Russ Pillar ’87 P’24.5 – appointed Friday afternoon, one of the first 100 most influential aluns of the 20th century by Brown Alumni magazine-spoke during the inaugural conversation of Brown Sports Network. Based Earlier this year by Charlie Pliner ’26 and Nikolas Rohrmann ’26, Brown Sports Network aims to connect Brown students with professionals and industry leaders.
The pre-professional club has gone from two group independent group study projects that Rohrmann and Pliner developed Last spring. Throughout the spring of 2024, 65 invited speakers around the world spoke in the two classes.
Friday, more than 50 students flooded the Macmillan Hall to watch Pillar’s speech. A number of alumni also attended to support both the pillar and the club.
“If I am lucky to hear Russ Pillar talking, I’m going to introduce myself,” said Sean Morey ’99 during the event. After winning the Super Bowl XL in 2006 as a captain of special teams for Pittsburgh Steelers, Morey was inducted at the Brown Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007.
After buying the Los Angeles marathon in 2008, Pillar quadrupled his attendance within two years, according to his LinkedIn page. In 2012, Pillar founded Reigning Champs, a NCAA Path-T-College program which was then sold in 2021.
Despite his career in sport, when Pillar began his speech, it was not at all sport. Instead, Pillar spoke of the main dishes to remember from its own professional development.
For public members, pillar told what he called his bravest experience. As a junior who had never traveled further from his New York house than Providence, he studied abroad in Japan for a year. In a period before email, SMS and cheap international telephone calls, pillar was incredibly alone and bad in the country.
But if he could pass this year abroad, said Pillar, he knew he could cross anything.
“Be courageous,” he told participants. “When you are in the world and you are in a situation where you are uncomfortable, remember your (most courageous moment), and remember that if you could do it, you can do it.”
The pillar encouraged participants to embrace their “thorny”: “Press what makes you different and what makes you special,” he said, “and that will help you win”.
He also advised students to take command of their lives and prioritize work towards their objectives.
Morey has echoed at this point, noting that doing work when the spotlights are not on – especially on the days when it has the most trouble – it’s when the magic occurs. By thinking about his stay in the NFL, Morey said that “every day was a lesson in humility and resilience”.
“Fighting by failure,” he added, “is the only way to succeed.”
Pillar’s final message to students was to always “prioritize the meaning”. As he finished his speech, the public broke out in applause.
The speech “was really influential,” said Dimitrios Kratimenos ’28, a goalkeeper of the Men-Polo male team after the event. “It was one of the best discussions I have ever heard in my life.”
Kratimenos teammates expressed a similar feeling.
“I did not expect to go with such a different view of what I want to do after university,” Mac Berry ’27 told Herald.
Berry came to speak by thinking that it would focus on the importance of sport, but when he left, he realized that “it had nothing to do with sport and had everything with the character you are building”.
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Lydell Dyer is a sports editor for The Herald. A junior from Bonn, Germany, Lydell studies English and non -fictional political sciences, and if he is not out of “making words pretty”, you can find him lifting heavy circles in Nelson.