Crystal Wise
Christian Rodriguez sits in an office of the Westlake headquarters of Charles Schwab.
In a suit perfectly assimilated to an athletic frame molded on a major college football field and a brief stint in the NFL, Rodriguez, by all appearances, achieved his place in the financial services giant as typically as a cooldown in the fall.
He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M, the citadel of tradition, where he was a standout linebacker under head coach R.C. Slocum.
After a brief stay with the National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts, Rodriguez turned his attention to a career in finance.
Today, he is a managing director with Charles Schwab. He heads retail acquisition and development.
Nice little story, right? Well, there’s a little more to it.
Rodriguez was orphaned at 12 years old. He was born in New York but lived the first six years of his life with his grandparents in the Dominican Republic. Rodriguez never knew his father. At 6, he moved with his mother to the states. At 12, his mother was sentenced to 27 years in the federal penitentiary.
It really goes without saying, but dysfunction and instability can dramatically disrupt a teenager's emotional, psychological, and social development.
It’s a story that often doesn’t have a happy ending without the right support or even intervention.
That’s why Christian Rodriguez’s story is all the more compelling and worth retelling.
“I went to first grade and second grade in Irving,” he says. “I went third through sixth in Euless. Got sent to military school in seventh grade and then moved to Mesquite in eighth grade.
“I've covered both sides of the metroplex.”
He lived with grandparents, aunts, and uncles. “All of the above. I’ve covered the whole gamut.” As he put it, he kept getting “kicked out” of homes. Rodriguez, as he tells it, “pushed my limits.”
“I was getting in trouble because my whole thought process was, ‘Hey, if you're smart in school and you're good at sports, why do I need to be home at midnight?’ I was just a turd, I'll just be honest with you.”
Finally, someone intervened.
A coach's responsibility to his players is to guide, support, and inspire them in reaching their full potential, both on and off the field. In many cases, coaches become father figures to their players. Mark Elam, then the head football coach at North Mesquite, went beyond for one of his players. Elam and his family — he had two daughters in high school — took in Rodriguez, then a sophomore who was living with a friend’s family, until he was kicked out again. He was out of places to go.
The coach offered him a place to not only live but grow. It would be, Rodriguez remembers, a “two-year contract.” Not literally, of course. There were no papers or notary involved. The coach was committing for two years, Rodriguez’s junior and senior years of high school.
“It blew me away,” Rodriguez says. “I was actually thinking about going back to the Dominican Republic. The fact that he asked that question of me tells you a lot about him, but he said, ‘I'm not just saying this off the cuff.’ He said he had given it some thought, and he had talked to his family about it.”
Rodriguez, his mentor told him, still had to get a job and he still had to make good grades and otherwise be responsible.
“The bottom line,” Rodriguez says, “it was someone that after having had my mom go to jail, not knowing my father, getting kicked out of house after house after house, it was one time that somebody was, like, ‘No, I genuinely want you to be here, and I want it to be for an extended period of time.’”
It was an “inflection point” for Rodriguez, he says. There was, at last, a stable foundation on which to grow and learn how to live. Not something that was only temporary with habits that were temporary.
“The classic quote is it takes 21 days to form a habit,” Rodriguez says. “When you live with a coach who loves John Wayne and loves discipline and loves all those other things, you build those habits in time. It's been very helpful because I saw how he interacted with his coaching staff. I saw how he interacted with players and, candidly, it's helped me in my career when I deal with people and interact with.”
The discipline that he was only first introduced to in military school in San Marcos was only affirmed and further installed with Elam.
“I don't want Coach to come out to be like this dictatorial, draconian person, but he was a yes-sir, no-sir kind of guy. He was, ‘Hey, you're going to be coming in on curfew on time, you're going to be respectful, you're going to shake people's hands and look them in the eyes.’
“All the stuff that I needed at that time in my life, for sure.”
Rodriguez, who had only begun playing football in the eighth grade, starred at North Mesquite. He ultimately picked Texas A&M over Stanford for the most ironic reason.
It felt like a home and home was Texas, which for the longest time was anything but representative of home.
“I really, really, really wanted to go to Stanford and actually was dead set on going to Stanford,” Rodriguez says.
Football wasn’t his only qualification. He was the senior class president, and his grades were good. Rodriguez finished in the top 5% of his senior class. No. 22 of 444. Right at the cutoff, impressive all the more considering he didn’t speak a lick of English when he arrived as a child and was challenged by dyslexia.
“I was the last person in the top 5% of our graduating class,” Rodriguez says. “I was the kid that would have to get up two times or three times a day in class and have to go talk to the counselor or go to the ESL [English as a second language] teacher or go to the dyslexia specialist and all these other things.
“As you can imagine a lot of kids were saying, ‘You’re the dumb kid,’ or ‘Why do you have to do’ this and that. It stung because it wasn't truly who I thought I was. I made a pact with myself that I was never gonna allow anybody to call me dumb or stupid. I will do extra credit until midnight every night, do all those other things, but it was motivation.”
It helped being a great competitor, too. One doesn’t become a Division I college athlete on talent alone. It requires a lot of work and dedication. Likewise, work and dedication could be employed to overcome shortfalls, too.
But it was Texas A&M he chose.
“Out of all the places that I looked at, it was the one place where I felt like this is family, like this is a place where I can genuinely say I have a family atmosphere,” Rodriguez says. “When I took a step back, I was like, I need to be somewhere where I'm part of a family. And A&M really felt like that place. When you say A&M, you don't just mean the football program, you mean the entire community.”
Today, Rodriguez has a wife, Heather, and a 7-year-old son, Sebastian.
Sebastian, Rodriguez says, has three sets of grandparents. Rodriguez’s mother, whom he reconciled with, and her new husband. Heather’s parents and, of course, Mark and Sharon Elam.
They have remained steadfast in Rodriguez’s life.
“He's my dad. He’s the only father figure that I can say that I've genuinely had who has been there through the good and bad. Coach and Sharon don't have any blood, but they love me unconditionally. I love them unconditionally, and they're part of my family.”