Kevin Eberhart graduates with a master’s degree
As the end of the school year approaches, multiple senior CU football players are preparing to enter the NFL draft. Senior place kicker Kevin Eberhart, however, is preparing to go to Houston to work for Lockheed Martin Corp. at the Johnson Space Center.
Eberhart will be working on the Orion project, which will replace the shuttle with a crew exploration vehicle as the primary means for the United States to get people into space.
In less than a month, Eberhart will be graduating from CU with a master’s in aerospace engineering. He was one of three graduating Buff football players to be inducted into the Hampshire Honor Society this year by the NCAA, which he earned by fulfilling the requirements of being both a starter or significant backup on an NCAA football team, receiving a 3.2 cumulative GPA as an undergraduate student and meeting all NCAA-mandated progress towards degree requirements.
“It’s a great honor,” Eberhart said. “Any time you get recognition or any kind of award, especially when they incorporate academics and athletics, it’s kind of a validation of all the work and all those tireless hours and late nights you went through.”
Most people wouldn’t put football and aerospace engineering into the same category. In the eyes of junior accounting major Andrew Lanius, Eberhart’s success was because of time management.
“It just goes to show how much time management you need to do that,” Lanius said. “You have to be able to know how much time you need to spend every day on football and also when you need to spend time on your school work, which is ultimately more important than football.”
Although he played for the Buffs, Eberhart didn’t originally look at CU to put on the pads and the gold helmet. Eberhart said the engineering school was what led him to come to Boulder.
“I was always into planes and space and that kind of stuff growing up,” Eberhart said. “If you’re anywhere around Boulder, you always hear about how great the engineering program is up here. I just started to check it out and really decided it was the place I wanted to go.”
Most student-athletes decide to come to CU either as scholarship athletes or as hopeful walk-ons, not for the academic program. Freshman history major Joe Prodehl said that with Eberhart coming to CU for academics rather than athletics, it shows a push for great performance on and off the field.
“It makes the school look a lot better,” Prodehl said. “It shows that we actually care about academics here at Colorado along with our football program.”
Eberhart said getting to play a sport he loves and getting a good education in a field he was interested in was a once in a lifetime experience.
“Engineering is something I always wanted to, and the football was something I wanted to do too,” Eberhart said. “Sometimes you get lucky, and they’re both something that you’re good at. I played football in high school and had the opportunity to come up here and play football, and I’m really grateful for it.”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer at Philip Fisher at Philip.Fisher@colorado.edu.
