SYRACUSE, N.Y. — He slinked off his overstuffed backpack and clunked it down in the chair next to him.
He thought he’d traded in the bookbag, at least the kind brimming with notebooks and study guides and paper outlines and grading rubrics and syllabi and pens and highlighters.
You look at him and expect to see some sign of disappointment, regret or just plain sadness. Some crack in his voice when he reminisces. Some distant look in his eyes that says he’s physically in Syracuse but really dreaming of greener fields far, far away, with goals on each end and thousands of fans looking on.
Richard Asante made it. He was the highest drafted soccer player in the history of Syracuse’s program, chosen 27th in the 2007 Major League Soccer SuperDraft during January of his senior year. He started every preseason game for Toronto FC. Playing for his hometown team, he was living the dream.
A dream that ended 105 days later.
The life of weekend trips across the country and stockpiling as many shoes as he possibly could from the team’s equipment manager - gone.
He was maybe one good game or one impressive play away from collecting his supposedly promised salary and never returning to Syracuse. Instead, he played a month-long game of phone tag with SU coaches last spring, pleading for a route back to the classrooms.
Today, here’s Asante, back in a South Campus apartment with the teammates he once left behind for a sporting career. Back in a college setting he figured to abandon, at least for a "long time." Back to planning a professional soccer career, possibly in Norway or Sweden this time around, where contracts are guaranteed.
A study published by the NCAA last fall stated that 37 percent of athletes who enrolled at Syracuse in the fall of 2000 left campus without a degree. Asante once belonged to that group - but doesn’t anymore.
He’s not dejected that his first stab at professional soccer didn’t work. He’s grateful he learned the hard way how rough and fickle sports are at the next level.
On May 11, he’ll walk across a stage, shake some hands and leave Central New York, again.
This time, with a degree.
"Of course I wanted to play, but I know that can end at any point in time," Asante said. "If you don’t have a degree to fall back on, then what do you do then?"
Too many athletes, he believes, forget to ask themselves that very question.
The 63 percent rate at which athletes graduated from Syracuse is a low in eight years of available archives, though it matches the national average. Meanwhile, 82 percent of the general student population in the same class graduated, giving Syracuse the eighth worst discrepancy in the nation.
Sixty percent of Division I institutions graduate athletes at a higher rate than the general student population. Syracuse athletes graduated at the same or higher rate six out of the last eight years. The study allocates six years for students to complete their degree.
"I think for some kids they’re just worried about being eligible (not graduating)," said Ryan Durand, a rising senior on the football team. "They haven’t really figured it out yet. They think football is going to be it; football is going to take them to the Promised Land."
The 59 percent rate at which football players graduated was also the lowest in eight years.
"It has to be reminded to them sometimes that there’s life after football, and you need to take care of your business in the classroom," said Kevyn Scott, who redshirted his freshman year. "I would get guest speakers, some who graduated and are in the NFL right now. Or, we have plenty of businessmen who played football here. Just get the message across, that’s all."
Plenty of individuals are willing to chime in on what Scott called "some scary numbers."
Ferna Phillips, the director of Boston College’s Learning Resources for Student-Athletes department, is bluntly honest with starry-eyed athletes.
"Only 1,500 people get to be in the pros, and you may not be one of them," Philips tells athletes. "There are 1.6 million people you’re competing against. So let’s be realistic."
At Syracuse, Kenneth Miles, associate athletics director for student-athlete support services, also noted the small percentage of those who actually play at the next level, no matter how many may dream about it.
Miles attributed SU’s current dismal rate to coaching changes that have provoked transfers. Eight head coaches have changed since Daryl Gross took over as athletic director four years ago.
In 1995, the NCAA began measuring schools’ "graduation success rate" (GSR), which excludes athletes who leave the institution in good academic standing and includes students who transfer in. Syracuse athletes’ GSR was 84 percent for the 2000 incoming class, which graduated 63 percent at SU. The national GSR average was 77 percent. There is no comparable way of measuring for non-athletes.
