David Clowney

NFL Player Enlists at CSE

When you're about to meet a professional football player, there are certain things you just sort of expect. You expect he will be larger than most people you meet, more athletic, powerful-looking. You expect he will have impressive athletic credentials compiled over a lifetime of playing sports. But what you might not expect, especially of a player just a few years out of college, is that he's also working on his master's degree. And that's just one of the ways David Clowney, a third-year New York Jets wide receiver and first year student in CSE's new Justice Studies program, breaks the mold.

When this insightful young man thinks about his future, he's thinking beyond football. "I love playing football," he says, "but football can be taken away at any moment. With education, nobody can take it away."

David chose the master's program in Justice Studies because it fits with his long-term goal of becoming a juvenile probation officer. And he's chosen that career for a very simple reason: "I love kids," he says. "I want to help those who got in trouble straighten out their lives. I'm going to be the guy who gets them to do better and turn their lives around."

As for why he chose CSE, that answer is pretty straightforward as well. He looked at several colleges in the area, but none welcomes him as warmly as CSE did. "I went on campus and met [CSE President] Sister Francis and all these different people," he recalls. "They didn't know me from Adam, but they took me in like I was their first-born child."

It's not just football David is thinking beyond as he plans his future - he's thinking beyond himself as well. One of his favorite projects has been launching the David Clowney Foundation, a nonprofit organization that raises scholarship money to help young, underprivileged athletes pay for college. The foundation sponsors a summer football camp in south Florida near where David grew up, and he recruits NFL players to come down and help high school athletes improve their skills and plan for their future.

It says a lot that a professional athlete would call running a football camp the most satisfying thing he's ever done in sports, but then, that's David. "I want to inspire the kids growing up in my neighborhood," he says. "Kids are our future."