The Online Reflector

University of Indianapolis President Beverley Pitts spoke on Jan. 25 at the third annual Provost’s Lecture about her time with the National Football League Players Association.

Students and faculty gathered in Ruth Lilly Performance Hall to hear the details of Pitts’ career as a journalist, researcher and communications consultant for the NFLPA.

The NFLPA is the union for professional football players in the National Football League. Established in 1956, the NFLPA has a long history of assuring proper recognition and representation of players’ interests, according to NFLplayers.com.

In her lecture, Pitts talked about how she rose from being a journalism professor at Ball State to working in the NFLPA.

“I wanted to take a year off to work professionally as a journalist. I had done work with magazines and newspapers, but I wanted to work in a national media environment,” Pitts said.  “I contacted people I knew and used my media connections. The gentleman who was the director of public relations of the NFLPA said he would be willing to take me on.”

Pitts worked with the NFLPA for about 20 years. During her career with the NFLPA, she worked for the director of public relations, writing stories for and about the players, covering and writing stories about events, writing for broadcast and working with video.

Pitts and the NFLPA worked to help people to see things from the players’ side and help break stereotypes.

“The players are not much older than many of you [referring to the students in the audience]. They have always had people taking care of them. Many of them [players] come from poor families, and they have suddenly found themselves in the midst of money. Their careers are on the line with every game,” said Pitts.

Another part of Pitts’  job was conducting research on retired and retiring players. She completed five studies over 15 years.

In addition to learning lessons about football through her career as a journalist and researcher, Pitts offered some advice that she learned through working in sports media.

“In sports journalism there is a sort of ‘I love sports, so I should be a sports journalist’ [mentality]. But it needs to be ‘I love journalism,’ because you need to know your craft,” Pitts said. “It’s not your knowledge of sports that gets you there, it’s your ability to work in a media environment.”

In addition to her journalistic lessons, Pitts learned lessons that can apply to everyone’s life, such as “there are no easy ways,” which she learned by watching football players play each game as if it were their last.

Pitts learned that there is an internal culture to every field and organization, so to be successful, one must learn to play by that culture’s rules.

Pitts also learned from going from the culture of academia at Ball State University to the different culture of the NFLPA that “going outside gives you a better look inside yourself.”

Pitts said she learned that “you have to pay your dues to get an opportunity for the big chance” when she saw that her skills from previous jobs as a journalist could transfer to her job at the NFLPA.

Pitts says she also learned that sometimes one just has to throw caution to the wind and go for it.

An example Pitts gave was when she pretended to know how to write a TV script.

Along the same line, the final life lesson Pitts imparted was to try anything.

“Working for the NFLPA wasn’t in the requirements for becoming UIndy’s president, but what I learned there, and the new experiences I had made life more interesting, my opportunities greater and my skills better. You just never know where a door might lead, so be sure to open it,” Pitts said.

Pitts also cleared up the misperception, which some students may have, that professionals who are established in their fields did not have obstacles on their way to the top.

“Everybody faces obstacles, and when you see successful people later in their career, you have the impression that things have gone just fine for them,” Pitts said. “But everybody has faced the obstacles you are facing, the difference is they just kept plodding along.”

After the lecture, in the discussion portion of the evening, a student asked what had been Pitts’ greatest career achievement.

“My greatest achievement is just being president,”  Pitts said. “It’s as if everything I had done was leading up to this achievement.”

Reflecting on Pitts’ career as president, Mark Weigand, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, remarked that Pitts guided the growth of the university from the outside in.

“President Pitts brought with her experience to UIndy the ability to grow with the larger community and within the university,” said Weigand. “We’ve obviously grown in enrollment, but we’ve also been able to work together as a community under her guidance.”