My name is Jack Henderson. I'm a big and tall, ( six-foot-six by 250 pounds ) dark-skinned and ruggedly handsome black man living in the city of Boston, Massachusetts. Sometimes in life, you've got to embrace the changes that come your way. The greatest villain can sometimes turn out to be the greatest hero. That's my motto and it has never failed me. I am currently the Athletic Director of Saint Lucy College, a small private Catholic school located in the heart of Boston. These days, life simply couldn't be better. At a time when everybody was experiencing a financial recession, I managed to have the best fundraiser ever for my school and boost the once-struggling Department of Athletics beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And the school has been better for it.
When I took over as Athletic Director in 2004, I didn't inspire much confidence in the students or the administration. The college president, Father James Hayworth was once my teacher when I attended Saint Lucy College, back in 1996. He is the man who introduced me to my fiancée, assistant district attorney Shamika Letterman. She was a law student when we met back in 1997. I graduated in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in business and stuck around to get my MBA by 2000. I worked as a manager for the New England Patrolmen Professional Football team from 2001 to 2004.
To be honest, I was a little too good at the job. Other men and women at the company didn't like having me around. I made them all look bad. The suits upstairs weren't paying me enough for my services. And I felt unappreciated. I've always believed that the end justifies the means. So I helped myself a little bit financially. The cold-hearted bastards and bitches who owned the team gave me the choice of quitting or be fired and prosecuted me for embezzlement. They didn't want to prosecute me unless they had to because it would embarrass the company. And it would be a waste of their finances since suing a broke man never made anybody rich. So I did the smart thing and quit. I didn't tell my woman that I lost my job. She wouldn't like hearing that. I was broke, basically blacklisted everywhere and seriously down on my luck for ages. I was ready to give up when the fates smiled upon me. That's when my good friend Father James Hayworth approached me with an offer I couldn't refuse. To become the athletic director of my alma mater. And I was barely out of my twenties. How about that?
People always dismiss you as inexperienced when you're young and energetic. I had a plan to revolutionize sports at Saint Lucy College and I put it in motion. I led the entire school in a massive fundraiser from 2004 to 2006. We raised eleven million dollars, thirty percent of which went to athletics. The school was seriously imbalanced in my views. When I attended Saint Lucy College in the late 1990s, men made up forty nine percent of the student body. Which wasn't bad at all. In 2003, men made up only thirty six percent of the school's nineteen-thousand-person student body. This was totally unacceptable. So I decided to boost male enrollment. How did I do that? Simple, by adding varsity football.
In 2005, for the first time in its 112-year-history, Saint Lucy College began fielding men's varsity football at the Division Two level of the NCAA. The fact that we lost to Stonehill College in our first home game did little to discourage us. The changes brought to the school by the new football program were immediate, and mind-boggling. Enrollment at the school basically skyrocketed. Of the eight thousand new freshmen we got in September 2005, fifty two percent were male. How about that? Over the next couple of years, male enrollment was on the rise. By September 2008, men made up fifty percent of the overall student body for the first time since the mid-1980s. You've got no idea how happy that makes me. I have always believed in expansion of intercollegiate athletics for both men and women rather than the limitation of it. With a sizeable chunk of the new money the school got from the explosion in enrollment, I could do what I've always dreamed of.