When Albert Rocker and Steven Sylvester shared a hotel room for road games, the space transformed into part barber shop, part mountaintop.
“There’d be a lot of younger guys maybe in the room, like freshmen or sophomores, just hanging out with us,” said Sylvester, a Georgia Tech linebacker, “and he’d just be talking to us, giving us the knowledge, his Yoda knowledge.”
Among Rocker’s pearls was an admonition not to forsake education in hopes of playing in the NFL. Rocker, the son of a retired Army first sergeant and who has a taste for Polo and Ludacris, lived the advice. With a management degree in hand, but a season of eligibility remaining, Rocker won’t suit up when the Yellow Jackets begin preseason practice Wednesday. Over the summer, Rocker accepted a management position with Microsoft.
“I’m as proud of him as the guys who are in the NFL,” Tech coach Paul Johnson said.
Rocker’s decision to give up his senior season to enter the workforce is not unheard of, but is unusual.
“It’s probably the toughest decision I ever made in my life,” he said.
On paper, Rocker’s football career did not amount to much. Heavily recruited out of New Market, Ala., Rocker played special teams and backup linebacker and made nine tackles.
“My career didn’t really pan out like I wanted it to,” he said.
However, he expected to back up at inside and outside linebacker and looked forward to his final season. He still harbored hopes of a shot at the NFL. Despite the fact that he graduated with a 2.8 GPA and often amused Sylvester by doing homework in their hotel room the night before games, he saw himself as a football player.
As a result, when he first began to correspond with a Microsoft recruiter who eventually offered him a job starting in the summer, relinquishing his last season was not an option. But, just as he had gone through recruiting five years earlier, receiving offers from Alabama, Auburn and Tennessee, among others, Microsoft made its own pitch. He could start out of college at a multinational company at a starting salary close to six figures. Unsure, Rocker prayed and talked with mentors and family.
“A million people would die for that opportunity [to play college football] just like a million people would die for this job that I received,” he said.
On graduation day in May, striding across the stage at the Georgia Dome to accept his diploma, Rocker saw his mother Sheri’s beaming face. He realized how proud she would be if her son took a job at a company like Microsoft.
“That time is when I felt it in my heart, that that’s where God was leading me, too,” Rocker said.
Despite accepting the job soon after, Rocker kept working out with the team, somehow hoping Microsoft would let him start work after the season and keep the pledge he had made to his teammates to play the whole way through. When it didn’t happen, he told teammates in June in a tear-filled speech following a morning workout.
“Everybody was proud of him because it’s not every day you get a chance to work with a company like Microsoft,” Sylvester said.
At the ACC Football Kickoff last week in Pinehurst, N.C., Johnson crowed about Rocker, suggesting he might include Rocker’s picture in recruiting materials alongside Tech alumni in the NFL such as Calvin Johnson.
“He’s talking about it [as though] it’s a hard decision, what do I do?” Johnson said. “I’m like, That’s what you came to Georgia Tech for. Here’s your opportunity.”
Rocker will be a technical account manager, a position in which he’ll oversee the IT infrastructure for Microsoft clients. He’ll be based out of Los Angeles.
He is training in the Microsoft Academy for College Hires (MACH), where his colleagues include graduates from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke and North Carolina. Rocker was told that he was the first Division I athlete to participate in MACH, a six-year-old program that has trained more than 2,500 new graduates.
He has felt the pangs of separation, reading Twitter posts from teammates groaning about workouts. To remain joined with the team, he took strength-and-conditioning coach Neal Peduzzi’s program for the summer and has followed it daily, rising at 5 a.m. to run and lift.
Rocker, who plans to visit this coming week as Tech begins practice, will miss running out of the Bobby Dodd Stadium tunnel and the camaraderie of the locker room. Before Microsoft, he intended to contribute to the Jackets’ effort to win the ACC title.
“I feel like I could have helped the team a lot this year,” Rocker said.
By showing his teammates an unlikely path, he already has.
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