Whiteside speaking up to enact change
Kobie Whiteside envisions himself years from now, preparing to perform. He stands before a massive crowd: thousands, maybe tens of thousands watching him. As usual, he’s a little nervous, but he believes this is his calling, so he’s prepared to push himself outside of his comfort zone.
This isn’t a daydream about playing in the NFL. Sure, the Missouri defensive tackle would welcome a professional football career, if it materializes. But he has bigger plans. Whiteside wants to pursue a career in Christian ministry. His ultimate goal: to serve as the pastor for a mega-church.
“I want to do it on a big stage,” Whiteside said. “I want to go to a mega-type church so I can reach out to a lot of people and try to bring more people in by trying to use the resources there.”
That dream would likely surprise even those who have gotten to know Whiteside well. One of the first words used to describe him during his Missouri career has always been quiet. At one point last season, Missouri defensive line coach Brick Haley called him “the silent assassin.” Whiteside himself admits he’s an introvert by nature.
But as his college career has progressed, Whiteside has gradually found his voice. Now a senior, he’s felt called to take on a more vocal leadership role on the Missouri team, not afraid to speak up about tough topics such as systemic racism and off-field accountability during the current COVID-19 pandemic. It hasn’t always been easy to assert himself, but the more Whiteside has spoken up, the more he’s felt called to continue to use his voice, both within the Tiger locker room and beyond.
“(God) gave me a platform for a reason,” he said. “Why not use it?”
Having a platform is a new feeling for Whiteside, who was picked to the preseason all-SEC second team by both the league’s media and coaches. He’s spent most of his football career flying under the radar.
Whiteside put up big numbers at Alief Taylor high school near Houston, Texas, racking up 97 tackles, including 19 tackles for loss and seven sacks, as a senior. Yet because of his height, or lack thereof, he was rated just a two-star prospect and didn’t earn a scholarship offer at a Power Five school until Missouri entered the picture shortly before National Signing Day in 2017. Whiteside quickly showed he belonged in the SEC, playing in all 12 games as a true freshman, but for most of his first two seasons, he served primarily as a rotational player, providing depth behind the likes of Terry Beckner Jr. and Walter Palmore.
As he climbed the depth chart, a lot of players in his position might have spoken up about carrying a chip on his shoulder, wanting to prove wrong the coaches who overlooked him during the recruiting process. If that was Whiteside’s mindset, he never vocalized it. In fact, he never vocalized much of anything. Fellow senior Akial Byers still wouldn’t describe Whiteside as an overly loud leader today, but he’s far more willing to speak up than during his first two years of college.
“Kobie has opened up so much since his freshman year, it’s crazy,” Byers said. “... He’s more vocal on the field. I’m not saying he’s a vocal leader, but he leads by example.”
Whiteside described becoming comfortable with his voice as a gradual process during his first three years of college, but the biggest breakthrough came after his sophomore season. Characteristically, he credited his Christian faith, the one thing he’s always seemed outspoken about since being baptized in the spring of 2018.
“Faith really helped drive me to be more vocal, because I feel less peer pressure about society, and I feel like with God I don’t have any pressure,” Whiteside explained. “I feel like I got my faith into God and he helped find me the confidence to speak.”
During his first few years of college, Whiteside was the type of player to worry about his own business and lead by example. That began to change when he started dating Olivia Evans, a thrower for the Missouri track and field team and journalism major, last November. Evans said she pushed Whiteside to start consuming more news, paying more attention to what was going on outside of his college football bubble. And as his senior season approached, he felt the pull to take on a larger leadership role. Evans’ father gave Whiteside a book called The Power of Full Engagement, which Whiteside said details ways to manage one’s time and energy in order to be more productive. That started Whiteside on a reading binge. Every few weeks, Evans said, she and Whiteside go to Barnes and Noble so he can find a new book or two about leadership.
But in order to put the leadership lessons into action, Whiteside would have to disobey his instincts and speak up. This offseason, when the real world began butting into college football, provided the perfect opportunity.
On Friday, Aug. 28, Evans saw a tweet about another college football program calling off its fall camp practice scheduled for that afternoon to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Earlier in the week, the NBA had paused its playoffs as a result of the incident, and dozens of college and professional football teams had followed suit by declining to take the practice field. Evans texted Whiteside a link to the tweet, jokingly saying “y’all would never.”
A few hours later, her phone buzzed with a response from Whiteside: “But we would.”
That afternoon, word got out that Missouri had postponed its practice to raise awareness about racism and police brutality in America. The team released a statement on Twitter featuring the hashtag #Mizzou4Change. Whiteside downplayed his role, but others pointed to him and roommate Markell Utsey as catalysts in postponing practice and crafting the statement.
