SCOOBA — Tredarius Carr had the inside scoop.
Before the defensive lineman started his freshman year at East Mississippi Community College, he turned to Yazoo County High School teammate Keilos Swinney for advice.
Swinney, a defensive back on the Lions’ 2017 and 2018 teams, came to the school the same year athletic academic advisor Abby Jenkins started in the position. He told Carr what to expect from Jenkins, whom Carr had met only briefly on a recruiting visit.
“‘She’s gonna love you, she’s gonna help you out, and she’s gonna get you graduated on time,'” Carr recalled.
Now, Carr spends the time between classes in Jenkins’ office at Stennis Hall, talking about school and football and anything else. One group of players goes in before lunch, hanging around and talking with Jenkins for half an hour or so.
“‘That’s the best place to come: the best academic advisor in Mississippi,'” Swinney, now playing for Louisiana-Monroe, told Carr.
Jenkins, who took over for Brittany Wagner in 2017 following the fervor of the documentary series “Last Chance U,” is more than that. Winning national awards and setting school records in the process, Jenkins called herself “the facilitator of the chaos” that ensues among teachers, coaches and student-athletes.
“I’m the communication wheel, the bridge to the coaches, the bridge to the academics,” Jenkins said. “I’m just kind of the facilitator. The spoke of the wheel.”
Whatever she is, EMCC’s student-athletes can count on her assistance when they need it.
“She’s going to help you and see what you can do better in,” freshman linebacker Jasper Williams said. “She’ll help you out.”
Far from a babysitter
Jenkins and her husband Ryan have two sons, 12-year-old Hayden and 10-year-old Henley, and Carr said he sees her maternal qualities come into her work.
“She’s just like a mother,” he said. “She loves (me) like a son.”
But Jenkins isn’t sure if that’s how she truly wants to be seen by the Lions’ student-athletes.
“I don’t know that I really want to be old enough to be their mothers, even though I probably could be,” Jenkins said. “I like to say the cool aunt. The older cool aunt. It’s a joke we all have with each other.”
That can be an important distinction, said Janet Briggs, an English instructor in her 19th year at EMCC and the chair of the school’s humanities division — especially given assumptions about the nature of Jenkins’ position.
“A lot of people think that an academic advisor is a babysitter,” Briggs said. “She’s far from that.”
Jenkins knows she’s an authority figure in the lives of her student-athletes — but the relationship isn’t a “buddy-pal situation,” she said.
She compiles an attendance report for the school’s student-athletes by 2 p.m. every day — the report was weekly before she started — so she can contact coaches when their players miss class. The Lions don’t always take well to that, she said.
“I think it’s funny every year, because the ones who will come by and visit, they’ll be sitting there, and they’ll be like, ‘Ms. Jenkins, you snitched on me yesterday. You told the coaches I was out. I thought we were cool,'” Jenkins said. “I was like, ‘We are cool, but because we’re cool, that’s why I do that, because if I let you get away with it, then I don’t care about you very much.'”
It speaks to Jenkins’ approach to her role: holding student-athletes responsible for themselves and their work as preparation for their next step.
“She understands the level the students should be at by the time they get to college, and she realizes that accountability is a big piece to student success,” interim vice president for instruction James Rush said.
Rush works with Jenkins on class scheduling — she’s allotted a few days to schedule student-athletes before general registration begins — and the two coordinate grades and attendance as well. Rush has seen Jenkins at work, and he likes what she brings to the role.
“It’s one thing for you to tell a student that they’re capable of doing something, but through her model I think it’s quite obvious that she’s pushing them to see what they’re capable of doing themselves,” he said.
‘Fifty of me’
Near the beginning of Jenkins’ time at EMCC, she took a tour of the athletic facilities at Mississippi State. She was impressed — and reminded of the difference between junior college and Division I.
“They have a whole building with, like, fifty of me,” Jenkins said. “I was just looking around like, ‘Wow, look at all the resources,’ because there’s just one of me for all those student-athletes, and it can get tricky.”
Though EMCC is “funded like a high school,” Jenkins’ job is rare. Just three other community colleges in Mississippi have a similar position: Northwest Mississippi Community College, Jones County Junior College and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College. It can be a selling point when it comes to recruiting.
