Athletes on the golf, swimming, track, and softball teams sat in classroom N10 in the Allan Hancock College physical education building the week before the 2014 spring semester started. Spiral-bound packets of information and worksheets were open on the desks in front of each student.
Hancock Athletic Director Kim Ensing spoke to them about GPA requirements, which is a 2.0 to play, but if student athletes get below a 3.0, they are required to get a tutor. She also went over credit requirements—12 credits per semester, nine of which need to be academic.
Ensing relayed the information matter-of-factly, and responded to questions with a dry sense of humor that often came with a smile. Then, an academic advisor, whose job is to get student athletes ready for their college careers, spoke to them about advisor availability, which is essentially all day, every day.
“It’s always an open door,” academic advisor Rich Partida told students.
Partida explained to students that in the athletic department, students have better access to help than the general student population because there are academic advisors dedicated strictly to athletes. It essentially means student athletes have help when they need it, as long as they ask for it.
Meeting academic requirements is a big part of being eligible to play sports in college. It’s as important to an athlete as eating healthy, staying away from alcohol and drugs, and emulating the behavior of someone representative of the school.
Ensing said her department performs academic eligibility checks every Monday, and in addition to the other requirements, each student also needs to have a completed educational plan to be eligible to play. When a student drops below the academic line, she steps in.
“I’m the one who has to go talk to the coach,” Ensing said. “I really don’t want to go deliver that message.”
It’s about more than just staying up to snuff in order to play Hancock athletics though; it’s about getting to that next level—transferring to a four-year college or university. That’s the ultimate goal every coach at the college wants their athletes to reach. Ensing’s job is to support them in that quest.
The message she delivers to student athletes who end up sitting in her office because they’re on the cusp of academic eligibility is one that comes with a story. It’s one she drives home based on her own experiences as a student athlete.
“Why do you want to waste this opportunity? You have control over it,” Ensing said she tells student athletes who wind up perched in a chair on the other side of her desk. “I just don’t want to see them throw this opportunity out the window.”
Control is an important point, because athletes don’t always have control over whether or not they get to take the field. An injury like the one that ended Ensing’s college basketball career is devastating to a student athlete, and it’s something that’s almost impossible to prevent.
Bad grades are easy to correct.
Ensing speaks of her injury as matter-of-factly as she did about academic requirements to students in classroom N10.
She was in her fourth year at what is now Vanguard University. It was a practice session.
She collided with a fellow teammate who was a little shorter than her—she’s 5-foot-11.
Boom.
That was it, basketball career over.
“My entire spine actually slipped off my sacrum,” Ensing said.
Although it didn’t completely slip off until a few years later, she couldn’t play college ball anymore. Her injury was precarious and painful. Though she didn’t know it at the time, that was when she started her ascent to athletic directorship by coaching a sixth-grade YMCA boys’ basketball team.
As the years ticked by, she started coaching at higher and higher levels, eventually becoming the assistant coach of women’s basketball at the University of Utah. While she was there, her injury got to the point where it couldn’t be ignored anymore.
Her sacrum no longer supported any part of her spine. To correct the issue, surgeons had to take out one of her vertebrae and fuse her spine back together.
“I was 5-foot-8-inches when I went into surgery, and 5-foot-11 inches when I came out,” Ensing said. “I actually learned how to walk again.”
She still walks with a slight limp, but it’s a marvel she can walk at all because her doctors told her she might not ever be able to again. Ensing continued to coach after her surgery and became the head women’s basketball coach at Barstow Community College before becoming the athletic director.
Her injury and the loss she felt when she became a spectator rather than a player has driven her forward since her life changed direction. It plays a huge part of every hard conversation she has to have with a student.
“A lot of your identity is wrapped up into being a student athlete,” Ensing said. “I was devastated, and coaching helped alleviate that a little bit.”
The devastation she felt was so profound that she dedicated her master’s thesis to studying the stages of grief a student athlete goes through when he or she can no longer be an athlete. In her thesis, she compares those feelings to the stages a person goes through when grieving the loss of a loved one.
She tries to explain to students who are forced to walk through her door that this point in their lives is their time. Having gone through what she went through, she tells students not to waste their time because it doesn’t come back. Once it’s over, it’s over.
“The academic eligibility is what’s going to keep them on the field or not,” Ensing said. “We do our best to stay on top of it, but sometimes it doesn’t pan out.”
The success of the Hancock Athletic Department isn’t only made up of team wins and losses, but also in terms of student transfers to four-year colleges. To transfer, students need to be National Collegiate Athletic Association or National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics eligible, which is why that 3.0 GPA is so important, as well as taking at least nine academic credits per semester, and having a future academic plan.
All of that can get athletes to where Ensing was when she started her collegiate athletic career—with a scholarship. She received her offer from Liberty University in Virginia, which she attended her freshman and sophomore years.
“When I got the phone call that I was going to get a basketball scholarship, you don’t forget that,” Ensing said.
Now she gets the opportunity to help college students receive that same kind of phone call, and that’s something the whole department works hard to make happen for each athlete. It takes time and effort on the part of everyone involved, but it’s the gold star on any Allan Hancock College athletic jersey.
Contact Staff Writer Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 23-30, 2014.