| Jacquielynn Floyd: Drug talk is a lesson in practice 02/03/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News Even facing so tolerant an audience as a roomful of star-struck children, Jason Kreis is almost paralyzed with fear of public speaking.
A professional soccer player – he's a top-scoring forward for the Dallas Burn – Jason, a Duke University graduate, devoted family man and all-around nice guy, is worthy of the overworked cliché "role model." But he was miserable this week in anticipation of the team's annual commitment to lend players for a blitz of anti-drug pep rallies at Dallas-area schools.
"These are the worst two days of the season," Jason confided during a prep class the day before his appearance. "I won't be able to sleep tonight."
The "Burn Out Drugs" program staged rallies at 20 area schools over two days before practice started for the 2001 soccer season. I sat in on the speech-training class to find out what the players were planning to say.
I figured all they had to do was show up and tell everybody to Just Say No, but professional drug counselors have figured out that kids will effortlessly tune out finger-wagging lectures. Every player on the team got a seven-page memo of talking points and discussion topics.
Old-style scare tactics
It's hard to say how well the current approach works. It has to be more effective than the junior-high drug-education class I recall: classroom screening of an aged and oft-spliced movie depicting dull-witted hippies freaking out on bad acid trips and being bundled off to the booby hatch in straitjackets. "He'll be 'far out,' all right," a grim-voiced, Jack Webb-style narrator intones. "Farther out than he ever bargained for!"
The soccer players promised to be more engaging, if a little unsure about what to say. To help them prepare, a brisk trainer stood each one up before a video camera and asked to hear his opening.
Caught off guard, some were a little rough around the edges:
• "Uh ... don't do drugs. That's all I've got so far."
• "I'm gonna talk a little bit about drugs. Look, I wrote out some bullet points."
• "Drugs is, uh, are, not very good."
• "Hello, kids!" – this delivered in a slightly alarming Mister Rogers imitation – "I have some wonderful information to share with you!"
• "I'm gonna tell 'em, 'Don' take drogs.'" Pressed to continue, this Colombian player shrugged helplessly: His English could take him no further.
• "Can I keep my hat on?"
Better with practice
An hour or so of improvisation and study brought everybody's message into presentable shape. Like the others, Jason settled on a snappy talk about dreams and goals and how to get there.
He was still wretched with dread. But when I asked him what he actually thought about kids and drugs, Jason was surprisingly impassioned and articulate.
"I don't really know that abstinence alone is the right message," he said. "At some age, maybe 13 or 14, that may not be enough anymore."
Dreams and goals are fine, he said, but for too many kids those are vague, unrealistic notions with little relevance to their daily lives.
Jason thinks kids need to view success not as an overnight transformation, but as the result of thousands of little daily decisions: to practice or goof off, party or study, sleep in or get up, settle for the easy A or risk the hard-won B-minus.
"The truth is that it's day in and day out, week in and week out: What are you going to do to get closer to that goal? Drugs are never going to help you get there," he said.
Right there in the parking lot, Jason Kreis, public-speaking phobic, delivered the best, most sincere, most persuasive argument against drugs I heard all day.
I hope the kids got to hear it, too.
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