ART WASN’T IN MY PLAYBOOK
10/6/2021 9:20:00 AM | General
Peterson Balancing Character Formation Work with Her Creativity Side
By Jerry HillBaylor Bear Insider
Through the many twists and turns in her life – from Caribbean American growing up in a single-parent home, to high school track star, to injured student-athlete at UCF, to the pain of a grad school rejection, to her current role as Baylor Athletics' associate director of Character Formation – art has been the one constant for Christal Peterson.
"My mom would tell you I was always an artist," said the 28-year-old Peterson, who painted a Homecoming mural that was displayed at Waco Escape Rooms last fall and is one of several local artists doing fabric silhouettes for the "Bridges of Souls" project, each representing a life lost to COVID-19 in McLennan County.
"I was just always a drawer. I loved to create my own world. I wanted to make a clubhouse, and we didn't have trees in our neighborhood. So, I made a machete one out of paper in my room, kind of a room within a room. That's just how I was, I always wanted to build with my hands."
Until moving to Waco a little over two years ago, though, it was Christal's hidden passion. While her friends in Hampton, Va., and teammates at UCF encouraged her to sell them, Peterson saw her paintings and drawings more as gifts than commercial products.
"I never really took it serious until that time I was injured in college. So, that was a pause," she said. "I lived in a house with another girl who worked on campus, and our house was filled with drawings. I even left four of them, because she loved them so much. She said, 'Please don't take these when you leave. I want them.' So, I guess they're somewhere in her apartment now."
It was during another pause, last year's COVID-19 shutdown, that Christal began painting again.
"I found myself, during the breaks we had from Zoom meetings and work, just drawing and painting," she said. "During Juneteenth, I remember painting a very big piece called 'Freedom.' It was a powerful piece, and it reminded me of where I'm from."
While she was born in Houston, she moved to Hampton when she was 9 years old and "spent a big chunk of my life there." The Emancipation Proclamation Tree is on the Hampton University campus, while Galveston, just outside of Houston, was "the place where the last slaves found out they were free."
"When you think of Galveston, you think of the beach, you never think about the history part," Christal said. "I drew that as a Caribbean American, realizing that I've been in two prominent places for black culture. That painting blew me up, for some reason. I don't know how, but everybody was reaching out to me, saying, 'You need to sell your art.'''
That's when she created her own business, Christal Createsss, LLC, where she displays her art on Instagram and etsy accounts.
"People were actually buying my art, which I was like, 'Wow, Christal, I think you're better than you think, and people do want to support you,''' she said. "I feel like anyone who is a creator is like, 'Oh, I'm not good enough to do that.' People kept telling me, kept telling me, but I was like, 'No, I'd rather give it for free,' because I just love creating and I love making people happy."
Mind you, at least for now, art is just a passion that she does on the side. She's in what she considers a dream job, overseeing an assistance program at Baylor that "helps young professionals in our athletic community get their foot in the door. I just realized that I have a passion for impacting people and helping them grow."
That's because she's been where they are.
Her basketball dreams dashed by a lack of height, Christal had one of her friends ask her to join the track team, "and I only did it because she didn't want to go by herself."
Initially on the cross country team, Christal told her coach at Phoebus High School that she was a sprinter, not a distance runner. Although she had never run track before, she said, "I bet you I can beat every girl that's on your sprint side right now."
When the coach called her bluff, she beat every sprinter on the team, "including two of our girls who went to (the state meet). . . . And the rest is history."
Eventually winning state and national titles in the 60-meter dash, Christal had coast-to-coast recruiting attention, but ended up in Orlando, Fla., at the University of Central Florida.
"When I stepped foot on the campus and I met Coach Caryl (Smith Gilbert), met the team, I was blown away," she said. "I think what really captivated me was she was just coming from an assistant's job at Tennessee and had great success there, but now she's the head coach at another Division I school and she's talking about legacy. I just came off a legacy year at my high school, I want to continue to build off this."
As a freshman, Christal earned all-conference honors in the 60 meters indoors and 4x400 relay outdoors at the Conference USA meets.
Trying to push through an injury at the start of her sophomore year, because "I didn't want Coach to think I was faking it," she collapsed during a practice and again at the C-USA Indoor Championships. An MRI showed that Christal had a tear and a hole in her patellar tendon.
Not wanting to go through surgery, she instead had a procedure called the PRP (platelet-rich plasma) shot. While it took less time to rehab, Christal was still sidelined and back home when the UCF team finished seventh overall and the 4x100 relay placed second behind Texas A&M at the 2013 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships.
"I remember watching that race in tears because I'm supposed to be there," said Christal, who was a second-team All-American in the 4x100 relay in 2014 and a three-time conference champion in the 4x100 relay. "Coach texts me saying, 'Hey, we miss you, Big Dawg, but your recovery is much more important.'''
In one of her darkest times, Christal said she "ended up finding the light" through a UCF student-athlete development office that included current Baylor Senior Associate AD Marcus Sedberry and Cori Pinkett, Associate AD for Character Formation.
Going into the office just to staple a paper, Christal met Pinkett and had a conversation that changed the direction of her life.
"I couldn't tell you everything that was discussed in that conversation," Pinkett said, "but I remember thinking, 'This is one we're going to need to get plugged in and one that will be good to invest in, because there's something there.'''
Initially involved in community engagement, Christal became more and more involved in the student-athlete development area, and "Cori started filling up opportunities for me to walk into."
"Little bit by little bit, they were lighting a fire in me that I really didn't even know was there," she said.
Realizing that track can be taken away, just like it was during her sophomore indoor season, Christal asked herself, "What are you going to do to set yourself up for the future?"
"I was already an introvert, didn't really like talking to people," she said. "But, to be successful, you've got to get past that. You need to put yourself out there. If people don't like you, they don't like you."
