Family, experience prepared Boulder’s Kain Colter to take on NCAA

On a chilly October night in 2008, under the glare of stadium lights and the gaze of rabid fans, Kain Colter took a beating. The defeat was painful enough for the Cherry Creek High School quarterback. But it came with a physical pounding that underscored one of football’s basic truths: Young gladiators in a violent sport perform in the constant shadow of injury.

After the game, Colter’s mom and dad delivered the unvarnished critiques of his performance that he valued for their brutal honesty. But his grandmother, Betty Flagg, framed the conversation in an entirely different way.

“Thank you for doing this,” she told him. “You’re out there entertaining us, putting your whole body at risk for us. Thank you.”

Six years later, her words — and so much that she stood for — still resonated for Colter as he stepped forward to lend his name to an ongoing revolution.

By then, he was not only Northwestern University’s double-threat option quarterback, but the newest face of an intensifying conflict between the institutional hierarchy of the NCAA and the players who power its multibillion-dollar revenue machine.

In early 2014, shortly after his senior season, he spearheaded an effort to win the right for Northwestern’s football players to unionize. His goal: advances for college athletes, including guaranteed medical benefits to balance the physical risks, stipends to cover full college costs, improved graduation rates and adherence to strict concussion protocols.

The gambit posed a new threat to college athletics’ status quo and almost instantly made Colter a lightning rod for both high praise and withering scorn. He strained relations with the school he loves. He risked jeopardizing a pro football career that has always been the target of his most passionate ambition.

Now, at 22, the Colorado native looks back on the influences that shaped his activism and sees a collection of individuals and experiences that led him to a crossroads in sports history. None had more lasting impact than his grandmother.

“Everything she instilled,” he says, “I tried to practice.”

Football runs deep in the Colter family.

Kain’s paternal grandfather set high school rushing records in Arizona. His uncle, Cleveland Colter, became a two-time All-America defensive back at Southern Cal before a knee injury dashed his hopes of a pro career.

And his father, Spencer Colter, played defensive back on the 1990 University of Colorado national championship team which narrowly defeated Notre Dame in the Orange Bowl to claim a portion of the title. His mom, Stacy Colter, was finishing school at CU when he was born.

Betty Flagg — the woman Kain called simply “Grandma” — became like a second mom to him. Stacy’s mother would pick him up when her daughter had class and take him to play in the park or, on so many occasions, to her office at a Boulder law firm where she worked for decades as general manager.

Kain spent so much time around the attorneys — “liberal lawyers into human rights, constantly doing all kinds of fundraisers,” Stacy recalls — that he came to regard them as extended family. “That’s the spirit that Kain grew up in, a world of watching out for people who don’t have as much as you do and making sure they were taken care of, never overlooking people.”

Kain recalls the law firm’s partners telling him stories of how, when it came time to hand out bonuses, Betty would advocate vehemently on behalf of her co-workers. In retrospect, he can see how her influence steered him toward the fight for players’ rights.

“She had all the workers’ backs,” Kain says. “I never really came from a big union family, but just hearing those stories, having people who believed in equality and everybody having a fair shot at things, I think is what pushed me.”

Betty became her grandson’s most ardent fan, clipping newspaper stories that chronicled his athletic exploits and watching him perform at every opportunity.

“She said ‘Thank you’ after every game — it brought her so much joy,” Kain recalls. “She really understood how much hard work goes into it.”

Spencer Colter never coached his son in youth sports, but when he took the head football coaching job at Boulder High School, Kain followed him there as a freshman. When Spencer was fired after Kain’s sophomore season, the ensuing controversy fueled Kain’s introduction to activism. He joined about 400 other students in a midday walkout to protest.

“I think I learned the power of unity, bringing people together,” he says. “It’s tough when one person is standing for something. But when you get a group of people to come together to push for something, you really have a strong voice.”

But you don’t always win. The dismissal stood, ending the father-son collaboration and raising new questions about Kain’s football future. Spencer promised his son that he could go anywhere in Colorado or beyond to finish his high school career.

He chose perennial power Cherry Creek.