Miles considers GSR a better measure of success, saying an institution should not be penalized for students who leave voluntarily and would be invited back if they chose to return.
Michael Wasylenko, the NCAA faculty representative at Syracuse, like Miles, wants to believe the latest statistics are a fluke. He said the implementation of harsher requirements for admission into college should start being reflected on the back end.
An extra year of math and an additional year of a "core course," which could include subjects such as foreign language or philosophy, are being required by the NCAA of incoming students beginning next fall.
Also, SAT/ACT scores are being judged on a sliding scale, which allows higher GPAs to compensate for lower test scores. For example, an 820 SAT score is needed to accompany a 2.5 core-course GPA, but a 3.0 would only require a 620. Wasylenko said this puts more emphasis on the work done in the classroom, which is a greater indicator of the potential to be successful at the collegiate level.
Still playing the optimist, Wasylenko points to encouraging numbers.
"The women’s teams are all doing fine," he said, as female athletes graduated at 72 percent. "It’s really isolated to a few places. The fact of the matter is that’s good news. We know where to put our resources."
Men’s sports graduated 53 percent of its players in the 2000 incoming class. Wasylenko said the football team recently hired another academic counselor.
Men’s basketball, which has also historically been a problem area, is difficult to measure, because class sizes are so small. The four-class average (1997-2000 entering freshmen) is 46 percent. The national average is 45 percent.
Jillian Drouin, a senior on the track team who has compiled academic awards since stepping on campus, discusses academic services offered to athletes with skeptical delight. Drouin praised the tutoring program, in which athletes simply have to decide which class they need assistance in and when they are available to be tutored - for free. But she said some individuals become too reliant on extra aid.
"Some (athletes) have been pushed through high school so they can get to college and succeed athletically," Drouin said.
"There are all these services here that we can depend on, but the hard part is having (athletes) learn that they can’t depend on someone else their entire lives."
Men’s lacrosse head coach John Desko, who played at SU in the late ’70s, knows the grind. But that doesn’t stop him from holding his players accountable.
"We’ll ask for feedback from professors," Desko said. "’How is the attendance? Is the work in on time?’
"Some of it comes into the recruiting process. If you have a choice between two equal players and one is good to outstanding in academics then you would choose that one, because you’re not going to have to deal with that headache, so to speak, of having to constantly monitor how they’re doing."
The other side of the equation for coaches is increased levels of accountability on their part, which began in the fall of 2004. Limitations can be placed on scholarships, recruiting and postseason competition.
Wasylenko doesn’t believe Syracuse will reach that stage.
"You change coaches, kids leave," Wasylenko said. "I don’t think we have a long-term problem here. I don’t think it’s an issue with the program. I don’t think they don’t make the kids study."
The 63 percent graduation rate may be an anomaly. But Miles knows a dip lower than the school has faced in nearly a decade leaves reason for internal scrutiny.
"What we’re starting to do is looking at our own processes, seeing where the gaps are, controlling the things within our own parameters: study environment, tutoring, mentoring, computer cluster updates, that type of thing," Miles said.
Still, NCAA restrictions, endless resources and reinforcement from players’ professors and coaches can only do so much.
If players want to go pro, they are enticed to leave early and not finish school. The NFL Scouting Combine occurs in late February. Asante’s MLS combine took place in early January, around the time the spring semester of his senior year would have begun.
And yet, even as Asante decided to hightail it back to Syracuse, he had no misgivings about initially deciding to leave.
"Now I know what it takes to get to the next level," Asante said. "I’ve seen it; I’ve been there; I’ve done that."
He also saw what life could be like when an athletic career strays from expectations.
"(If I have a long professional soccer career,) my life will be complete to some extent because yes, I’m happy I’m playing soccer, but when I stop playing … then I would have been too old to go back to school. I would have gone to college for four years with nothing to show for it."