Having grown up in Dallas, Tx., Dr. Albert Bimper Jr.’s experience attending Colorado State University (CSU) as an undergraduate was “very different” racially and culturally, he says. While some of his experiences as a student athlete were positive, at other times, it was challenging.
“I tell students now, my transcript didn’t point towards doctor,” Bimper recalls with a laugh. “It took a lot of support and a lot of thought.”
The then-NFL-bound student continued to navigate the spaces of the university as a Black male football player until he injured his hamstring during a Thursday night game his senior year. One Black professor pulled him aside and asked him, “Now what?”
Bimper says the professor helped him walk through the process of “Plan B,” keeping him under his wing when Bimper’s football dream started to fade away. This professor “had higher expectations for me, other than being a football player on this campus, and I appreciated that,” he says.
After graduating from CSU in December 2005, Bimper deferred his graduate studies at Purdue University for a year, and had a “cup of coffee” in the NFL, playing for the Indianapolis Colts, he says, referring to his brief stint in the league. His rookie year ended up being a Super Bowl year.
Once the 2006-2007 season was over, Bimper decided to return to Purdue for his master’s degree and to take up a graduate assistantship coaching. He found that the experience working with student athletes of color at West Lafayette, Indiana, paralleled his own as a student back in Fort Collins, Colorado.
“That really intrigued me about how do I better serve these student athletes, particularly student athletes of color, in ways that aren’t just coming from the voices of coaches,” Bimper says. A question he considered was, “How do we restore the kind of humanity to these student athletes’ experiences?”
Both his master’s and then his doctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) explored the range of experiences, identities and values of student athletes of color and how race and class intersect with a student athlete’s development and academic outcomes.
