Hokie ClubBy Jimmy Robertson
For nearly all of his entire life, Ken Oxendine never has been afraid to reverse field and go in a different direction.
Virginia Tech football fans remember him for that ability during his playing days with the Hokies from 1994-97, but the former tailback has continued displaying that trait even though his football playing career ended nearly two decades ago.
The latest example came last August when Oxendine moved his wife and two daughters to the Richmond area, not far from where he had been a high school legend at Thomas Dale High. The reason for the move, though, had nothing to do with sports.
In fact, after spending pretty much his entire career in sports – either through playing, coaching, teaching, fundraising, or as an athletics administrator – Oxendine pivoted to an entirely different realm, taking a position as a loan officer with C&F Mortgage Corporation in Midlothian.
"It stress me out," Oxendine said, laughing, during a phone interview a few weeks ago. "It's a different type of work. The great thing with it is you're still having to be sociable. You're trying to create relationships with agents, you're trying to create relationships within the community and let people know what you're doing and how you can help them … The stressful part is whenever I get a deal, to make sure the puzzle is all put together the right way, and making sure that their doing their due diligence and giving me all their information, but then also hoping it all works out. At that end of the day, that's not only my livelihood, but also my agents' livelihood.
"At the end of the deal … I feel like I did just before a football game. You get the butterflies just before you get that first hit. That's what I was feeling, so this was the first time I've had that type of excitement since playing the game of football. It really gave me a sense of everything else. It definitely is different than everything I've ever done. I'd say I've transitioned well and been able to take it all in and lean on a lot of my colleagues on things that have been a little different from the standpoint of the learning curve."
Oxendine landed the job mainly because of his uncanny ability to network. Always personable, he knew how to build relationships, and he had the foresight to realize that careers in the NFL came with a shelf life. So during his two seasons with the Atlanta Falcons in the late 1990s, he welcomed every outside opportunity that came his way – mainly community service events, charitable functions, etc. Arthur Blank, the founder of Home Depot and the owner of the Falcons, always wants his players visible in the community, and Oxendine became a willing participant back then.
People like Bobby Butler and Buddy Curry, former Falcons players from the 1980s, became mentors to him. Curry oversees USA Football's "Heads Up" football program that teaches kids proper tackling techniques, and he conducts clinics all over the country. Oxendine often helped with those.
Oxendine started contemplating a move to the business world after meeting Joe Dunn, a senior vice president who works for Fairfax-based George Mason Mortgage at the Glen Allen, Virginia office. Dunn and Oxendine met at a charity golf tournament sponsored by a foundation established by former Washington Redskins player Darrell Green.
"After my mom had passed away, I was looking to come back home, and he had peaked my interest in his world, and I started to look into it," Oxendine said. "I saw this industry being able to help me reach other goals that I had in mind and being able to do those things in my community."
Of course, a bunch of Hokies helped him along the way. C&F Mortgage employs a bunch of Virginia Tech graduates, and they embraced him with open arms, showing a willingness to help him learn and explore a new career.
He never really expected to dive into the business world. The first part of his future consisted of playing in the NFL for as long as possible, and his career at Tech helped him toward that goal. He was fifth at Tech in career rushing at the time of his graduation and currently ranks ninth (2,653 yards), and his 11 100-yard rushing performances rank tied for fifth. One of those 11 game was an outstanding 150-yard performance against Nebraska in the 1996 Orange Bowl. All of that led to him being drafted by the Falcons in the seventh round of the 1998 NFL Draft.
He spent two seasons with Atlanta, and he went to Detroit after the Falcons released him in 2000. But he got caught up in a numbers game in Detroit, which led to his release, and he then tried to make it work with the XFL team in Los Angeles.
Oxendine injured his ankle and calf in the second game of the XFL season and never returned to the field. He helped the team by serving as a player/assistant coach and by working in community relations, but by the season's end, the XFL went belly up, and Oxendine decided to reverse field.
