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I maintain that not enough professional athletes and, in particular, NFL players, get enough credit for the good things they do off the field. Given that Washington Redskins’ linebacker and special teams standout Lorenzo Alexander’s charitable foundation, A.C.E.S., recently became eligible to receive a donation from a campaign launched by prointerviews.org, I decided to re-visit an article I wrote a few years ago in the hopes that people will have an idea of what A.C.E.S. is about and perhaps choose to go vote for it. I recently spoke to Lorenzo and updated information that had changed over the years. One thing that has not changed is this man’s charitable nature and the giving that he does… despite the beast he is on the gridiron.
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Washington Redskins linebacker, Lorenzo Alexander has the well-deserved nickname, “One Man Gang.” There’s no better moniker for a guy who has worn as many helmets as he has on the football field. Not only does Alexander currently play linebacker and special teams as well as any player in the NFL, he also has played on the defensive and offensive lines. He has even played the fullback position in goal-line packages. When he made his first career start with the Redskins in 2007, he lined up as part of a two-tight end formation against the Philadelphia Eagles.
Since Alexander was a young man in high school, he has excelled in football. At St. Mary’s High School in Berkeley, Ca. over his high school career, he earned SuperPrep All-America honors, ranking as the No. 7 defensive line-recruit in the country. He was also rated the No. 44 prospect in the nation by SuperPrep and ranked No. 5 among all recruits in the Far West (Pop Warner football). Alexander was ranked as the No. 2 defensive line prospect in the West, earning Dream Team status and ranking as the No. 10 defensive line prospect in the country.
At the University of California-Berkeley, Alexander was one of the most dominant defensive linemen in the Pac-10. By his senior year, he had made a name for himself and consistently drew double-team strategy from opposing offenses. He earned football honors throughout his college career. As a freshman, Alexander earned Pac-10 All-Freshmen first team honors and in his sophomore year he was given the Bob Tessier Award as the team’s Most Improved Lineman on defense. As a junior he was given the Brick Muller Award as the team’s most valuable defensive lineman, surpassing his career-high in tackles that year with 33 stops. In his senior year he was second team All-Pac-10.
Not only can Alexander play about 85% of all the positions on a football team, he is also a husband, father, son, nephew and friend, as evidenced by the men he shares the locker room with and his family. He is a man who cares deeply about his faith; and about giving to and helping others.
Born in Berkeley, Ca. in 1983, Lorenzo John Alexander was raised by a single mom and an uncle who was an important role model for him. His mother’s brother taught him that it is important to work hard for what you want and to share what you have when you get it.
“I had a great support system from my mom,” Alexander said of growing up, “and my uncle stepped in to be like a father-figure to me. I think he’s really the reason I love giving back. He has three daughters and is a diabetic but he always took time out for me and made me feel like I was one of his own. He would provide stuff for me, teaching me things about how to be a man, like working for things that you needed. He never just gave me a glove or a bat or some cleats. I had to go cut the yard or do something to earn it, which was good.”
Not only did his uncle teach Alexander the benefit of hard work, he taught him other important life lessons.
“Looking at my uncle I just thought, ‘I need to give to the community,’” Alexander continued. “He didn’t have to do any of what he did for me because he had his own family. That’s probably the biggest reason why I love to give back.”
And give back he does. The versatile linebacker has a foundation that does a variety of things – mostly involving youth – and does it with the future in mind.
His foundation (A.C.E.S. = Accountability, Community, Education, Sports) is a chapter of the NAAAA (National Alliance of African-American Athletes) has been in existence for approximately five years. Its mission is: “To support youth through emphasizing self Accountability, taking pride in the Community, striving for Educational excellence while promoting a healthy mind and body through Sports.”
Lorenzo’s charity is headquartered near his Oakland, Ca. home town in but he has brought many of the events and programs that the foundation sponsors here to the Washington metropolitan area.
A.C.E.S. helps kids in practical ways that offer long-term, real-life benefits. There are programs that aid in SAT preparation, teach life skills and offer tutoring. Anyone who’s had to prepare for an SAT knows the daunting task it can be even if school has been fairly easy for them. Consider how it would be for someone to whom school has not been easy. This is where the program is so valuable.
There have been foundation events at places like Alexander’s California middle school that involved a group of professionals going into the school to talk to the student body about the consequences of choices made in life in very real terms. After the group addressed the entire school, they broke down into smaller ‘focus groups’ and talked about life one-on-one with the kids. At the time I wrote this article, the event had not taken place yet and Alexander described how it would happen.
“They have about 400 kids so we’re going to do it a couple of different ways,” he said. “We’re going to talk to the school as a whole and then we’re also going to break it up to a smaller group. We will be bringing in people from the professional world like lawyers talking about the law and consequences whenever you do something wrong so [the kids] are thinking about things before they do them. We’ll be bringing in a nutritionist to talk about the proper way to feed yourself, you know… learn that you’re supposed to eat four or five times a day. And we will discuss sexual education, talking to kids about sex now because it’s happening earlier and earlier and earlier these days. We just will educate them about all the things that are out there so they learn how to protect themselves.”
The kids in the smaller focus groups were kids assessed as especially needing help. As the linebacker describes it, these are “kids who have been identified as ‘high risk.’” These are kids that might not have a stable household environment or who have a lot of potential but aren’t quite working to it.
“We’ll work with them at a more intense level,” he explained.