Serving as president of the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee at UCF, Christal remembers going to new Senior Woman Administrator Brandi Stuart on her first day in the office and saying, "I just wanted to communicate with you what our office is all about."
"She was so impressed with me," Peterson said of Stuart, who's now at Texas Tech, "because she said, 'I've never had an athlete come and tell me this is what the tone is and this is how we can work together.' After a while, people thought I was an administrator because of how involved I was in our office."
Despite that wealth of experience on the student-athlete development side, as a health science pre-clinical major, Christal planned to be a physician's assistant and maybe get into physical therapy. She even applied for grad school in the health administration department, and was devastated when she was denied because of her lack of clinical hours.
"Instead of being defeated and saying, 'Well, forget this. I'm just going to take my extra year doing whatever,''' Christal said, "I decided to talk to my coach, look at my schedule and find some classes to take so I could get those clinical hours."
In addition to two health classes, she took a hip-hop music class and a sport management class taught by program director Scott Bukstien.
"In the process of me doing my clinical hours, I'm going to class, and I started really loving my sport business management class," Christal said. "I remember Scott Bukstein pulling me from class one day and asking, 'Have you ever thought about DeVos (Sport Business Management Graduate Program)?'
"Which is funny, because our men's soccer head coach, Bryan Cunningham, had said the exact same thing. He kept telling me i would be perfect for DeVos. As an athlete, I had heard of DeVos a lot, but I just thought it was so far-fetched for me. Some of the best of the best have come out of DeVos."
But, she decided to "shoot my shot and see what happens." Nothing but net. This time, she got accepted to graduate school.
"I remember telling Ben Rodriguez, who was the director of the student-athlete development office at the time, 'If I get into grad school, I'm going to work for you,''' Christal said. "So, when I got accepted, I didn't call my mom, didn't call my dad, didn't even call my best friend. I called Ben as soon as possible, and I said, 'When can I interview?'
"I was bluffing it a couple times, but somehow I guess the confidence made people say yes, and it worked out for me."
During the 18-month graduate program, Christal spent the whole time in the Student-Athlete Welfare and Development (SAWD) office working under Rodriguez. She started a "Knightship" internship program, revamped the Swords Awards (similar to Baylor's Golden Bruisers) and also did an eight-week boot camp for new students.
Coming to another crossroads after graduating with a master's degree, Christal got job offers from Holy Cross and Wheaton College just two days before a scheduled interview at Baylor with Marcus Sedberry and Cori Pinkett.
"Two of my favorite people are at Baylor, and they're looking for somebody in Character Formation. I was like, 'Oh, this is where I need to go,''' she said.
But, she had firm offers on the table from Holy Cross and Wheaton, without knowing for sure what was going to happen at Baylor.
In something of a risky move, she went to Pinkett, one of her mentors, and asked, "What should I do?"
Taking off her Baylor hat and "I'm hiring someone" hat and replacing it with her mentor/friend hat, Cori told her, "Christal, it would be very difficult for me to tell you to turn down a job that you have on the table, that's doing what you want to do, that will stretch you and grow you and give you great experiences, for a maybe. You could miss out on a great opportunity waiting for a maybe."
Instead of taking the job at NCAA Division I Holy Cross, on the advice of her mentor, Christal took the position at Division III Wheaton College in Massachusetts. The NCAA was funding the position through an Ethnic Women's and Minority grant, giving her the chance to start a Character Formation program and giving her an additional $3,000 for professional development.
In 10 months at Wheaton, Christal was able to create some new programming, including a leadership academy, and worked closely with President Dennis Hanno. She was actually with him in Rwanda, teaching an entrepreneur class with her student-athletes, when she got the job offer from Baylor.
"Imagine me being in Rwanda with my president from Wheaton College, accepting another job," she said. "I was like, 'Oh no, he's going to leave me here,' because this is like the worst time to tell somebody, 'Hey, thank you so much for this opportunity, but I'm leaving.' Of course, the president did not do that."
Actually, he told her that he knew it was going to happen, "because people like you definitely don't stay around for very much longer. They have bigger things they need to accomplish. But, your 10 months here at Wheaton, you've transformed so many things. We are always going to be grateful to you."
The chance to reunite with Pinkett and Sedberry, two mentors that she had known since her early days at UCF, was too good to pass up.
"It's hard to put into words," Pinkett said. "Think about the layers of this opportunity. I'm back with the person that I was a graduate assistant for, in Marcus. Both of us worked with Christal, and now Christal wins the job to be able to be with us as part of our team. I just feel fortunate to be able to still grow, develop, coach up, someone that I started with so many years ago. I never thought I would get an opportunity like this to work with one of my student-athletes."
Surviving COVID-19 and then the once-in-a-generation snow blizzard last February, Christal said they made sure the "students knew who we were and that we're here to help."
"I'm just so thankful that I did take the time to cultivate relationship," she said, "because during the COVID year when we had to do everything virtually, I was still in communication with our students. 'How are you doing? Is everything OK? Do you need anything?' Obviously, that built a level of trust and consistency, because I wasn't just, 'Hey, I'm here,' and then I'm gone. Like, we were really there for them."
Now in her third year at Baylor, Christal says she is "living for the moment," but would love the chance to move into a role like Pinkett as Associate AD for Character Formation someday.
And then, there's this whole art thing.
"The art was not something that I had in my plans. It was not in my playbook at all," she said. "But, you start to think, 'Hey, if athletics doesn't work out for me, would I want to become an artist?' And that kind of scares me a little bit, because I've really only known athletics my whole life. I think for me, it's just saying yes to opportunities to breathe life into my art, but also showing up for our 500-plus student-athletes who need me. I just want to have an impact in their lives."
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