Central’s Ricketts a Division III impact player

PELLA—Central College linebacker Gregory Ricketts (senior, Rochelle, Ill.,, Rochelle Township HS) gets it.

Much like NCAA legislative minutiae, details about his Student-Athlete Advisory Committee duties are typically met by teammates and friends with the same glassy-eyed indifference that one might bring to paging through a home appliance owners’ manual. He once had the same view.

But Ricketts found that his trip to the NCAA Convention in San Antonio, Texas Jan. 11-14 was as eye-opening to others as it was to him. After Ricketts’ return from an event-packed week, a friend confessed he was taken aback.

“I thought that SAAC thing was pretty low key, like you didn’t do a whole lot,” he told Ricketts with a tone of wonder. “But that stuff you were doing in San Antonio–that looks like a big deal.”

Ricketts laughed.

“In some ways, it was a big deal,” he said. “It’s where all the legislation comes to, similar to going to Congress. It just showed the impact that we can have as athletes on a broader scale and at a broader level.

And to Ricketts, at least, fascinating as well.

When football teammate and SAAC board member Josh Mayhew tapped him on the shoulder a couple years ago and asked him to consider serving, that triggered a leadership ascent that Ricketts shrugs off as random. Initially a team representative, Ricketts moved onto Central’s SAAC board, then volunteered to represent Central at American Rivers SAAC meetings, where he was chosen as the conference SAAC president, which came with a plane ticket to San Antonio.

“I stumbled into it, honestly,” Ricketts said.

But Central associate athletics director Alicia O’Brien, who shares SAAC advising responsibilities with lecturer of kinesiology Katelin Valster, said it didn’t take long to see he was destined to climb.

“To see somebody step into a position and just lead like he has is impressive,” O’Brien said. “He has a great skill set to be a leader. He’s very interested in listening to people. He can get up in front of a group and run a discussion. Whether it’s conference leadership or his fellow students, he has that ability to connect with whatever person or groups he’s speaking to.”

And unlike in his football career, Ricketts’ SAAC contributions were not diminished by injury.

Ricketts flashed promise as a freshman but due to the global pandemic, the 2020 season morphed into an abbreviated two-game spring slate. Ricketts had seven tackles and a pair of pass breakups in the two games. Big things were expected heading into his junior season.

“He was a heavily recruited kid in high school, with a lot of talent,” coach Jeff McMartin said. “He had a combination of great speed and intelligence, and he was also really physical. We were really excited about him.”

But one game into his junior season, Ricketts made a big hit on a Kalamazoo College (Mich.) running back. It brought the running back’s progress to a screeching halt, and did the same to Ricketts’ season, as he suffered a serious shoulder injury.

Hours of rehab and off-season training left Ricketts determined to make the most of his senior season last fall. It was his final shot. But it was even shorter than the previous campaign. In the fourth quarter of the season opener against St. Olaf College (Minn.), Ricketts and linebacker Reid Pakkebier (sophomore, Cedar Rapids, Kennedy HS) both had their eyes on an Oles’ pass.

“I was going to get it and then I saw that he was getting it, so I went to plant and basically the peroneal tendons on the malleolus on the outside of my foot were snapping over so there was nothing keeping it in, then on the inside of my foot, my deltoid ligament, it all got ripped up,” he said.

A longtime surgeon at the University of Iowa Hospitals told him he’d only repaired three deltoid ligaments previously, and he’d never seen the injury on both the inside and outside of the ankle. Unlike Ricketts’ leadership rise this was, indeed, random luck. Two season-ending injuries and a global pandemic stole his Central career.

Or did they? Ricketts’ response impressed McMartin even more than his playing ability.

“How he handled everything, the decision he made to pour his energy into helping others by coaching, by being involved in SAAC, by helping our program in any way he could showed that he could still have a huge impact on our team,” McMartin said.

Ricketts said when the second injury hit, he knew the drill.

“The things I learned from my junior year, and the frustrations and disappointments that I had, made this year easier, I think,” he said. “It’s kind of weird to say that but it’s kind of like I’ve done it once, I know what I’m not going to do and what didn’t make me feel good. And I know what did make me feel good. So I just focused on the things that continued to push me in the right direction. I told my teammates it feels way better to play hero than to play victim. I decided I’m going to get through this and I’m going to do this for my friends and my teammates. My junior year I didn’t have that same mentality. We had one of the most successful seasons in Central history (12-1 with an extended NCAA playoff run) and it wasn’t as enjoyable for me as it should have been. It’s one of those things where you live and learn. It was unfortunate, but I was lucky at the same time that I had been through it so I knew what I needed to do and could do it better.”

Ricketts was a constant presence at practice, working with other players at his Bandit linebacker position, providing instruction on a personal level even more effectively at times than coaches could. When team captains met with officials for pregame coin flip, it was Ricketts helping represent the Dutch, his injured leg propped on a scooter as he wheeled his way to midfield. As the number of recruits visiting campus grew with each Central win a year ago, it was Ricketts helping connect with them.

“Seeing the group of guys that I sat with at lunch on game days that came in this year as recruits and now are going to eventually contribute, that’s ultimately my footprint,” he said.

Dwelling in the land of what-ifs is wasted emotion, Ricketts said.

“I think that I could have played at a high level but at the end of the day, I never got that opportunity,” he said. “But the perspective that I’ve gained, how thankful I am that I’m part of this program and this culture and on this campus, the opportunities that I’ve had, I’m just thankful for that. It’s honestly the best way to think about it.”

One of those opportunities came through his SAAC work. Ricketts confessed his own earlier view of the NCAA mirrored the stereotypical perspective of his friends.

