“When you value other people, when you value other people’s life and dreams and goals and just the fact that they’re standing in front of you and you are working with them every day, when you really value them as people, I don’t think you have to have this list of what you’re not going to do,” she said. She is careful - and precise - when discussing her frustrations with Stephens. The hard-charging coach’s attempts at change - he hated what he saw of himself in Season 1 - become a theme of the second season, and Wagner grows increasingly skeptical as the year goes on. Everything about it - it’s how he runs the institution, his message - comes from him.” She had become personally unhappy in Scooba (population around 700) and wanted more for her 8-year-old daughter, Kennedy. The idea for 10 Thousand Pencils didn’t arise from Last Chance U - she’d been dreaming of finding a way to do her work independent from an athletic department for a while - but the show enabled her to make the leap.
He bought right in and usually that’s half the battle.” He loved the show and he’d seen me working with players and he understood that, he was open with me from the beginning and very honest about his own weaknesses and what we could do to fix them. And I think that was the reaction of this kid when he was told he had a new advisor: ‘Someone else to yell at me.’ … When his coach told him it was Miss Wagner, that changed. “It was that difficult, their walls were that high, they were so not into it. “It might have taken me six months to a year to reach some guys,” she said. And she had a “guinea pig” this summer, a player headed off to college who needed extra assistance staying on the path toward qualifying - meaning Wagner could intervene before junior college became the last option.Īnd while Wagner will do most of this work remotely, without the face-to-face interactions that endeared her to millions of viewers, she believes the show has given her a unique ability to reach players. She has already signed on to consult with a Division II conference to guide the counselors at those schools on dealing with incoming transfers. “A lot of these schools don’t have the money to pay for large staffs, and there’s only a few kids who really need the extra, full-time attention,” she said. She wants to help those sorts of players - and the smaller schools that might end up dealing with them while lacking the resources deployed at big-money schools. Though she oversaw 200 athletes at EMCC, she estimates she spent most of her time on the six to eight who combined Division I athleticism with an inability or unwillingness to keep up the grades needed to transfer to 4-year university. Wagner’s company will offer a wide range of services, but mainly she plans to do what she’s always done: Propel talented athletes who are struggling in school into their next chance at proving themselves. (Her most famous line from Season 1 was, “Do you have a pencil?” And she uttered it so frequently that fans of the show sent her more than 3,000 pencils - and a new desk chair.)
She has since launched her own company, called 10 Thousand Pencils, which will offer academic counseling services to schools and athletes across the country. food company she lasted only a few months in that job. If there’s something you want to do, do it.”Īnd though Wagner originally left the tiny junior college where she had spent eight years to work in marketing for a Birmingham, Ala. “And what they told me is what I told them, ‘Follow your dream. You need to develop something deeper than that. “But we had the sort of relationship - and you see this throughout the show - where it was built on talking about more than the schoolwork. “I think, first, they could sense that I had these frustrations,” she said. There in the office that became the setting for so much of the show (director Greg Whiteley simply planted a camera man there every single day), she asked them: What should I do? And though the first season of the show brought her fame - and job offers - the single mother struggles to figure out what to do next with her life.
The charismatic and forceful academic advisor no longer has a relationship with head football coach Buddy Stephens, which makes her efforts at helping his players even more difficult. Much of what Wagner goes through in Season 2, available starting Friday on Netflix, goes unspoken. She got to that scene, the final one in an 8-episode series, at 4 a.m. Brittany Wagner binged on the screeners of Last Chance U Season 2, watching her own life tumble toward a chaotic job search that ended with her simply leaving East Mississippi Community College one afternoon, tears in her eyes.
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