A native of San Antonio, Texas who was raised in New York and graduated from the University of Virginia, Elizabeth Wright began her career at Vanderbilt Athletics in 1999 as a writing tutor. She now oversees the entire team of academic counselors and student tutors as the Commodores’ Director of Academic Support. Vanderbilt Athletics regularly ranks among the national leaders in all measures of academic success, and recently earned national recognition for its innovative summer programming for incoming student-athletes.
When I was 11, I read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and I was so involved with that book, it was like I was living it. When I got to the end, I decided that what I was going to do was write. To be able to write things, to feel so strongly about what you’ve read, to have the ability to live so many different lives and to go different places in your writing, it’s really an unlimited profession. You can be anything and everything.
I began to write poetry and short stories, and eventually a couple of books, including a novel that was autobiographical. I had gone through a devastating illness and wanted to write about that. I spent six years on research for the book.
I earned a Master’s in Fine Arts in writing from the University of Virginia. That’s when I started tutoring in the athletic department, and I really enjoyed it.
One of the football players I tutored ended up playing for the New York Jets. He was a cornerback. I didn’t know anything about football. He told me if I was going to teach him all this stuff, then he was going to teach me about his position. To this day, I know the position of cornerback better than any other.
When I was in high school, I worked in a factory, and that was by definition the same thing every day. It was an assembly line, the printing presses at the Penny Saver newspaper on Long Island. If we wanted to take a break, someone would literally throw a wrench into the machine. It would come screeching to a halt and the foreman would come out cursing. But we all got to take a 10-minute break while they were getting it back started.
I took a lot of time out of the workplace to raise our children, and when I thought of going back to work, I asked myself, “What was my favorite job ever?” It was working with student-athletes.
You learn things every day in this job. Somebody you’re counseling can talk about a class topic on volcanoes and another person a German opera and someone else brings up Dostoevsky. I feel like I learn as much as they do. I enjoy that every day is different.
When I first started here, I met with the head of the writing program in the English department and asked what their introductory writing professors do when they work with students. They may go through the first page and do exemplary changes and then the rest of the paper is left completely blank. We created a manual for our writing tutors based on those best practices. We have NCAA guidelines, SEC guidelines, Vanderbilt University guidelines, Athletic Department guidelines. We’re always erring on the side of caution. If a student has a run-on sentence on Page 1, the tutor will explain it, and then say, “Go through the rest of the paper and find other ones.” The whole purpose is to help students write better, to teach them so they don’t need us anymore.
We are one of a very few schools where all of our tutors are students, either upper level undergraduate or graduate students. The advantage to that is that the tutors are then also under the same Honor Code. If a tutor were to help someone else inappropriately, they would go through the Honor Council as well as the student-athlete.
We have staff from a lot of different backgrounds, and I think that’s important. Some were former student-athletes and some were not. It’s good to have both perspectives.
Everyone here has a Master’s degree, and that’s important for the students to see, to set a good example for them about continuing their education.
Our coaches are very good about supporting what we do, very respectful of academics, which makes my job so much easier. I think that’s really following the lead of David Williams.
I take it as a compliment when a student says I was like their mom on campus. When they come here, I treat them like family. I’m going to listen and talk about whatever they want to talk about, what their goals are in life, what they’ve been through and are going through. I want them to achieve what they want to achieve, whether that’s playing pro sports or becoming a professor or a doctor or a mom. I have children myself who are older than these students and I feel like I have some wisdom and some perspective they might not have.
I go to their weddings and they bring their children by when they come back to town. Every week, former players come by and tell me what’s going on in their lives. That’s the reward for this job: working with these student-athletes and getting to know them and watching all that they accomplish.
A former student-athlete signed a Bears jersey that said, “Thank you for saving my life,” which is framed and in the office. When I first met him, I told him he can keep playing video games until 5 a.m. and he’ll end up pumping gas. Or, he could put the games down, go to class, give it all you’ve got, and you’ll be a guy in the NFL. He didn’t speak to me for about three weeks. But then he came back and he said, “OK, I stopped.”
There are a lot of parallels between your performance on the field and in the classroom. If you’re satisfied with being mediocre in the classroom, you’re often mediocre on the field. If you do great through three-fourths of a class and then tank, the same will happen on the field. If you hold yourself to really high standards it affects everything. You know how to maintain all the way through, you know how to finish.
When we lived in New York, we used to take a tram over to Roosevelt Island. People can rent space for gardens there, just 15-by-15-foot spaces. But they were the most spectacular gardens, one after another. We didn’t have one, so we would just look at them and admire how they packed so much into these small spaces.
Now we live eight miles from downtown Nashville and we’ll see deer and wild turkeys in the backyard. And I like to go walk at Radnor Lake. Nashville is a beautiful area with a lot of culture, a lot of really smart people and great universities. There’s so much to like about it.
Interviewed by Andrew Maraniss
