A secret weapon in Life Skills

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By design, recruiting visits are meant to impress.

Recruits who visit Pitt could, depending on their sport, be exposed to the gymnastics team’s 2016 EAGL championship trophy, or the hardware the volleyball team collected for last season’s ACC Tournament title, or perhaps the Heisman Trophy that Tony Dorsett won in 1976.

They’ll see the Cathedral of Learning and the weight rooms, restaurants and the libraries, entertainment and education. And they will likely be impressed by all of it.

But the biggest impact on a Pitt recruiting visit might not be made by trophies or buildings or the city; it might come from a presentation by a group of individuals who are quickly becoming - or have already become - one of Pitt’s biggest strengths in recruiting, in supporting current student-athletes and in assisting former Panthers.

They’re the 10 people who run the Cathy and John Pelusi Family Life Skills Program, and amid the divergent interests driving college athletics, their purpose is fairly straight-forward.

‘There was a parent who burst out into tears’
The mission of Pitt’s Life Skills program is simple:

To prepare student-athletes for success in life now and beyond.

That means a lot of things. It starts with the transition to college, an often-overlooked element that can play a significant role in a young person’s success - or lack thereof - on and off the field. Then there are career development pieces, internship opportunities and career placement assistance for after graduation.

Connecting all of those bigger themes is the foundation of 10 people who spend every day working one-on-one with Pitt’s student-athletes to make sure that they’re doing everything they can to be in position to succeed.

“It’s important to me to give them an understanding that, this is more than just a game,” says Penny Semaia, the former Pitt football player who serves as senior associate athletic director for student life, a position which centers on running the Life Skills program.

“It’s the education and the experience: how are we helping you develop as a human being, as a person, to be successful for life beyond Pitt, life beyond the sport? This is how we’re going to do it and this is the success rate at which we do it.”

And the success rate is no joke. According to Semaia, 98% of Pitt’s student-athletes who graduated in 2017 - the last year for which numbers have been made public - were placed in a job, an internship or a specific career program within six months of graduation.

98% is a remarkable number. Even more remarkable is that it’s a number Semaia thinks Pitt can and will improve on. That kind of hard info that makes an impression on recruits and, perhaps more importantly, makes an impression on their families. As a former football player himself, Semaia knows the value of recruiting and takes his role in that enterprise very seriously.

“I come in at all hours, on Sundays, on Saturdays - a coach could call me Saturday night and I’ll be there Sunday morning to meet with a recruit. Recruiting is the bloodline of any program, so if we are one of the hallmark functions of the Athletic Department, I want to make sure that myself or any one of our team members on the Life Skills team is able to meet with them when we need it.”

That was how Semaia ended up in front of a group of recruits three weeks ago, pitching Pitt’s Life Skills program to a group of recruits that included four-star receiver Aydin Henningham.

“The way the program is set up for the football players is something different,” Henningham told Panther-Lair.com after his visit to Pitt. “With the Life Skills program for the student-athletes and how the tutors are there for you 24/7, they just talk a lot about life after football, which got me and my dad’s attention.

“When they were talking about the Life Skills program, that’s when it clicked for me. The way he was talking, it just caught everybody’s attention. That’s what made my decision and everybody’s decision, I think. That was really impactful.”

Impactful enough that Henningham committed to the Panthers before leaving campus to fly home to Florida. Five other recruits committed then, too, giving Pat Narduzzi and company a total of 13 commitments from two big recruiting weekends, and while those recruits based their decisions on a variety of factors, there’s no mistaking the effect the Life Skills presentation had.

“Most recently, there was a parent who burst into tears,” Semaia recalls from June’s recruiting blitz.

‘When I came in, I was definitely blown away’
The origins of the Cathy and John Pelusi Family Life Skills Program date back to the mid-1990’s when Pitt was a pilot program for the C.H.A.M.P.S (Challenging Athletes’ Minds for Personal Success) Life Skills program. At the time, it was under the watch of Donna Sanft, the Pitt athlete-turned-Pitt administrator who spent nearly 30 years working in Pitt athletics.

In 2005, Sanft and then-Athletic Director Jeff Long tabbed Semaia to take over the program, which was called the Panther Game Plan Life Skills program at the time. Semaia had been working at Pitt since graduating from the University in 2003 with a degree in anthropology. He spent the intervening years working in the Office of Admission and Financial Aid, but his interests always tended toward working more directly with the students.

That made the position - officially, he was named Career and Life Skills Coordinator for Student-Athletes - a natural fit for Semaia.

“It’s my heart. This is a big part of what makes me tick in a day.”

Semaia’s staff in the Panther Game Plan Life Skills program grew, and in 2007, it got a huge shot in the arm when former Pitt football player and Pitt Trustee John Pelusi and his wife, Cathy, made a significant contribution to the program.

A long-time supporter of the University as well as Pitt athletics, Pelusi carried a passion for the student-athlete experience. In 2011, Pelusi and his wife made a $1.5 million commitment to support the program, which was renamed the Cathy and John Pelusi Family Life Skills Program.

Since then, the program has blossomed. Nine full-time staffers now work with Semaia - “the most Life Skills professionals in the nation,” he says, “and the second-most is five” - and the list includes five other former student-athletes in addition to Semaia.

