A group of former University of Colorado football players have launched a mentorship program to support Black college students in Colorado with navigating academic and workplace challenges.

The alumni founded a nonprofit organization in 2022 and launched a mentorship program for the first time on Wednesday in person at CU Boulder and virtually.

“We wanted to come back to our community that helped strengthen us and helped launch our careers and try to give back,” said Solomon Wilcots, former NFL player, CU Boulder alum and Emmy-winning sports broadcaster.

Wilcots, Greg Knight and Morris Copeland attended CU Boulder in the 1980s and were on the football team together. Knight is now a businessman with experience at various Fortune 500 companies and most recently was a C-suite executive at one of the largest energy delivery companies in the United States. Copeland pursued a career in social services and retired last year from being the chief community services officer of Miami-Dade County in Florida.

The three men were also connected in college by their decision to join the Beta Theta chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi at CU Boulder, a historically African American fraternity. Their nonprofit, the Beta Theta Achievement Foundation, was named after the chapter that brought them together and instilled in them the values of community and mentorship. The foundation itself is independent and separate from the national fraternity.

“Our foundation came out of our undergraduate fraternity chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi that served as a tremendous support system for all of us as we were trying to matriculate through Boulder at really a different time,” Knight said. “And so this is an incredible opportunity for me to have the ability to come back and give back to the students, because the university and the community gave so much to me.”

Now, the men want to take all the professional knowledge they’ve accumulated and share it with young people to help them as they launch their careers.

“All of us took different paths but we all have one goal in mind, and that’s to create opportunities for young people to feel empowered and to grow and to become productive citizens,” Copeland said.

He said CU Boulder was a wonderful school and he received an awesome education. He recalls out of the roughly 25,000 students that attended CU Boulder when he was there, a few hundred were Black. It was a challenge, but one he wouldn’t change for anything.

“My experience was wonderful because it was good, bad and ugly,” Copeland said. “It was the essence of what human beings have to deal with and all of it made all of us who we are today. It gave us the opportunity to face challenges, things we never thought we would have to deal with. But those things gave us the fortitude and ability with the support system around us to continue to move in the right direction.”

Wilcots hopes the mentorship program can make it easier for students today as they look to develop a career. The program is focused on reaching Black college students throughout Colorado, including at CU Boulder, the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State University.

“We want to go back and help young people who we know are struggling just like we were during that time, trying to figure it all out,” he said. “It was the curriculum — what I should be studying? Is this really what I want to be doing with my life? How do you go about choosing the right career that’s right for you?”

Knight said it’s important to him to share his more than 40 years of experience with young Black men.

“I don’t want to underplay the challenges we have as a community in terms of getting to college and getting through,” Knight said. “But, I really want to play up the fact that we have a lot of people like us who have successfully done that and we now have the ability to help other people and give back.”

The mentorship program covers topics including mindset, goal setting and personal resiliency in the face of challenges while discussing available resources and the foundation as a support system.

Wilcots said it aims to impart knowledge about how to start a career, how to access opportunities and how to to progress, improve, receive promotions and continue to climb to success.

“We hope they take away some tangible skills,” Wilcots said, adding, “We hope they come away with more knowledge, with more resources to be able to make better decisions when it comes to developing a career.”

For more information on the mentorship program, foundation or to donate, visit btafoundation1939.com.