Deacon Sports Xtra: Get In The Game Update: Walter and Jordan Still Cultivating Change
3/10/2022 9:00:00 AM | Baseball
“What it showed me is that people actually care about what we are doing and what anybody is doing to make a better society.” - Kevin Jordan
On stage being presented with the Stuart Scott ENSPIRE Award last summer, Wake Forest baseball head coach Tom Walter could sense the Scott daughters, Taelor and Sydni, were being touched by the impact accomplished by Get In the Game.
Get In the Game, founded by Walter and his former player Kevin Jordan in 2020 during a period of heightened nationwide awareness surrounding racial justice and equity, started programs for middle and high schoolers called "GameChangers," who are empowered to engage in meaningful conversations on race and social justice in the classroom and on the field.
"Anytime you're sharing the stage with someone like Billie Jean King, it's a special moment," Walter said. "I was really proud of Kevin. He handled that moment really well and was a natural.
"When we were telling our story, to look down at Stuart Scott's daughters and see the tears in their eyes, and our message resonating with them was a great moment for our organization and for Kevin. I'm super proud of him, the work he's doing and the difference he's making."
The Stuart Scott ENSPIRE Award, created in honor of former ESPN anchor Stuart Scott who battled cancer until his passing in 2015, celebrates someone who has taken risks and used an innovative approach toward helping the disadvantaged.
"What it showed me is that people actually care about what we are doing and what anybody is doing to make a better society," Jordan said. "When I was giving my speech, Roger Goodell and Max Kellerman, who was on ESPN every morning at the time, were back there. I'm here talking about my want to create a conversation. And that got me here in front of these people and they're the audience."
According to Walter, there are active Get In the Game programs up and running in the Winston-Salem area, Greensboro, Baltimore and Cleveland.
"It's going well and Kevin has done a great job," Walter said. "He's doing most of the work. We're in the schools and have programs going in that are running well. Everything is on track and moving well. We have a great board of directors. It's been really great and fun watching it come together."
As a freshman Wake Forest outfielder in 2011, Jordan needed a kidney and it was Walter who stepped forward as the match who provided the life-saving organ. The duo have used this selflessness as a bridge to help people look beyond race and now to help educate and empower youth through Get In the Game.
"Right in the middle of a pandemic and it was really one of those things that we felt like we needed to do with the social climate the way it was, just having an opportunity to use our story," Jordan explains. "We were like this is the time to do it if we were ever going to do something like this and we just listened to people tell us what they thought solutions were.
"We came to the conclusion that our blood was the same and that's a conversation that wasn't being had, but was being seen and seen in a lot of the wrong ways. We'll build something where we create the conversation in a more positive way, a way to bring people together and simply have the conversation that we think that people have been avoiding for probably far too long."
Making headway into a school requires a three-pronged approach, Jordan said.
"We have to engage and get three different groups on board from the principals to the facilitator who'll run the program and the kids and for them to create a time and a space for us to run our curriculum and train their facilitator so they can lead the conversation," he said. "After that, it's roughly a 12-week. We can shorten it if we do two sessions in a week, but it's a 12-session playbook to get through one season and we have two seasons. We do that and we have a community service aspect and a final visual project that culminates all the learning.
"That's pretty much our organization in a nutshell. It's 12 conversations or roughly 24 conversations and a service project and a more verbal, visual content related project."
When the conversational breakthroughs occur, they are memorable.
"My favorite story involves an eighth-grade girl, I think it was around session five-or-six," Jordan recounts. "She had a realization that the race conversation that she had avoided for so long, and was something that she could be involved in from having conversations with people that didn't look like her. So she realized it's not something to avoid, it's something to do well.
"She could be involved in these conversations and see where she fits in and make the social climate better race-wise and all other situations. That really made me believe, just having a conversation can lead to a different perspective and a different way to think. And that right there was enough, as simple as that is to let me know that conversation definitely leads to a different way of thinking. The girl was a rock star in all of our minds, as soon as she said that."
