Gilman grad Opara shows studies help sports career

September 18, 2009

By Katherine Dunn

Something student-athletes hear over and over again during their high school years is the importance of succeeding in the classroom as well as on the field. After a while, that advice can go in one ear and out the other.

One person who proves the truth in that advice is Chisom Opara, a Gilman graduate who is now a scout for the Cleveland Browns. The subject of today’s “Alumni Report,” Opara knows he wouldn’t still be in football if he had not succeeded in class as well as on the field.

He wanted to make it as an NFL player, but he didn’t, so he found a way to fall back on a career that kept him very close to the sport he loved.

Like Opara, most high school athletes will not play professional sports. There just aren’t enough roster spots in the NFL, the NBA, the WNBA and other pro leagues. But you don’t have to play to have a career in those sports.

Just look at how many people surround an NFL team – everyone from coaches to scouts to athletic trainers to public relations specialists. It takes a village to keep a professional team running. At the college level, there are lots of supporting positions, too, and you can see how many people work to make sure your high school and club teams run smoothly.

There are other careers in sports, too, such as sports management and sportswriting or broadcasting. Do you have any idea how many people it takes to pull of Sunday Night Football?

Opara’s 3.5 grade-point average at Gilman sure helped draw the interest of college coaches from such academic powerhouses as Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Duke and Virginia. He chose Princeton and earned his degree in politics.

“The percentage of people who make it to the professional ranks if you really look at it across all sports, it’s very small,” Opara said. “It is an uphill battle. Certainly, if you’re good enough and you try hard enough, there’s a chance, but not everybody’s going to make it. But there are other opportunities to stay around the game, whether it’s coaching, scouting, being a trainer, equipment manager, working in operations. There’s a lot of opportunity up there. Even when I was coming up, I didn’t realize there were people who scouted me when I was in high school. That aspect of it didn’t really dawn on me until college, and I started to become a bit more into it.”

Opara said he thought about other careers, such as investment banking, or teaching and coaching high school football, but when his chance came in the front office, he jumped on it. Today, he can’t thank Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome and Browns general manager Phil Savage enough for giving him the chance to stay in the NFL, but Opara made a lot of that happen himself. He got the grades in high school to get to Princeton, and he got his degree even though he went back for it after a tryout with the Ravens in 2003.

Without the ability to communicate well, he wouldn’t be any better at his job than I would be at mine.

“It kind of underscores the importance of combining the athletic part with the academic part,” Opara said, “because in my job, your ability to write and communicate is very important. If you’re just a good football player and you can’t write and communicate, you can’t express your opinions, then jobs like scouting and jobs like coaching are not going to be as open to you. That just underscores the balance of succeeding athletically and also pushing yourself academically.”

Alumni Report: Ex-Gilman standout Opara makes mark as NFL scout

By Katherine Dunn

September 18, 2009

When Gilman graduate Chisom Opara emerged as a standout wide receiver at Princeton, he started thinking about a career in professional football. Now, he has an NFL career - although it's not exactly the one he envisioned.

Opara, an All-Metro and All-State receiver at Gilman in 1998, tried to make the Ravens as an undrafted rookie in 2003. His dream of playing for his hometown team ended when he was waived in the final round of cuts. Shortly after that, however, he was picked up by the Ravens' front office.

Now, Opara, 26, is a college area scout for the Cleveland Browns.

"It is an incredible way to stay in the game," he said. "When the weekends come around now, you have some of the same feelings when the game starts and watching the game. It's probably the next best thing" to playing.

Opara never thought about playing in the NFL when he was young. He didn't even think about it at Gilman.

Opara started playing in seventh grade, and as a Gilman senior he scored 18 touchdowns, rushed for 664 yards and caught 54 passes for 942 yards. That brought scholarship offers from Virginia, Duke and Stanford, but Opara opted for Princeton.

As his Tigers career progressed and he began moving up the school's career receiving charts, he started thinking a little further ahead.

"Once you get to your sophomore or junior year, you see these other guys who you've lined up with ... getting chances to play in the NFL," said Opara, who finished his Princeton career second all time in receiving yards and third in receptions. "Dennis Norman, who was actually my host when I went to visit there, he made the NFL. Obviously as a young kid, to you that's the coolest thing ever, but when you start to see other people do it who come from the Ivy League, it starts to become a lot more real."

He was disappointed not to make the Ravens' practice squad in 2003, but the end of one career possibility opened the door to another. He spent 10 months as a Ravens player personnel assistant and then was hired by the Browns.

Opara lives in Atlanta and travels all over the Southeast scouting college teams for the best players.

"Basically, I evaluate players from both sides as far as what they can do on the field and who they are off the field, their background, work ethic, how they do in school, their character. The other half is watching the film and going to the games and evaluating what you think the player can do at the NFL level," he said.

During the season, he spends much of the week on the road, traveling through one area of the Southeast at a time, looking at players from big schools and small schools.

"It's tough at times, and it can be a grind being on the road and away from home for so many days at a time, but a lot of times I'm walking away from practice at the end of the day thinking about how much I really love what I'm doing. It's one of those jobs that feels natural for me to do - watch players and get this information and write reports. I love what I do, and I really couldn't imagine doing anything else at this point."

Once in a while, Opara gets home to Baltimore during the fall. Last weekend, he made a stopover to watch the Greyhounds play DeMatha.

When he's here, of course, he's subject to some serious ribbing about working for the enemy - one of the Ravens' rivals in the AFC North.

Opara, who acknowledges that he has gone over to "the other side," laughs when he thinks about it.

"One of my teammates from high school, Henry Russell, who coaches at Gilman now, he took me to my first Ravens game, Ravens versus the Steelers. We sat up probably three or four rows from the top fence, and for every single home game that I was around, he was around. He kept inviting me to go. Huge Ravens fans. He constantly is reminding me about that. 'How could you do this? I wasted all these tickets on you,' and stuff like that. People do give me a hard time, but I think it's all in good fun."