"I didn't want to be one of those guys that kept training and training for another pro team to say, 'You've trained hard enough to let us give you a chance to come to our offseason program to see if you have a chance to make our pro team,'" he said. "There were too many chances. It was a toss-up between going back to school or continuing to train, so I chose to go back to school. The good thing is I was able to train, working in the weight room and stuff. But I found out that the injuries that I had, every time I got to my top level of speed and my fitness, the injuries were haunting me. God was telling me I needed to take another road."
During his playing days at Tech, he pursued and received a degree in psychology, but he learned he probably needed another four years of education to become a psychologist, and the thought of four more years of education didn't appeal to him. Instead, he took a condensed route, returned to Tech in 2001 to pursue a master's degree in education and health promotions, with plans of getting into coaching. He worked as a graduate assistant under Mike Gentry in Tech's strength and conditioning program.
After graduating in 2003 with his master's, he took a job as a teacher and assistant football coach at Duluth High School in Duluth, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. He spent a season there before landing an assistant's job at Georgia Southern, where he spent two years before heading to Europe as an assistant coach with an NFL Europe team.
But in the summer of 2005, Oxendine reversed field again. A job came open at Notre Dame Academy, a new private school in Duluth, and he took it, working as a teacher and helping to raise money both for the school, and later on, the athletics programs within the school.
While at Duluth High, Oxendine had worked with Joe Marelle, the director of athletics, and his time with Marelle sparked an interest in becoming an athletics director. He had played at the highest level and been around great coaches and leaders in Frank Beamer, Dan Reeves and Bobby Ross. He even had conversations with Dave Braine, a former football assistant coach and the Hokies' director of athletics from 1988-97. He felt confident in his own ability to be a leader of an organization.
"All those coaches were not only great coaches, but they were great people as well," Oxendine said. "I really leaned on a lot of them and looked at how they delegated, and then the marketing component and being able to lean on other people, like Dave Braine – I spoke to Dave a couple of times and that was on a higher scale, but on the same mentality. I became friends with the AD at Marist School [a private school in Atlanta], Tommy Marshall, who has been there for years. I've been fortunate my whole life to be around great people that could lead in the direction when it came to whatever I was doing. That's really what led me into the administrative world."
Fortunately, the head of Notre Dame Academy, Julie Derucki, trusted Oxendine to put together an athletics program, and Oxendine ran with it. He wound up spending 13 years at the school, using athletics as a way of bringing publicity to the school in a heavily populated suburban Atlanta area.
Oxendine never expected to stay in one place so long. But life had delivered him a good hand, especially in the form of a wife, two young daughters, and a great job.
"I guess I got comfortable at the school, and when I started my family, I was just comfortable," he said. "They weren't paying me a bad salary, but in the same breath, I knew the rigors and time consumption when you got to the college ranks. So I stepped back from trying to progress in that career once I started my family."
Now he's moved back to his hometown, and in a way, come full circle. He's started a new job, reconnected with family and friends, and started plans to build a home next to his dad and brother on a piece of property left to him by his grandmother. The move also makes for easy weekend trips to Blacksburg, especially in the fall. Prior to this past season, he had been to one Virginia Tech football game in nine years.
Oxendine does miss being involved in sports, but he scratches that itch by training his daughters and by helping out at his old high school on an as-needed basis. These days, he loves the bigger challenge that his new position brings – a feeling similar to what he felt when he played and coached.
"It's definitely different because I'm not outside like I have been over the course of my whole career," Oxendine said. "That's one thing that I do miss. If the right opportunity comes along, you never know. Just like this opportunity came along that allowed me to get back to Virginia and allowed me to get into a career that I can transform into and have a great group of people that can help me be successful in this career.
"In the same breath, I'm in a place where I'm getting involved with my high school – not from a hands-on perspective, but from a standpoint of helping them fundraise and being an ear if their coaches, their AD, the people in their world need it. Just as my career out of the NFL transitioned out well, I believe the transition out of sports has gone well."