David Woelkers Jr.
The Kinesiology Merit Fellowships are given to students from educational, cultural, or geographic backgrounds that are underrepresented in kinesiology in the United States or at the University of Michigan. These students have demonstrated a commitment to diversity in the academic, professional, or civic realm through their work experience, volunteer engagement, or leadership of student or community organizations.
Read on to learn more about David Woelkers Jr., one of this year’s fellows.
Q: What was it like for you to grow up?
A: I grew up in Ann Arbor. I was born and raised here. My dad went to U-M; my mom didn’t go to college. My mom, who was my primary caregiver, moved to Brighton, when I was about to enter high school. Brighton, diversity wise, is nothing compared to Ann Arbor. There was just a different cultural feel to it that I never really felt 100% attached to. I always felt more at home in Ann Arbor.
Q: What brought you to U-M?
A: In the middle of my junior year, I was talking with my school counselor about colleges. He was like, ‘Where do you want to go?’ My dad would always take me to Michigan sporting events and show me around campus, and it was always in the back of my mind that if I could go anywhere for school, it would be Michigan. I said to my counselor that I wanted to go to community college and transfer to Michigan. He looked at me and he was like, ‘You’re never going to do that.’ (In fairness to him, I had a sub 2.0 GPA at that point, although my grades started out worse than they ended.)
At the time, I was defeatist. I got where he was coming from. It took me a couple weeks to be like, ‘No, I’m starting to do better in school. I can make it there.’ I was smart; I just hadn’t cared enough. It was actually a conversation with my dad that sparked the whole thing. I was talking with him, and he was like, ‘David, you’re doing better now. You could really do this.’ He said in a not-so-PG way: ‘Screw him. You got to take that as a challenge.’ So it was really spite that fueled me.
Q: What path did you end up taking?
A: I did two years at Washtenaw Community College and then got in here for psychology. I originally wanted to be a sport psychologist, but I realized over the three years that I was here that I didn’t want to do the doctoral work that came with that.
I still loved being involved with sports; I was a sports writer for the Michigan Daily at the time. I had always been involved with the sports information directors in athletics because you have to go through them to interview people. I was talking with Kurt Svoboda, the associate athletic director of communications, and he was like, ‘Yeah, if this is something you want to do, you could go for a sport management degree and go from there.’ So that’s how I ended up in the sport management master’s program.
Q: Was U-M everything you expected it to be when you got here?
A: Not exactly. Everybody else had a two-year head start in terms of social lives and stuff. In those first couple of months, everybody had their own friend groups already. I always felt like I was barging into places.
I transferred here in the fall of 2019, so I had a semester of full-on social life, and just when I thought it was evening out a little bit, COVID happened. Everybody went home. It was all virtual. So I think it wasn’t all that I cracked it up to be, but not necessarily because of Michigan so much as because of circumstances.
Q: Why did you decide to stay here for your master’s program?
A: I knew that there was no place where you could get people like Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Babiak in a building and have an athletic department as big and worldwide. Places have one but not the other, and Michigan has both. If I want to have both really good classes and really good connections to make, this is the best place to do that.
Q: How has your master’s experience compared to undergrad?
A: The graduate Bridge program [a Kinesiology program that connects and engages students from populations that are underserved in graduate education] really helped. In the same way that I felt like everybody else in undergrad had a two-year head start, Bridge gave us a two-week head start to get to know each other and have a group of people within the grad programs here. We’re all on different schedules so we don’t meet a ton during the school year, but we all text each other all the time. It feels like I have a group here that I can call my own.
Q: Has the focus on diversity that Bridge and the Kinesiology Merit Fellowships (KMF) provide been helpful for you?
A: I think you can’t have a quote unquote community if you can’t have diversity with it and on the flip side, you can’t really have diversity without having a community. That’s something that is a major strong point here. You have somebody in Dr. Armstrong who realizes you need both to fuel the other.
Q: What kinds of diversity-related initiatives have you been involved in?
A: I don’t know if you would call this a diversity initiative, but when I was a sportswriter, I had always wanted to cover women’s sports more than men’s sports. There’s a ton of people that cover football; there’s a ton of people that cover [men’s] basketball. The Daily is one of the only outlets that covers Michigan softball, Michigan field hockey, sports like that. I was the unofficial field hockey beat writer and wrote about the women’s soccer team’s NCAA tournament run as well.
It gives you more opportunity to not just be a face in the crowd but somebody who’s really championing a sport.
Here at Kines, we’re starting KDIN, the Kinesiology Diversity and Inclusion Network, back up. Shantaris Brown and Kylie Lison, who are both sport management master’s students, they approached Dr. E [manager of DEI Elena Viñales] and Dr. Armstrong with that goal. They’re the two who are really spearheading it, but I do whatever I can to help them out. We don’t want our experiences to just be for people who qualify for KMF or the Bridge program. We want them to be open to everybody that has an interest in diverse community and experiences.
I think you can’t have a quote unquote community if you can’t have diversity with it and on the flip side, you can’t really have diversity without having a community.