{"id":3822,"date":"2015-06-18T17:46:50","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T21:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2016\/02\/03\/the-comeback-kid\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T17:23:47","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T22:23:47","slug":"the-comeback-kid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/the-comeback-kid\/","title":{"rendered":"The comeback kid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AndersonK2010WCU3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kadarron \u201cKD\u201d Anderson \u201912 wasn\u2019t your typical Furman football player.<\/p>\n

For one thing, he was really, really good\u2014first-team All-America good. For another, he grew up in the Connie Maxwell Children\u2019s Home in Greenwood, S.C., alongside more than a hundred other kids facing the world with their backs against the wall.<\/p>\n

A Furman athletic scholarship was an opportunity boys who grow up foster care aren\u2019t supposed to have, but Anderson wasn\u2019t your typical boy in foster care, either.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was naturally gifted and had that inner drive to discipline himself, and that\u2019s very rare for us to see,\u201d says Doug Kauffmann, who served as Anderson\u2019s pastor at Connie Maxwell from the time he arrived. \u201cMaybe his first year or two might have been a transition time, but he really got to a point where he was smart enough to say this place has a lot to offer me. A lot of kids don\u2019t ever get there, or they get there too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson was born in Rock Hill, S.C., the youngest of five children to a mother struggling with substance abuse that eventually left her unable to take care of the family. He and his older brother, Demarco, had the relative good fortune of eventually being placed in Connie Maxwell, which is considered one of the best children\u2019s homes in the state, at the ages of 8 and 9.<\/p>\n

It was maybe their last chance, but it was a real one. Miller Murphy, Connie Maxwell\u2019s longtime director of communications, remembers Anderson \u201ccarrying a lot of hurt\u201d when he first walked through the doors, but it didn\u2019t take much time to set a course from which he\u2019s never wavered.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe teases us. He says when he first got to his cottage, he saw they had a Nintendo and everything was OK then,\u201d Murphy says.<\/p>\n

Anderson embraced structure in his life, excelling in school, and it became apparent along the way that despite his small size he was exceptionally athletic. He and Demarco went on to star in football and basketball at Emerald High School, and by his junior season Kadarron\u2014no longer small\u2014was emerging as a Division I prospect perhaps too talented for Furman to land.<\/p>\n

He was getting scholarship offers from mid-majors, schools that compete a level up from Furman in the Football Bowl Subdivision, but Anderson knew Furman had more to offer than sports in the form of academic reputation. \u201cI visited Furman after sophomore year on a college tour not even thinking about football,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cI wanted to get an academic scholarship. That\u2019s what I was striving for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson was the ideal fit for Furman\u2019s model highlighting the holistic education of a student-athlete. Clint Hill, director of athletics fundraising, says, \u201cFurman\u2019s athletics department strives to provide \u2018Life Lessons through the Pursuit of Athletics Excellence.\u2019 Those life lessons include time management, work ethic, and being a part of something bigger than yourself . . . a team, a class, a university.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furman also had the added bonus of proximity. Anderson\u2019s mother and three sisters had reentered his life, and he didn\u2019t want to leave them again. \u201cI wanted to stay close to home so my family could come to the games,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

They did, and he gave them a show as a ball-hawking linebacker. Anderson joined Will Bouton \u201902 as the only two Paladins to ever lead the team in tackles in a season three times, and he graduated in four years with a degree in business administration. \u201cHe was a tremendous player,\u201d Furman coach Bruce Fowler \u201981 says.<\/p>\n

The New Orleans Saints and Tennessee Titans both signed Anderson to free agent NFL contracts, and he was among the final cuts for each. Now settled back in Greenville, Anderson is a facility director for D1 Sports Training and a frequent presence at lunchtime basketball games on the Furman campus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think every kid grows up wanting to be a professional athlete . . . Just getting the opportunity to be there for a short time was a dream come true for me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Married with a small child and another on the way, Anderson is at ease with the NFL not working out, perhaps because he long ago learned to recognize what\u2019s truly important in life. Though reluctant to talk about himself during an interview, Anderson hasn\u2019t been shy about sharing his inspiring story with at-risk children. That volunteer work earned him the prestigious Palmetto Patriot Award in 2010.\"Unknown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cPeople ask that question a lot: How did you overcome that adversity? And I think from a young age I kind of the made the decision that I was going to take the cards I was dealt and I wasn\u2019t going to let that be an excuse for me not being successful and achieving my goals,\u201d he says. \u201cI learned to not dwell on things you can\u2019t control.\u201d<\/p>\n

For fundraisers like Hill, on the front line raising dollars to provide student-athlete scholarships like the one that brought Anderson to Furman, this kind of inspiration and impact is all the motivation he needs. \u201cKadarron\u2019s story gets to the heart of what we do in the Paladin Club . . . scholarships provide opportunity for kids to live out their dreams. We are very proud of KD, and there is no better representative in our community than this young man.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in Anderson\u2019s own words, \u201cHaving my whole family come up for football games helped bring my family back together, and we\u2019ve made sure that we\u2019ve stayed close. Furman played a huge role in that,\u201d he says, noting his mother has been clean for 12 years. \u201cI came to Furman more prepared for life than some people who are actually raised by their parents.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kadarron \u201cKD\u201d Anderson \u201912 wasn\u2019t your typical Furman football player. For one thing, he was really, really good\u2014first-team All-America good. For another, he grew up in the Connie Maxwell Children\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":14966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,60,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-alumni-profiles","category-parent-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}