“It’s very comforting for parents to know that their kid may be coming into a program that has one person whose only job is to tend to the needs of the student-athletes,” she said.
Jenkins does her best for the Lions’ 170 student-athletes, working from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. — “or whenever I get done.”
“It’s not really a job that has a time limit on it,” she said.
Jenkins found that out over winter break in 2018, working with defensive lineman Kane Taylor. Taylor, a Florida native, was enrolled in a four-week, online speech class offered via Meridian Community College, but he was back home for the break. So Jenkins spent part of her time off on the phone with Taylor, helping him stay caught up on his assignments — some of which involved getting eight or more family members together and recording a speech.
“It was hectic, getting him to understand, ‘You’ve gotta get this uploaded,’ being across states from each other,” she said.
Taylor passed the class and now plays football for Division I Florida International.
“You can’t keep a kid from his next opportunity because it’s my holiday,” Jenkins said. “… When that’s their one opportunity, you’ve just gotta do it.”
Freshman wide receiver Myles Hopson enlisted Jenkins when he badly needed help in a composition course. He said she not only helped him pass but post a respectable grade in the class.
“She’s always there for us when we need her — through good and bad times,” Hopson said.
That applies to ex-Lions, too. Jenkins purchased ESPN+ to watch her former players, especially those who play at smaller Division I schools and aren’t always on national television, and spends her Saturdays flipping from game to game.
“I’ll definitely make a point to keep up with them, and if I see them do something good, send them a text — you know, ‘Great play!’ — so they know that I’m still out there cheering for them,” Jenkins said.
‘I’m the new Ms. Jenkins’
By her seventh year as a counselor with the Philadelphia Public School District, Jenkins came to realize that her passion wasn’t being fulfilled.
On the hook for various responsibilities, Jenkins was barely getting to do what she wanted to do: help students.
“I was just kind of getting burned out on my job because I felt like I was always doing something but my job,” she said. “I was proctoring a lot of state tests in the spring when seniors needed my help, and they’re all like, ‘You’re never in your office!’ It’s just like, I don’t even get to do what I really am wanting to be doing.”
She watched a couple episodes of “Last Chance U,” taking note of Wagner’s highly documented role at EMCC. “‘That’s all she has to do all day is just help kids?'” Jenkins thought to herself.
Hired in the summer of 2017, Jenkins saw the comparisons to Wagner begin right away.
“I got that a hundred times,” she said. “‘Oh, so you’re the new Brittany.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m the new Ms. Jenkins.’ … I wanted people to see that I was the new person in the role. That didn’t make me her. There were different ways to do things.”
In “Last Chance U,” players are often seen sprawled across desks and chairs in Wagner’s office — not so much for Jenkins, though.
“They’re sitting in my office,” she said. “We’re not laid out and having a good time. They just sit there until their next class, so that mainly for me ensures that they don’t go back to the dorm and fall asleep before their next class, and then I can be sure that they’re in the building ready to go.”
Jenkins knows the contrast between her style and Wagner’s, but she acknowledged that both advisors were efficient in their work.
“I don’t think either one of us did it any better or worse than the other,” she said. “I think we were just different in how we handled it.”
Recognition
Whatever Jenkins’ methods have been, they’re paying off. In the 2018-19 academic year, EMCC won the David M. Halbrook Award for graduating 100 percent of eligible student-athletes from its five MACJC-affiliated sports.
“That was even more exciting to me because it highlighted all of our athletics, and I think football does tend to dominate at times just because of its success and that kind of thing,” she said. “But we’ve got great student-athletes in every sport that don’t get enough recognition, so that was an exciting award for me.”
In each of the past two seasons, the Lions have had four of their six sports achieve a team grade point average of 3.0 or higher. The football team’s 3.01 GPA in the 2017-18 year topped all National Junior College Athletic Association programs, and the Lions had a school-record 30 athletes win NJCAA All-Academic Student-Athlete Awards in 2018-19.
After two years with success of that magnitude, Jenkins said she’s feeling the pressure to improve in year three. Her goal is to get all six sports over the 3.0 threshold after coming close her first two seasons.
To do that, Jenkins said, it goes back to EMCC’s instructors.
“None of us would be here without the teachers,” she said. “If it wasn’t for them and how much they care and pour into their students, they wouldn’t get what they needed to go on and be eligible and all that kind of stuff.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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