“I started seeing what’s been happening around and I felt like, why not now?” Whiteside said. “And my team felt the same way. So that’s what really sparked us stopping practice and talking about what’s going on in real life. We finally said, like, football matters to us, but what’s going on in the world really matters, so let’s stop what we’re doing now and let’s get together and find a way to help.”
A few days later, Whiteside found himself walking at the head of about 800 people across Missouri’s campus. The Black Student Athlete Association organized a march from the columns of the Francis Quadrangle to Faurot Field on Sept. 2 as a show of unity against racism. As BSAA officers, Whiteside and Evans helped orchestrate the event, marching at the front of the mass and standing on the field once the march reached the football stadium, squarely in the spotlight.
It wasn’t the first time Whiteside could be seen leading a group across campus during the offseason. In June, the Missouri football team organized a march from the columns to the Boone County Courthouse after George Floyd died while in police custody. Photos showed Whiteside front and center. Even though the football team had already held the march to honor Floyd and postponed its practice the week prior, Whiteside felt called to help the BSAA. After all, he’s never been one to talk about making change without taking the action to back it up.
“As people, we can do something once and feel like we accomplished something, but in reality we never accomplished nothing because it was the one thing we did,” he said. “So keep moving. You gotta keep going. Whatever you believe is true or right, you gotta keep going with it. You just can’t say, we did this one thing, we can stop. It’s an everyday battle, everyday fight to move forward.”
Whiteside hasn’t only spoken up about racial inequality. When the football team returned to campus for summer workouts, with the prospect of a fall season still very much up in the air and every positive COVID-19 test adding momentum to the talk of postponing, players say Whiteside took the lead in holding his teammates accountable.
Whiteside texted articles about medical findings related to COVID-19 as well as practices that were considered safe versus dangerous first to the defensive line group chat and then to the defense as a whole. He said his goal was simply to pass along information that his teammates might have otherwise missed. But linebacker Jamal Brooks described him as taking a more impassioned stance, imploring teammates to make sacrifices like avoiding bars and house parties.
“Kobie put it like this,” Brooks said back in August. “He said, everybody, we're in college. We understand everybody wants to go out and play and have fun and, you know, live, the college dream, I guess. But, he said, you have to put it in perspective. What do I want in the long run? And we want to play college football. So, knowing that, you have to understand, well, what do I have to sacrifice to get what I want? And so for the team, we've just had constant communication about that.”
New head coach Eliah Drinkwitz hadn’t known Whiteside for very long at that point, but he said his voice carried so much weight because it was clear that his lifestyle aligned with his message.
“His personal life and his on the field life match,” said Drinkwitz. “He lives a low-drama off-the-field life, takes care of his body. He does things the right way and then he performs well on the field, and when you do that you have credibility when you speak to your team and it's about what you’re doing off the field.”
Now that the first game week of his senior season has finally arrived, Whiteside will focus on taking over a leadership role on the defensive front with his play. He’s expected to take over current Cleveland Brown Jordan Elliott’s role as a double-team magnet on the interior of the line. A popular offseason talking point has been whether Whiteside will be able to repeat as the leading sack man on the defense now that he won’t be lined up next to Elliott.
Whiteside couldn’t care less. He wants to play well at his position because he wants his team to win, but he has few individual, statistical goals for this season. As his college career has wound down and he’s become increasingly involved in the community away from the football facility, Whiteside has found himself viewing football more as a vehicle to drive change than as an end in itself.
“Even if I’m a great football player, that doesn’t matter,” Whiteside said. “It matters like what I do on this stage to spread His word, what I do for the community, what I do in communities that help change people’s lives. That’s what matters to me the most, more than just being known as a great football player.”
“He said to me that he was just out here getting his feet wet,” Evans said, “and now the water’s up to his nose when it comes to making change.”
Whiteside hopes to use a coming offseason to intern for a pastor and “learn the ropes.” His ultimate goal is to use the ministry to teach young people about Christianity and how they can use it to make a difference in their communities, two things he wishes he could have been introduced to prior to college. Football has already given him a significant audience, but he wants an even bigger one, hence the mega-church idea.
In order to get there, the “silent assassin” knows he’ll have to make his voice heard. He’s shown this offseason that he’s not afraid to speak up, even if it doesn’t come naturally.
“I want everybody else to experience the change that I felt through finding God,” said Whiteside. “That’s something that I gotta get out of my comfort zone to do, but I’m happy and willing to do that.”