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October 22, 2004 > News > Student-athlete profile airs on PBS affiliate

Student-athlete profile airs on PBS affiliate

By John Kehoe | For the Thresher

Student Athletes, a profile of four Rice student-athletes, premiered Monday night on Houston’s Public Broadcasting Station affiliate KUHT. The 30-minute piece featured baseball player Chris Kolkhorst (Brown ‘04), women’s basketball player Lindsey Maynard, a Hanszen College senior, and football players Clifford Sparks, a Brown College senior, and Jeff Vanover (Will Rice ‘04). ‘Rice is a great example of the fact that you can have people who are talented in athletics but who are also academically gifted,’ Linguistics Assistant Professor Nancy Niedzielski said in an interview for the documentary. ‘Private universities such as Duke and Vanderbilt and Stanford and Rice compete at the highest Division I level, and I think they still are very capable of providing a high quality of education for the athletes.’ Documentary producer Jim Bailey of Sunset Productions filmed the piece over the course of the 2003-‘04 academic year. So far, it has only aired in Houston, but Sunset public relations consultant Nancy Burch (Jones ‘61), the documentary’s associate producer, said she expects it to be picked up by the rest of Texas’ PBS stations, and possibly a cable sports network, sometime in the near future. Burch, who is also president of the Owl Club, the Rice varsity athletics booster organization, said the documentary was intended to showcase the positive side of college athletics. ‘Unfortunately, most of what you see about athletes tends to portray their negative side,’ she said. ‘The vast majority [of student-athletes at Rice] graduate and tend to go on to successful careers in the business world, but that’s not the common perception.’ Funding for the program was provided by a number of individuals with Rice connections. The list of 12 sponsors included eight who were Rice alumni, three who were Board of Trustees members, and former President Malcolm Gillis. The Owl Club and the ‘R’ Association, the alumni organization for Rice varsity letterwinners, also contributed to the documentary. Men’s basketball player Arte Culver, a Jones College junior, said he thinks the documentary accurately reflects Rice athletics. ‘It highlighted the high points of being a Rice athlete,’ Culver said. ‘We have to juggle a full academic load and a full practice load, and professors treat us just like everyone else.’
In the documentary, Gillis credits the baseball team’s 2003 national championship for calling attention to Rice’s strengths. ‘People for the first time across the country began to understand what we’re trying to do with academics and athletics,’ Gillis said. Athletic Director Bobby May (Will Rice ‘65) said he is happy with the publicity the documentary provided the university. ‘We’re thrilled to have student-athletes that are that talented that you can make a piece like this one and show the Houston community what it’s like to be a true student-athlete at Rice,’ May said. ‘It’s a very good thing for Rice and for the kids that were involved.’ After a year-long review of athletics at Rice, the Board of Trustees decided May 21 to reaffirm Rice’s commitment to participate in Division I-A athletics. At this time, a rebroadcast of the documentary has not been scheduled on KUHT.

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