, I watched the idyllic images of Palo Alto dance across a projector screen. Ten seconds into the video, I was sold. B-roll images of kids sunbathing among Spanish-tiled cathedrals of higher education enchanted me. On the trip back to Mount Pleasant, I swore an oath to submit an early-decision application to Stanford. If I got in, I was obligated to accept.

Two years later, an oversize envelope from Palo Alto arrived. I got in. My fastest unofficial forty-yard-dash time was clocked on November 12, 1996, as I bolted up the driveway from my mailbox to the front door. The only complication was the price tag.

This shifted my focus back to Texas. As a fifth-generation Texan, I loved my state, but I was ready to leave. The University of Texas was the second option on my list, but a scholarship interview one weekend shifted my mindset. With big dreams of becoming the governor of my home state, I accepted a full academic scholarship to UT. The Forty Acres, a moniker for the University of Texas main campus, felt surprisingly like home. I jumped into the throes of a liberal arts education and closed the door (or so I thought) on my romance with football.

A GROWN MAN GOES TO SUMMER CAMP

It had been nearly ten years since I made my final play on the Mount Pleasant football team, so when Alfonso—now a high school football coach—called to invite me to join him at the Steve Spurrier Football Camp in South Carolina, I was immediately reminded of the smell of a freshly cut field, echoes of the drumroll before kickoff, and the uncontrollable thumping of my heart during a halftime speech. I leapt at the chance to reenter the world that I had so loved as a child.

By day, I was tasked with coaching fifth-grade players. By night, I was a chaperone, making sure the kids didn’t break curfew. One night, as I sat with the young men in the commons area of that old dormitory talking about girlfriends, video games, and why a lawyer-to-be was coaching fifth graders at a football camp, I listened as a white kid from the right side of the tracks talked with a black kid from the wrong side of the tracks. As inquisition grew into discussion, the two boys realized they had more in common than they thought. It was as if Holden Caulfield and the Invisible Man met each other for the first time only to discover that they were actually long-lost twins separated at birth. The melanin divide evaporated as the boys discovered they were really the same person. In that moment, I felt my career dreams almost instantly morph into the desire to become a football coach. Three days working a football camp was just the reality check that I needed. My passion purpose had smacked me in the face. It fell in my lap wrapped in a thirteen-pound pigskinned oval.

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Back in Cambridge, a large majority of my classmates laughed at me.³ Back in Texas, my family members wondered if I needed to see a psychiatrist. But I kept drafting my exit strategy. Sitting at the same desk at which I had penned legal briefs, I wrote letters to football programs across the country, asking begging for an internship. Legalese would not work. None of my recipients wanted to hear about the arc of First Amendment case law. This letter needed to convey my desire without coming off as starry-eyed and naive. It also needed to demonstrate my willingness to go broke on sweat equity.

Still, I struggled. The blinking cursor just stared at me. Why was this so hard? I realized I had not written about myself since completing law school applications years earlier. Every assignment I had in law school hinged on intellectual detachment. I had spent the last three years as an observer. Now it was time to be intentional and personal.

The cursor morphed into a flashing smirk. I had to fight back. I began to type.

Dear Coach,

I am a third-year student at Harvard Law School and I want to become a football coach. After three days of working as a volunteer coach at the Steve Spurrier Football Camp, I realized that changing the life trajectories of young men can be fulfilled by coaching a sport that I fell in love with in high school. I understand that you receive countless letters each year but I promise I will work harder than anyone else you are considering for this position.

For the past two years, I have immersed myself in the study of the law in the world’s most challenging institution of higher learning. This quest required that I spend sleepless nights in the library toiling through legal cases.

Notwithstanding the heavy workload, I devoted every fiber of my spirit to this academic pursuit. Now, I want to take this same work ethic to your organization. I am committed to performing any menial task at any arbitrary hour in order to add value to the team. Please consider me for any entry-level position that you may have available.

Sincerely,

Daron K. Roberts

I reviewed what I had written. What the hell was I doing? My classmates were headed to law firms on Wall Street and clerkships with federal judges. I was hoping to go wherever a head coach was nutty enough to let me in the building.

With the click of a Print button, I began a direct mail campaign to get into the NFL, sending letters to every NFL team. I searched through the online directory of coaches at every NFL team and tried to find a personal connection. Was the coach born in Texas? Did he study government in college? Any common ground that I could find was fair game. I just needed one hook. To think that ten years earlier, I had figured my first direct mail campaign would be to fund a race for state representative.

My football goal of a training camp internship was much, much lower than election to public office, but nearly as difficult to attain. A training camp intern is essentially plankton, functioning at the bottom of the food chain. The list of your potential responsibilities includes ferrying players to and from the airport, setting out cones before practice, holding tackling dummies during practice, and picking up cones after practice. It is not a position of glory and acclaim, but it was exactly what I wanted.

Securing an internship was even more daunting given the fact that I had not played football in college—let alone in the NFL—and that I had spent the previous three years in law school. Almost as soon as I placed a letter in the mailbox, I’d receive a rejection letter. It was a rough period, but I got through it by repeating one statement upon waking up each day: Just get in the building.

Gaining no traction as a training camp intern, I started searching for real openings in ticket sales departments and community relations departments. If I could just get in the building, I would outwork my peers (remember, I was one of those try-hard guys on the football team) and gain a foothold in the organization. I hung signs in my apartment: Get in the Building. I would repeat the words to myself in the mirror thirty-two times after brushing my teeth, Get in the building. Get in the building, and so on. I changed the background picture on my laptop to read, Get in the Building.

My roommate, Ernesto Martinez, was a good sport (pun intended). He casually suggested, Maybe we should tape the rejection letters up in your room? That way, you can get used to it and it won’t feel so bad? Perhaps Ernesto was right; as rejection letters continued to fill my mailbox, I drew on a formative experience from my undergrad days.⁴ When I ran for student government president at UT, people told me I had no chance of being elected. Their justification? I was from Mount Pleasant, an unknown town with a population of only 12,291. (The enrollment at UT at that time was not only the largest in the country, but it was four times the population of my hometown.) Traditionally, student body presidents shared three features. They hailed from Texas metroplexes (Houston or Dallas), they were male, and they were white. I was one for three. As a reminder of my low odds of winning, I wrote a simple message on my bathroom mirror: "No one thinks you’re going