St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Lance Berkman told FOX 26 Sports on Thursday if he chooses to retire this offseason, he has a plan in place which includes returning to Rice University to finish his degree and work as a student assistant for Owls baseball coach Wayne Graham.
Berkman has already reached out to the academic advisor for athletics at Rice to help him get ready for his return to college for the first since time 1997 should he choose to go that route.
Berkman is considering retiring because of a chronically sore right knee. His immediate goal is to get as healthy as possible and help the Cardinals make the playoffs.
...“If I do decide to retire my next move is going to be to enroll at Rice and to be a student assistant for the baseball team,” Berkman said.
“I’ve talked to the academic advisor at Rice, Julie Griswold (associate director of academic advising for athletics), and she’s kind of helping me put some thoughts together about how to go about it,” Berkman said.
“She’s talked to the administration about ‘can I continue and just go ahead and get the coaching and teaching degree even though that’s not a current (plan)?’
“In other words was I grandfathered in on that or am I going to have to pursue another degree, which I already have a lot of the hours required for a kinesiology degree for example.
Hopefully I can just get grandfathered in and keep going. If not, it’s not a disaster.”
Repoz
Posted: September 06, 2012 at 06:15 PM |
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1. JJ1986 Posted: September 06, 2012 at 06:25 PM (#4228718)Townsend became a professional No Limit Texas Hold'em player during his injury. He plays under the moniker 'ricestud' at PokerStars, where he holds the record for most Heads Up Sit N Go's played by anybody (101,062 as of January 11th 2012). His online winnings are in excess of $1,000,000.00.
Wha? This man has made over $100 million in his career, and he wants to be...a student assistant? Really?
-checks-
Wow, no. Phil Humber went to Rice?
current Owls (in MLB this year, others might be in minor leagues, a few played 2009-11 but not this year)
Niemann
Humber
Joe Savery (Phillies)
Lucas Luetge (Mariners)
source: baseball-almanac
I love Wayne Graham but Berkman would be a cool Rice baseball coach in the future.
There is something to be said for having modest ambitions, and not wanting to reinvent the MMO or the like.
That reminds me of this Onion article:
advice from Roy Halladay
i thought youse guys were all hot for higher education. why on earth shouldn't lance go back to finish his degree? what's wrong with being a student assistant? i think it's kewl. who else wouldn't think it was beneath his dignity to do something like that?
lance ROCKS!!!
I'd settle for a software kickstarter in which Berkman's lefty swing is used as the holy grail for young hitters.
Well that's the beauty of it. He's made $100 mil and can pretty much choose what he wants to do(lucky guy) and he chooses to finish his education, stay working in baseball and pass on whatever knowledge he found useful to him to a new generation of players, I for one, reckon it's a very cool thing to do.
All kidding aside - good for him.
i wouldn't have thought he'd be the one position player to succeed from that team. but it's baseball and youneverknow
wade townsend got a nice signing bonus, although he crapped out at AA. he doesn't need to work neither
Emmitt Smith went back to Florida to finish his degree in the middle of his NFL career. I always thought that was pretty cool, and I think the same about what Berkman is doing.
A $1.5 million bonus might not be enough for a guy in his 20s to retire.
Even if his post-baseball career goes Schilling up, he'll always have a place in the Cardinal Caravan.
You mean something like $750k after state and federal taxes, plus agents commissions.
Coincidently, I was once a student assistant, and would like to have 100 million.
Well after he let the Twins bat around on him in a third of an inning this week he might not qualify as "in the majors" much longer.
I bet he's got big plans to take over the head baseball coaching job someday and from there use some of his $100m to get a ninth college created: Berkman College.
"This year, Lance Berkman will discover that you're never too old to learn. Lance Berkman is Lance Berkman in...'Back to School.'"
"This year, Lance Berkman will discover that you're never too old to learn. Lance Berkman is Lance Berkman in...'Back to School.'"
Somebody write this screenplay, now!
Never mind...I'll do it...
(I'll do it, though it may be outdated at this point: Detectives believe alcohol may have been involved.)
I my time, there were slingshot water balloon wars. The most celebrated slingshot exploit was a balloon launched from ground level that cleared the top of Sid Rich.
In my time they were paint balloons.
Wha? This man has made over $100 million in his career, and he wants to be...a student assistant? Really?
Why not? If I didn't have to work to pay the bills anymore, I'd love to spend my time coaching sports and taking random classes in things that interest me. This is assuming that family obligations prevented me from simply traveling around the world.
Me, I'd do two chicks at the same time.
It looks like one of those sumo things after gastric band surgery.
Maybe a little cryptic for some readers here, but I can read that. I think the high-flying water balloon I referred to in #34 was launched from one of the entrance balconies of the "new wing" of Will Rice. From that angle it probably landed on Main Street. Which is, shall we say, a bit reckless, but I never heard of any damaged cars or accidents caused.
We might have relatives in common, who knew.
They've been making those same jokes for years about UC San Diego, which also "sorts" students into six colleges that are unrelated to major but do have themes.
Man, the educational system does have problems if we're organizing schools by lazy plot device!
And going back to school is very cool.
Hey, it works for Hogwarths!
Yeah, if you don't segregate all of the slightly bad kids, then they might not grow up to be evil.
It's one of my pet peeves about the Harry Potter series. There's quite a tendency for characters to be labeled good guy/bad guy by the author simply putting them in an easily identifiable group. That and the tendency for Harry Potter to be the center of attention of every event, no matter how insignificant, and all events being relayed in the context of how they relate to Harry Potter. It makes late-1980s WWF usage of Hulk Hogan look conservative by comparison.
He was good enough to be a starter for several years, back when the NFL was much smaller than it is today.
I think college could be a nice way to transition from intense, purposeful activity to a more laid back lifestyle. Gives you something to do besides drinking at noon.
I think Rowling literally has no idea what would motivate someone to commit evil. The bad guys aren't really motivated by fear or greed or selfishness or anything else. They pretty much just want to be bad.
OK, I'll bite. Who's smaller? Northwestern?
The old Southwest Conference was a pretty odd mix of schools. The state schools: UT and TAMU, Arkansas and Texas Tech and (new to the conference in my time), Houston. The big privates, with more or less sectarian tendencies: TCU, SMU, Baylor. And little tiny non-sectarian RIce.
I was there on that notorious day when the Owl football team beat the Aggies and the MOB (Marching Owl Band) made fun of the Aggies. They had to smuggle the band out of the stadium in food service vans to get them to safety.
Wake Forest, I think.
Funny enough last year for First Friday the theme was Harry Potter and we had a big world of Harry Potter exhibit in the main Library and the Engineering school wrote the code of Dobby's skin.
Anyways one of the main things about the colleges is it lets you have a lot more say of your GE's since they are college specific.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tulsa. (This is only counting undergraduates; all three military academies have more undergraduates than Rice but less total students.)
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