His performance with the Bruins brought recruiters calling from several Division I schools — including Stanford, whose robust academics, strong football program and idyllic setting proved so intoxicating that he offered his verbal commitment to the school during his junior year at Creek.

Then came the first game of his senior high school season, and a hit that dislocated his right shoulder. He popped it back in and continued to play, but later an MRI revealed that he had torn the labrum and biceps tendon.

For Kain, the emotional devastation of the moment fed uncertainty about his future. Stanford quit calling. Finally, an assistant coach phoned to let Kain know he no longer figured in the school’s plans.

“It was my first wake-up call to the realities of recruiting,” he says.

Jarred from his dream scenario, he went into panic mode — and felt thrilled and grateful when Northwestern offered him the opportunity to play big-time football for another highly reputable academic school.

He signed his scholarship papers — a one-year deal, renewable at the school’s discretion. Not until his junior year would Northwestern switch, as some schools around the country did, to a four-year athletic scholarship.

Kain would finish his college athletic career with an impressive résumé: co-captain for his last two seasons, twice honorable mention All-Big Ten, three-time academic all-conference and among the school’s career leaders in several statistical categories.

But Northwestern also prepared him for the road ahead. The evolution of his attitude about the business of big-time college athletics found its tipping point in a summer course taught by 29-year-old political science graduate student Nick Dorzweiler.

Titled “Field Studies in the Modern Workplace,” it was the academic companion to Kain’s summer internship at Goldman Sachs’ private wealth management department. Dorzweiler’s course merged trips to sites such as a Chicago-area steel mill with discussion-based seminars in a wide-ranging examination of the social, political and ethical components of work.

“This is something that spoke to Kain,” Dorzweiler says. “My sense is that he was definitely already thinking about this — it was on his radar before.”

For Kain, locker-room chatter about long-standing issues — from medical coverage for injuries to a greater voice in distribution of a gargantuan revenue pie — intersected with Dorzweiler’s class in a life-changing way.

Heading into his senior year, Kain put theory into practice, even though he would never reap the benefits of any reform.

“I’ve always been a little bit of an impulsive person, I just kind of want to jump into it,” he says. “I didn’t know the steps, what it would take or what would happen at that moment. I didn’t tell too many people.”

In his search for organizations or advocates who pursued protections for college players, he found Ramogi Huma.

On the website for the National College Players Association, Kain saw an organization whose goals dovetailed with his own, spearheaded by a former UCLA linebacker intent on changing the system. He tapped out a long message to Huma in an online comment box, outlining his evolving beliefs, figuring it was a shot in the dark.

“There was a tone of sincerity, a tone of intelligence and determination in his e-mail that made it stand out,” Huma recalls. “I pretty much called him right away.”

Within weeks, Kain turned commitment to action through an awareness campaign called “All Players United,” in which he joined with other football players around the country to write “APU” on their gear during televised games one weekend.

There were rumblings of public backlash — Kain estimates the reaction was about evenly divided between supporters and detractors, who labeled the participants as greedy and ungrateful. The APU action provided a lower-stakes prelude to the serious action that would follow.

“After it all happened, once he’d gotten pushback from his coach,” Huma recounts, “I said, ‘Look, this is just a taste of what it’s going to be like if we go forward with unionization. It’s nothing compared to what will happen if we go forward. Is this still what you want to do?’

“And he said, ‘Absolutely.’ “

In late January 2014, Kain huddled with teammates in a players-only meeting on the Northwestern campus and made the case for unionization.

By asking them to sign union cards, he was initiating a step toward seeking a ruling that scholarship athletes are employees, eligible for collective bargaining, and not “student-athletes” as designated by the NCAA.

Two days later, Kain and Huma, acting as the newly formed College Athletes Players Association, filed a petition to the Chicago office of the National Labor Relations Board.

Then Kain spoke to the media about the need for reform in college sports: “The current model represents a dictatorship,” he said. “We just want a seat at the table.”

Less than a month later, he testified at an NLRB hearing on the matter.

As a player who ended up graduating early with a degree in psychology, Kain faced a difficult task in casting a school with such a sterling academic reputation and high graduation rate as an institution where football was essentially a full-time job.