The passion Lorenzo has for the youth he is helping is quite obvious. He is a father himself and is dealing with teaching his own kids the right and wrong way to live life. While we were talking about teaching kids things like the value of the dollar and working for your money, he told me a funny anecdote about his daughter, who at the time was a “tween”.
“Well, I had this with my daughter,” he explained. “She wants to go buy these Uggs and they cost $150… And I told her, ‘That’s all your money! And now you want me to go pay for your movie? Maybe you need to pass on the shoes or find a sale… get them on sale!’”
Spoken like a true father.
“You need to talk to kids about various subjects like sexual health and finances,” Alexander continued. “Things need to get imbedded in their heads that they need to work towards if they want to achieve certain goals.
“Studies show that the earlier you start talking about college and putting those types of things in their heads, the more successful they’ll be because of starting out early. Around fourth or fifth grade you want to start putting that seed in their mind so… that’s what we’re trying to do right now.
“You know you just want to be very real with the kids,” he finished. “They need the information because a lot of them don’t know. They hear it from friends, they get misinformed; they’re just working off of ignorant information – nobody really knows.”
A really ambitious event that the foundation would like sponsor is bringing some of the kids from Alexander’s home state here to Washington. He feels it’s important that they travel and see the way things are in other areas of the country and away from their corner of the world.
“We’re going to try to bring, I think, five kids out to D.C. because a lot of kids don’t ever get out of Oakland,” he said, “and then take them to Howard, American or Georgetown University. You know, let them see the White House. We want to get them out of Oakland, let them see some things across the country and see how things are different.
“I was on a travel basketball team… we got to go to [New] Jersey, [Las] Vegas and Detroit. If I wasn’t on that, I would never have left Oakland, really, or the Bay Area. I know a lot of kids never leave.”
In addition to the SAT preparation and tutoring help, the life skills events and the travel; A.C.E.S. puts on bowling events, a youth camp, and has a back-to-school giveaway (in the past, the foundation partnered with ‘Oakland Natives Give Back’ for some of these). One of the charitable events that took place here in the D.C. area was A.C.E.S. partnering with IOTA (a black service fraternity) to provide two area youths with $2,000.00 a piece for college.
Since A.C.E.S is headquartered back in California, Lorenzo’s mother and aunt keep things running smoothly in the foundation’s office while the Redskin is here playing football. A smoothly-running charity requires a lot of hard work and fund-raising to stay “in business.” Fortunately, because of the type of organization it is (501.C3), there is help available from other organizations. Alexander’s mom and aunt work as volunteers, as do most of the folks who help with the events. The work is time-consuming but that doesn’t stop any of them.
“It can be hard,” the former Golden Bear said, “especially with us being a smaller non-profit. Even when I’m not in Oakland it’s not that ‘out-of-sight-out-of-mind’ type of thing. Being hard doesn’t deter us from doing what we need to do. We’ve been successful and each year somebody else steps up and we get a grant or something like that which really helps us out. And the NFL has been really instrumental in providing. They have the Youth Football Fund and the NFL Charities as well. They’ve been really great. [In one of our earlier years] they gave us $5,000 from the Charities and then between my two camps they gave me about $7,000. I mean, they do a great job as far as helping the players out with our foundations.”
NFL players do remarkable things on the field. They are amazing athletes and most of them are totally committed to their craft. Professional football is a violent sport but that does not mean that the men who play it are violent beasts. To the contrary, most of them are generous people, and, like Alexander, are fathers, husbands, sons and friends. A lot of good is accomplished with the organizations that many professional football players have established and are passionate about.
Lorenzo Alexander is an accomplished professional and certainly the Washington Redskins benefit every week from his presence both on the field and in the locker room. He is committed to his faith, his family, his job and his foundation.
To be so committed to a vocation that involves the kind of physical abuse these football players take every week… well, it’s not surprising that the same commitment is part of their lives outside of football.
“The biggest thing with each event…,” Lorenzo said about A.C.E.S., “… especially when we do the giveaways like the back-to-school stuff, is to see the kids come in and light up. A lot of the kids are from low-income families but they want to go to school and do well there. They just need the chance. This year we have also worked with both single moms and abused women so they’ve been able to come in and get stuff for the babies and just kind of set up shop. It’s just an awesome feeling to be able to give back, just to give somebody the hope to think, ‘okay… I can do this – there’s somebody out here helping me.’ That’s the biggest fulfillment.”
This season Alexander was nominated for the Walter Payton Man of the Year award for the second year in a row. The award recognizes players’ work in their communities as well as excellence on the playing field. As the nominee from the Redskins, he will receive a $1,000 donation to his charity.
Since the veteran player founded A.C.E.S., Alexander has personally donated more than $62,000 to support his various charitable interests. Last November, his foundation launched the “Real Talk Education Workshop” at his former middle school to help kids understand the importance of education.
Many Redskins fans and people from this area are familiar with the ‘Ride to Provide’, a popular local event that Alexander sponsors with teammate Kedric Golston. This spring brings the third annual ride and it is good to see that it has steadily grown over the few years it has been in existence.
Actually, Alexander’s foundation work and ‘The Ride’ are only a portion of the way he gives back. I haven’t even touched on the amount of support he gives to his teammates’ charitable interests and almost anything else he is asked to support in the community. It seems that if there is something charitable going on that involves the Washington Redskins, the One Man Gang is there.
Hail.
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