When The Cheering Stops

Kansas City native and former NFL player Kenny Randle signed copies of his new book, When the Cheering Stops on Wednesday, June 22, at the Prosperos Books and Media bookstore..

“The book isn’t about me,” Randle said. “The book is about what happens when all the cheering stops. What’s the next step?”

He said that whatever area of your life you feel you have succeeded in, what happens when it ends? How does one move on?

Among his accomplishments, Randle was a world class sprinter, a member of the USC Track and Field Hall of Fame, corporate regional vice president, and associate pastor under Bishop T.D. Jakes.

A colleague once told him her analyst said she was “... living in a haunted house.” “I am being haunted by past relationships, she said. “By the failed marriage I had ...”

“That is when I realized this book is way beyond sports,” Randle. “The cheering stops when people who used to run companies now have to do something else ... When something happens and a marriage goes south,” he said.

“It happens with children, relationships, ... it happens in ministries ... people are not prepared for what to do when it all fails.”

“Sometimes our lives are haunted by what could been, or what should have been ... I would have accomplished so much ... that is what people are haunted about.”

“Like a kid coming out of high school thinks, ‘If only I’d gotten a break I could have accomplished this ...”

“We are haunted by things that occurred in our past ... so we’re haunted by broken promises, by unfulfilled dreams, and disappointments.”

“I, too, have had my moments in the haunted house; unsure of where reality ended and fiction began. There seemed to be a thin line between hanging on to what was, stopping my failures and unobtained goals from haunting me until hope for the futures dies,” Randle said.

“I knew what I wanted, I just didn’t know how to go about it.”

“One of the scariest things I’ve ever had to deal with is ...what could have been.”

Some regrets are valid, he said, but, unfortunately, most people do not celebrate you for what might have been. If you’re going to work in this world successfully, you have to come to grips with that fact.

There are three groups who will benefit most from his book, Randle said. The parents, coaches/teachers, and the athletes themselves.

It is for parents, who tend to live their lives, their dreams, through their athletic kids. The book will help them prepare their children for what comes next in life.

As for coaches and teachers, they also tend to be mentors. Randle feels that one of the greatest shortages in this world is mentors.

A lot of our young people do not have mentors ... most youth realize they need programs to help them develop skills to meet life’s challenges.

Randle feels that is the crux of his book: preparing people to look forward, make provisions for comes next.

Ms. Elonda Clay, Kansas City native and library director at Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO), is one of a select group of humanities experts from the United States to attend the Future Humans, Human Futures Institute at Virginia Tech, Arlington, Virginia, campus.

Future Humans, Human Futures, is a project that combines religion, ethics, and technology to tackle fundamental questions of what it means to be human in a technological age. The Henry Luce Foundation awarded Virginia Tech’s

Center for Humanities a $500,000 Grant to support the project.

The institution was held June 6-10. At the crux of the institute were the following questions: Will those who are already highly vulnerable to structural systems of inequality based on race, gender identity, disability, and wealth face greater marginalization in a society increasingly shaped by algorithmic machines? How do we create and govern technologies from the perspective of the human condition?

“Because of the real-time impact of digital exclusion and digital reluctance on black communities, before and during the pandemic, we should be asking whether what we are doing now with digital technologies matches what the future will demand of us. As we pursue civil rights in the Digital Age, broadband access to the internet, public interest technology, digital entrepreneurship, digital interventions for seniors, and tech labor organizing will be critical for our people and our future,” Clay explains.

Ms. Clay (Bishop Hogan H.S.) earned master’s degrees from the Interdenominational Theological Center, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and her B.S. from Kansas State University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and serves as principal for a 2021-2022 Science for Seminaries grant at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio.

For more information on the institute, go to https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2020/08/clahs-lucefoundation-grant.html.