Florida hip-hop legend Plies has been one of the more vocal celebrity HBCU advocates online over the past several years. Posting consistently about HBCU sports and culture to his over 10 million combined social media followers. Recently, the Fort Myers Florida native reposted a video from the SC State football Instagram account on the importance of football players graduating from college, not just coming to South Carolina State University looking for an opportunity to play football professionally.
The March 4th post on Twitter (X) from plies reads. “If U Ain’t Showin These Young Men How To Get 💰 W/o Sports! U Failing Them Point Blank Period! Dem NFL Lies Sound Good But The Truth Means More. S/o To @SCState_Fb For Given These Kids The Truth! @coachberry77 Keep Given Them The Truth & Not What They Wanna Hear @ksj_carolinagal“
Plies attached a snippet of a video from the SC State football Instagram page. from a weekly segment called “WE EDUCATE WEDNESDAYS,” where a guest speaker addresses the Bulldog football team. The video features speaker Michael Summers Sr., who is not only a former SC State football player, but is the CEO of his own company, Summertime Enterprises, Inc., a logistics services and real estate investment company.
“There’s only one percent… And I know everybody in this room thinks they gonna play the national football league,” Summer says to the team in a lecture hall. “There’s a lot of people who sat in those seats, way before you… Me being one of them, came here with aspirations to be the best person I could be, the best football player that I could be, but there are a lot of guys who left here as professionals…”
Summers says of the numerous South Carolina State football players who didn’t become pro football players but found themselves as professionals in other areas of life after getting their degree from South Carolina State.
“I’m gonna be honest with you for about 5 or 10 more minutes,” Summers continues. “I’m a millionaire and football didn’t make me a millionaire, I didn’t make millions of dollars playing football, but I came here to South Carolina State. I took advantage of the opportunity that it gave me that used to get a degree.”
Summers graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Agribusiness in 1988 and is a 2020 South Carolina State University athletics Hall of Fame inductee. He football from 1984 to 1988 and was a free-agent signee with the Indianapolis Colts in 1988, so to say that Michael Summers has been where the current SCSU football roster is now is about as accurate a parallel as you’ll find.
SC STATE FOOTBALL – WE EDUCATE WEDNESDAY
Before he was the rapper known as Plies, he was Algernod “Nod” Washington, a star wide receiver at Fort Myers Senior High School where he was Homecoming King and valedictorian. After graduation, he attended Miami University where he played wide receiver from 1995 to 1997, then transferred to the University of Central Florida.
As a freshman in 1995, he had 9 receptions for 69 yards then followed it up with 25 receptions for 262 yards and 2 touchdowns. The next season, he had 5 receptions for 43 yards.
Plies may be a Grammy-nominated hip-hop artist but the message of going pro in a field other than football is something he can relate to, and now, so can millions of his followers who may not know about South Carolina State or the real-world mentorship that happens when you are a student-athlete at an HBCU.
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