There’s Lousaka Polite, who played fullback at Pitt, and John Pelusi (the son of the program’s namesakes), who was a tight end for the Panthers. Sam Clancy, who starred in basketball for Pitt before playing in the NFL, joined the program last year when the Varsity Letter Club, of which he is the coordinator, went under the umbrella of Life Skills in order to continue the connection with student-athletes beyond their time at Pitt.

There’s also Director of Life Skills Jackson Martin; he played tennis at the University of Portland. And Kelsi Schaer, the Career Consultant for Student-Athletes who Semaia calls “a rock star; she’s phenomenal,” ran cross country and track at Oregon State.

Lisa Auld (Assistant Athletic Director for Student Life), Chase McIntyre (Life Skills Community Coordinator) and Kristen Manchor (Life Skills Events Coordinator) round out the staff.

“You can ask anyone in the Athletic Department about our culture in our Life Skills space,” Semaia says. “We love what we do. When you have people who are passionate about it and exhibit that, that’s something that’s going to stand out.”

“When I came in, I was definitely blown away by the impact and the relationships that they have with our student-athletes,” Athletic Director Heather Lyke says. “It’s extraordinary. It really is.

“Most schools in the country have a Life Skills program with one or two people; we have 10 full-time staff members. It is, by far, the best program in the country, and I’ve seen a lot of them.”

‘They don’t have a Penny’
There are a lot of components that make the Cathy and John Pelusi Family Life Skills Program work. There’s the considerable investment from the Pelusi family. There’s commitment from the Athletic Department in giving the program the largest staff in the country. And there’s execution on a micro scale, with every student-athlete receiving personalized attention and guidance from the staff throughout his or her career.

But what puts the program over the top might be Semaia, a former lineman who is still built like one and carries a positivity that outsizes his frame.

“His personality is larger than life, and I think from a recruiting standpoint, it’s something that other schools don’t have,” Lyke says. “They don’t have a Penny and they don’t have a Life Skills program as broad and as deep and comprehensive as ours is. And really, the results speak. It’s impactful.”

During his years as a student-athlete at Pitt, Semaia supplemented his anthropology degree with related areas of study in sociology and theatre, and it’s not hard to imagine him drawing on both of those subjects while meeting with recruits and their families.

His laugh is booming and his passion is genuine, and just as he can back up the Life Skills program’s success with numbers, so too can he back up his own commitment to the University of Pittsburgh. He plans to marry later this year is and is looking forward to starting a family - all with an eye on growing even deeper roots in western Pa.

“Pitt is home,” he says. “I love Pittsburgh, I love the people, I love my alma mater.”

“There’s no doubt that he is highly sought-after to meet with recruits because he’s so genuine and he loves Pitt so much,” Lyke says. “He’s a product of Pitt athletics and he’s giving back every day to Pitt athletics, so when he talks about it, it’s really real for him and very meaningful work.”

Semaia thinks his entire staff feels that sense of purpose in what they do.

“Our mission is simple: our mission is to help prepare our student-athletes for success in life today and success in life tomorrow,” he says. “We’re ‘Forever Panthers’, and the beauty of that is, we exemplify what our mantra is: family takes care of family.”

That family includes all 10 staffers of the Life Skills program. Polite, Pelusi and Clancy are former Pitt student-athletes. McIntyre, Dancey and Manchor have Pitt degrees. And Martin, Schaer and Auld have been accepted into the family - and treat current and former student-athletes like it.

They all take their cues from the man at the top.

“He is a glue in our Athletic Department,” Lyke says of Semaia. “He is the life of the Athletic Department in many ways. He’s just a real strong source of positive energy every day, and so is his team; the whole Life Skills team is that way.”

Forever Panthers
The Life Skills program at Pitt is easy to overlook for fans. It wasn’t involved in redesigning the uniforms. It doesn’t have a strong presence on social media. And it’s not easy to find on the official Pitt website.

But here’s the trick:

The program’s not for the fans. In the world of collegiate athletics, where so much is driven by factors other than the experience of the student-athletes, the Cathy and John Pelusi Family Life Skills Program exists exclusively for that purpose. There is no angle to the program, no hidden agenda; it has a lone purpose, a solitary goal, and that is to support and develop the student-athletes as people, not commodities.

That was the Pelusis’ inspiration for committing to the program, and it continues to be the program’s core.

“If he has said it to me one time, he has said it a thousand times,” Lyke said of the elder Pelusi. “‘Heather, it’s about the kids. If it’s not for the kids, what are we doing and what are we here for?’”

It goes without saying that Semaia shares that view as well. So when the parent of a recruit “burst into tears” during a Life Skills meeting, Semaia had to balance the satisfaction of an effective presentation with a nagging question about why Pitt is so far ahead of the pack in this area.

“It was a little discouraging to me because I know what we do, I know how we do it; my question is, why isn’t everyone doing it? If we’re talking about this industry, the student-athletes are the most important people in our care, so why aren’t we giving them the best? That’s why I’m still grateful to be at Pitt for 20 years after I finished competing there: I know my alma mater is doing the right thing by our student-athletes that’s helping them prepare for life.”

Now the program is approaching its 25th year overall and 15th under Semaia’s leadership. Semaia has earned the trust and appreciation of four athletic directors, dozens of head coaches and countless student-athletes. And every day he works toward the same goal: to prepare student-athletes for life.

“We speak truth. From the moment we meet you as a recruit to the days into being a ‘Forever Panther,’ we’re literally the same team that’s going to work with you for life.”