What Deion Sanders says about Jalen's first day of school

Going back to school is nerve-wracking. Coach Sanders says it's worse than coaching a Big 12 football team.  

Asked about the pressure of coaching a losing team, Colorado Buffaloes’ head coach Deion Sanders waved the question off.  

“You know how pressure is?” he said. “That’s a single mama trying to make ends meet and ain’t no man in the house. And she gotta be the mother, the father, the provider, the disciplinarian and everything.”

Sanders wasn't talking about football. He was describing Jalen's* mom. 

She's single, working full time plus overtime, raising five kids, and trying to do the back to school season on her own. New shoes. Haircuts. Meet-the-teacher night squeezed in between shifts. It's a lot to carry alone, and she carries it anyway.

This fall, Jalen is starting middle school, and he's anxious about it — the kind of anxiety that shows up in complaints about clothes, comments about how dumb school is, and negativity about just about everything. 

That's where Jalen's mentor steps in. Not to fix it, but to sit with it — to notice the anxiety, tell Jalen it's normal to feel it, and share a story about his own first day somewhere new. And when he picks Jalen up for their visit, he makes a point of finding Mom first, giving her a high five, and saying, "You're the real MVP."

It's made a difference. Jalen's vague complaints about going back to school have turned into this: "I think I'm going to like this school."

Nobody becomes the best version of themselves by themselves. Mentors matter.

Thank you for being a part of the community that helps send mentors out for kids like Jalen. 

PS — There are more than 9,000 kids just like Jalen in our community, being raised by a single parent doing it all alone. Every one of them, and every parent stretched thin trying to hold it together, could use one more steady adult in their corner. That's what a mentor is.