As a historian, Dr. Leonard Moore, the George Littlefield Professor of American History at the University of Texas at Austin, loves to tell stories. He is also making history as the Black Student-Athlete Summit he founded is set to celebrate its 10th anniversary May 21-24, 2025, in Chicago.
Moore’s Journey
“In the fall of 1994, one of the guys in my doctoral program at Ohio State said I could make some good money tutoring athletes. One session I was tutoring six or seven football players and one woman’s basketball player for American History. Instead, they began talking about their experiences as Black student-athletes and that opened a whole new world to me,” recalled Moore, who continued tutoring for his four years at Ohio State while earning his PhD.
“From that first conversation, I wanted to impact that community. After getting my PhD, I had job opportunities at Cincinnati and LSU (Louisiana State University) and I took the LSU job. I started doing some informal mentoring there and we tried to start a Black student-athlete group in 1999. The administration was terrified,” he described. “Then (legendary football coach) Nick Saban was hired, and he was very supportive. I told Nick, “I am glad you are here, but we want to help these young Black men develop. He said, ‘Anything you need, just come to me.’”
The New York Times did a Sunday morning feature on Moore as LSU headed to a national championship. The article talked about how he changed the culture and interviewed some of the players. He started getting calls from multiple universities, doing some consulting about bringing about culture change in their athletic programs.
Moore took a job at Texas in 2007, a year in which the football team was riddled with issues, including head coach Mack Brown suspending seven players. As he made inroads in improving the culture at UT, particularly for Black student-athletes, Moore noted that things really took off for him in 2010-11. “The University of Georgia flew me there once a month for 16 months and we were able to put amazing initiatives in place. I originally told them, “I have some ideas that will work. Atlanta is one of the largest Black middle-class communities in the country, but you have no relationship with them. I asked them if the ‘good ol’ boys’ were going to be okay with this approach. I told them that if they wanted to win games, they had to change some things,” he recollected. “They started spending money on Black radio stations, billboards in Black neighborhoods, and brought inner city kids to campus.” Georgia finished 6-7 in 2010 with only three wins in the Southeastern Conference but turned things around in 2011, finishing 7-1 in the SEC and sweeping Auburn, Florida, and Tennessee for the first time since 1981.
The Summit’s Beginnings
“I knew there was a market for this,” Moore said of a summit to benefit Black student-athletes. “It was first designed for administrators and was very administrator heavy the first two years (2015 and 2016), but then it flipped.” The 2024 summit in Los Angeles and hosted by University of Southern California (USC) included more than 1,500 student-athletes and 400 administrators.
Dr. Darren D. Kelly, the University of Virginia Associate Vice President and Dean of the Office of African American Affairs, has been involved with the summit from the beginning. Currently the treasurer and chief financial advisor for the event, met Moore while attending UT-Austin as a graduate research assistant. He spent more than 16 years at UT-Austin, lastly as the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement Associate Vice President, before taking his current position at UVA, his undergraduate alma mater, in October 2023.
“Supporting Black student-athletes has always been a passion of mine,” remarked Kelly, who earned his PhD. in kinesiology with a specialization in sport management. “I have mentored Black athletes on campuses and seen their needs and gained an understanding of their issues. I see a Black person come on campus and be in a fishbowl with pressure to achieve in the classroom and on the playing surface. They are often isolated from the rest of the community of non-student athletes, not part of a support structure, and facing microaggressions regularly.”
Dr. Ryan Sutton earned his PhD in counseling psychology from Howard University in 2013 before heading to UT-Austin in Jan. 2015 for a post-doctoral fellowship in counseling and forensic psychology. It was then that he met Moore and Kelly and became involved with the summit. “I have been blessed to be part of it since its inception and see its growth every year. The numbers growing is positive, but it also challenges us to reconceptualize how we are doing it,” he stated. “Our mission does not change, but how we accomplish it changes as the summit continues to grow.”
As a professor, Moore acknowledges that he has a special view of the student-athlete experience. “I have a unique vantage point. I see the recruiting process, the athletic experience, and then a bird’s eye view when the dream is over,” Moore expressed.
“We look at the summit to empower student-athletes, particularly those who may be isolated in their sport. They may be the only Black person on their team or one of a few in their sport even if there are other Black student-athletes on campus. We want them to be able to network and build community, gather and get tools, and meet with former student-athletes who made the transition to a professional life,” Kelly commented. “The summit allows these athletes to just focus on themselves as people and connect with others, not only student-athletes from universities all over the country but professionals who are doing important work on campuses and in the workforce.”
Preparing Student-Athletes for the Future
One of the key aspects of the summit is to prepare student-athletes for their future after college. According to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), fewer than two percent of college athletes go on to play professionally. In addition, only two percent of high school athletes receive athletic scholarships to compete in college, so 98 percent of collegiate athletes are competing without an athletic scholarship, including all NCAA Division III athletes.
“It doesn’t matter what level these athletes are competing in. They have been good and competitive their whole lives. They all deal with identity foreclosure when it is over,” explained Moore. “Some of these athletes, especially in Olympic sports, have been competing since they were five or six years old. No one is checking on them when they are done. They no longer have anything that compares with being part of a team and competing.”
“Often times, athletes are put on a conveyor belt. Then they look up and it is over. They are questioning, ‘Now what do I do? How do I make this transition?’” Kelly added. “We teach them to take more ownership of their college experience, not so much a pushback, but help them understand what it means to be in certain majors and what classes they are taking. We encourage them to widen their networks. We don’t want the only people they know to be in the athletic department.”
Kelly recalls asking the summit attendees how many of them could find someone other than their coach to write them a letter of recommendation. “Very few could think of someone else and that is something that needs to be addressed. We want them to branch out and leverage the expertise of faculty members to help them get into a post-graduate program,” he suggested.
“Former student-athletes are doing so many different things and when they speak at the summit, the current athletes can see themselves reflected in who they are now and who they can be,” Sutton said. “We are concerned about you as a person, your holistic development, and level the playing field professionally. The intentionality of connecting people at the summit is for the betterment of us all.”
Mental Health Aspect
Moore is no stranger to the college athlete experience with three children competing at different institutions (daughter playing basketball at North Texas, son playing football at Notre Dame, and daughter on the cheer team at his undergraduate alma mater Jackson State).
“There are a lot of athletes who are on planes every other week, staying in hotels, having a new experience every week. When that is all over, we see a lot of depression kicking in,” he communicated. Mental health served as one of the key themes of the 2024 summit and will continue to be so going forward. “We want to help administrators and staff members figure out how to implement best practices to offer support and cultural programming that addresses the needs of Black student-athletes,” Kelly stated.
Sutton, a licensed psychologist, focuses on mental health, well-being, and performance. “This impacts a lot of spaces student-athletes find themselves in. We talk about chronic stressors, traumas, and family dynamics and the way it impacts their everyday functioning,” he described. One area he is particularly passionate about discussing is Black people’s reticence to seek psychological therapy. “We often unintentionally blame our community for that instead of talking about why we carry that burden and understanding the nature of the concerns. We want to help student athletes understand what they are experiencing and empower them to seek the help necessary for them to thrive. Not just on the field, but in their personal relationships, professional and academic life, and beyond.”
The goal of the summit is to empower Black student-athletes to maximize their college experience in the classroom and to not leave “any meat on the bone” in terms of opportunities. Professional staff who attend the summit are empowered to go back to their campuses and create innovative initiatives to ensure that Black student-athletes are competitive in the global workforce upon graduation. “We have to be about institution building,” Moore pointed out. “Too often Black excellence is personalized and depends on the individual. The summit is about the institution of Black excellence in college and beyond.”