Coach Carter promotes the importance of education
Coach Ken Carter caught his audience’s attention right away by tossing out 10 signed copies of the 2005 movie he inspired.
After that, Carter spent only three minutes of his 70-minute speech on the stage in Goldstein Auditorium Thursday night. The rest of the time was spent in the aisles of the auditorium, interacting and shaking hands with listeners as he passed by.
Carter’s talk focused on the importance of education and staying tough in the real world.
He restated the latter fact by hitting a few members of the audience in the chest as he walked through the aisles. His reasoning: the need for people to ‘man up.’
‘This is the only lecture you’re going to go to that is interactive,’ he joked.
Rashida Carter, a sophomore in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, was impressed by Carter’s level of interaction throughout his speech.
‘I thought he was very aggressive, and I like that in a person,’ Carter said. ‘He is definitely very determined and has a lot of inspirational words for students.’
Carter encouraged young people to believe that they ‘can do anything in the world if people like you.’ He confirmed his point by taking a baseball cap off the head of a boy in the audience and tossing it to the other side of the crowd. Carter paused as the boy laughed with him. Then he said, ‘See?’
Though Carter is best known for his success in coaching athletics, his message went far beyond basketball, which helped get his story onto the big screen.
When Carter was 7 years old, he wrote his mother a letter saying, ‘One day I will be famous and they will make a movie about me. When that happens, I will buy you a big house and pay all your bills.’
He explained that on the first day of filming for ‘Coach Carter,’ his mother came to set and handed him back that letter he had written so many years ago.
The movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson as Carter, follows the true story of the Richmond High School basketball team and how Carter emphasized the connection between good grades and winning a game.
‘Knowledge is not power. The use of knowledge is power,’ Carter said.
Along with Syracuse University students and professors, local high school students were also invited to attend.
‘He kept you interested with his hilarious humor, and his message was very clear,’ said Chyanna Canada, a middle school student at Nottingham High School. ‘I play basketball … and I will try to apply a lot of his message to my own playing. But I will tell you one thing, I am not doing a thousand push-ups like he made his team do.’
He concluded by making the entire crowd stand up, raise their hands, touch their hearts and turn around.
‘If anybody asks, ‘How was Carter’s presentation?’ you say, ‘He made me rise to my feet, raised both my hands, he touched my heart and he turned me around,” Carter said, calling it the ‘Carter Experience.’
Susie Flores, a sophomore in the College of Human Ecology, particularly enjoyed the presentation’s ending.
‘I really liked his ending. I thought his ending showed his character,’ she said.
Published on February 13, 2010 at 12:00 pm