Although he allowed that his school was ahead of the curve in its treatment of scholarship athletes, he reasoned that this was “the hardest test case.” If he could make the argument at Northwestern, it would be that much easier at reputed football factories.

Through e-mail and Twitter and other means, critics accused him of ruining college sports.

“I had one guy tell me that his son was my biggest fan, but after this, they were going to burn my jersey,” Kain says. “You can’t do anything but laugh. It’s crazy that you go from being the face of the program to one of the most hated people on campus.”

His parents expressed concern with his sudden high profile on such a volatile issue, although it came tempered by pride in his motivation. Still, both tried to talk him out of such a prominent role.

They worried about the backlash casting their son as the ungrateful locker-room lawyer, particularly in light of Kain’s NFL aspirations.

“To listen to our fans just annihilate Kain after what he’d done for the school, how he’d worked so hard for four years — they treated him like he was an evil person,” Stacy says. “It was really hard to watch your own group of fans treat you like that. That was painful.”

But as the unionization effort played out in Chicago, an even more intense anguish consumed the family.

Back in Colorado, Betty Flagg was slipping away.

Her health had gone into a downward spiral because of neuromyelitis optica, a neurological disease that affects the spinal cord and optic nerve and, in her case, initially was mistaken for multiple sclerosis.

Her deterioration spanned six years from the first diagnosis. But even as her health declined, she found welcome relief in watching her grandson play football.

Even on the occasions when Betty’s illness forced a hospital stay, she would obsess about having a television nearby. At game time, she always wore a replica of Kain’s jersey — No. 2 in deep purple.

Toward the end, she deteriorated quickly. While Kain was testifying before the NLRB in Chicago, his grandmother was in hospice care at her house. The events converged at the worst possible time, making it difficult for family to support Kain’s efforts while also coming to grips with the truth that Betty wouldn’t be with them much longer.

But even as her condition worsened, Betty understood and appreciated the course her grandson had taken.

“She was still relatively cognizant when the union stuff started popping up, and I would talk to her about what he was doing,” Stacy says. “She was so proud of him.”

The union effort gave way to Kain’s workouts in preparation for the NFL combine. By the time he was able to break free and come home, Betty had lost consciousness.

“My parents felt like she was waiting for me to get there and say my last goodbyes,” he says. “She couldn’t say anything back, but I like to think she understood everything I said, that it meant something that I was there when she passed, holding her hand.”

Betty Flagg, 76, was buried with her grandson’s Northwestern jersey at her side.

Four weeks after Kain said goodbye to his grandmother, NLRB regional director Peter Sung Ohr found in favor of CAPA and players’ right to unionize, saying essentially that Northwestern’s scholarship football players are employees.

It was a stunning, although preliminary, victory. The legal battle on this front and others over the rights of college athletes probably will stretch on for years.

A month after the decision, the Northwestern players voted on whether to form a union. Now, more than a year later, those votes remain uncounted pending an appeal of Ohr’s decision to the full NLRB.

However the Northwestern union vote turns out, some suggest that Kain and his teammates already have influenced the NCAA to revisit some policies.

“Now, they weren’t the only factor — the wind was blowing against the NCAA for lot of reasons,” says Jay Coakley, a Fort Collins-based sociologist and author who studies sports and society. “But athletes at Northwestern had a major impact, for sure. The NCAA knew that some of these points athletes were raising were going to resonate beyond the NLRB.”

Late last spring, Kain concentrated on preparing for the NFL draft and kept a lower media profile to reinforce that he was fully focused on football. Ultimately, no team selected the athletic quarterback who was projected as a wide receiver. He signed a free-agent contractwith the Minnesota Vikings and spent last season on the team’s practice squad before being waived last week.

Whatever direction his pro career takes from here, he plans to keep advocating for college players and continue his groundbreaking role.

It has been an education.

“I’ve learned that life is short,” Kain says. “If I had this opportunity and decided it’s too big of a risk, that I don’t want to face the criticism, then later on in my life I would’ve truly regretted it. I’ve learned that you get rare opportunities where you can make a true impact on other people’s lives.

“And this has been one.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com