“In high school, through the ways the media portrays it, you get a certain idea,” he said. “For the longest time, I thought it was just a couple people who sit around, make the decisions and reap the benefits of all the money. But the layers and levels and the amount of thought that goes into every decision. To see how much effort it takes to pass legislation–people think somebody just signed a piece of paper and it went through, when that’s not the case at all. That’s been a cool eye-opening experience for me. And trying to get that information to other people, even on our campus and specifically student-athletes, that when your opinions are stated, it eventually makes its way to the national SAAC and we do have a pretty important role.”

Feeling that impact first-hand was as much of a convention highlight to Ricketts as seeing former Dutch teammate on stage with fellow quarterback Peyton Manning as Hawkins received the elite NCAA Today’s Top 10 Award at the NCAA Honors Celebration Jan. 11.

“Some of the legislative pieces that went through dealing with playing and practices, Division III SAAC took a different stance than the majority of the administrators do,” Ricketts said. “And that ended up flipping a lot of the administrators’ opinions.”

Ricketts called that gratifying, as is the move to give a convention vote next year to a Division III SAAC representative.

“In the past, we would write our opinion on legislation and when that proposal comes up, somebody from the national SAAC would come up and read ‘this is where Division III SAAC stands because of this and this,’ and that was I,” he said. “Most people would listen, but we didn’t have a vote. Now we will actually get to have a vote rather than just an opinion.”

One of those listening to student-athletes’ voices was new NCAA president Charlie Baker.

“That was a very bright spot out of my trip,” Ricketts said. “We had a roundtable discussion with him. We had prepared statements and talked with him about it and he did a great job. He had two sons who played in Division III. So that was exciting. It gives you hope, seeing somebody like that come in who seems to care not only about Division I but all the way to Division III.”

Ricketts found that the issues his teammates deal with aren’t unique to Central.

“I was sitting with three ADs from out east during a roundtable discussion and they were hitting on all of the same points,” he said. “It was enlightening to see that it’s not just us.”

The Division III SAAC members connected quickly.

“We’re a pretty tight group, even though we only see each other twice a year for seven days total, we talk frequently,” Ricketts said. “We get along well. We go out together and do different things. That was a super fun part of the trip.”

The group shares a joint appreciation of Division III often missing in the public’s perspective.

“Sometimes Division III athletics are seen as inferior when in reality, there are top athletes in Division III that, for all kinds of different reasons, chose this route,” Ricketts said. “And not only are we competing at a high level, but we also do all kinds of things off the field.”

Ricketts was proud to share with them that it was the late Central president Kenneth J. Weller who authored the original Division III philosophy. That’s one of many Central connections with the NCAA, which notably include Dick Schultz, a 1950 Central grad who served as the NCAA’s executive director from 1987-93.

“It means way more to me than what it did my freshman years, realizing what (Weller) did for Division III,” Ricketts said. “You don’t realize that until you dig deeper into the story. Getting people to read about it and understand what he did, not only for us at Central, but for all of Division III and thousands of athletes, is really cool. Even at our national SAAC meetings, just in conversation, we’ve talked about it with some of my friends there and they didn’t realize Dr. Weller had done all this stuff.”

Yet Ricketts said there is also mutual respect among SAAC members from other divisions.

“A lot of the Division I athletes are bigger,” Ricketts said. “You could tell they’re Division I athletes, but at the end of the day, they are people doing the same things that we were. It was good to have those conversations.”

O’Brien attends the convention annually and was joined by Central president Mark Putnam, who currently serves as American Rivers Conference Presidents Council chair. They were impressed with Ricketts’ efforts.

“He’s very organized, understands about getting opinions and then doing background work and presenting a proposal,” O’Brien said.

“I think he carried himself really well. I got a lot of compliments from people who deal with him that week like, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s a good one.’”

Ricketts’ skills were also on display when he returned to campus.

“When we came back from the convention and then he presents to the SAAC group, he shares,‘Here’s the things that were voted on. Here are the reasons why, here are the reasons why not,’” O’Brien said. “His leadership skills really stand out there. He has really embraced the role and understands how to get a group working in the right direction, which not everybody can do.”

Ricketts will travel with the Dutch football squad one more time when the squad makes a trek to Spain following graduation in May. But then he’ll most likely head to graduate school. The University of Georgia and the University of Houston are among the programs on his short list as he eyes a career in athletics administration, possibly in a conference office. And his SAAC experiences even have him pondering a future with the NCAA. He applied for an internship there and is intrigued by the legislative machinations that make much of the general public cringe.

“Most of the role that I would have been in would have been committee support,” he said. “It would be cool to work with the different committees in whatever division, and with that, the people that you are rubbing shoulders with are just very interesting people who have had success. That was something that appealed to me.”

Ricketts will leave Central as an impact player after all.

“Football ended early for him but he looked at this as a way to really have an impact on Division III athletics,” McMartin said.

It’s a Central career so full that Ricketts finds no room for disappointment.

“When I came into college, I had all these athletic accomplishments that I wanted to check off the list and, in all honesty, I didn’t check a single one of them,” he said. “I started for a couple of games but never got to play big-time snaps in big-time football games at Central. And so, at the end of the day, that’s frustrating, but the things that I’ve gained professionally, emotionally, socially, even physically before I got injured, are the trade-offs that make everything worth it. I’ve had these experiences. I’ve met these people and built this network.

“I know that if I would have gone to another school, I wouldn’t have the same priorities that I do now. I’m super thankful for the discipline that has been instilled in me from coming to Central College and the experiences that I’ve had.”