Alan Babbitt: Welcome to the Hope College Athletics Orange and Blue Podcast, Episode 2 this summer. Hard to believe time flies, but this is the fourth season of me bringing conversations of Hope where we talk to Hope College student-athletes, coaches, and staff and share their stories and their time here at Hope College. We have another exceptional representative of our three pillars and Hope Athletics of academic success, competitive excellence and transformational experience with senior Dylan Clem of the Hope College football team. Welcome to the Orange and Blue podcast Dylan.

Dylan Clem: Thanks for having me.

Alan Babbitt: Dylan, there's a lot of different points that I've been thinking about as I've been pondering, this conversation with you. Offensive linemen, I find are always fascinating to speak with. I mean Jason Kelce is just one example of the latest, but just in terms of so, it's always fine. I had a good friend that I worked with many years ago that was an offensive lineman as well. I'll start there. Have you always been an offensive lineman? Is that kind of as you picked up football? What do you think makes you offensive lineman?

Dylan Clem: I was blessed to be, let's say a husky child when I was younger. I only played one year of flag football which wasn't normal. I played my first year rocket as a third grader because I already had the tape on my helmet for kids who couldn't touch the football basically. I played rocket football in third grade first year and the minors league, then I played in the larger league in fourth fifth and sixth grade because once again, I already had that tape on my helmet, so I can't even give you a weight because I was so young. But I was one of the bigger kids out there even though I was younger. Then I would say when I was in eighth grade. I slimmed down a lot. I grew probably six inches. I was probably 6-2. In eighth grade I was around 200 pounds, maybe 190, so I actually played tight end my eighth grade and then I got pulled up to varsity as a freshman and was a tight end in my freshman year. which is my funny story because every lineman you ever meet thinks that they're the best athlete on the field, have the best hands have the best footwork.

Alan Babbitt: Of course.

Dylan Clem: Then my sophomore year, we had a ton of linemen graduate. I got put to right tackle a little skinnier because I had been tight end before. But I gained some weight that year and then ever since then junior and senior year. I was a center. Then obviously my time at Hope I've been a lineman but I mean, I don't know it's weird because nobody really I would say wants to play O-Line when they're a young kid. Everyone wants to touch the football. Everyone wants to be a quarterback. Everyone wants to run the ball. I had that glimpse of that my eighth grade year and freshman year, but ever since I've been in o-lineman, I've loved it. I mean, it's hard sometimes, but most the time it's rewarding to be able to look up and be like us five guys like we did that. We controlled the game. We did that. Even though you don't really get we always scored a touchdown or we had this many rushing yards. It's like you can kind look around on your little brotherhood of five guys out there in the field and feel that.

Alan Babbitt: Another thing is that you have to work together and you could be the greatest offensive lineman in the world. But if a guy either to your left or right is struggling or even it's just that physicality and all the things that go in with it. It doesn't matter how good you are because you really truly have to work together as a unit

Dylan Clem: Football in general, both sides of the ball, the most cliche football saying ever is every offensive play is supposed to score a touchdown and every defensive play is supposed to stop a touchdown. I think one thing that Luke Marsh and I who were both captains on the football team is we've really tried to decrease that 11 down to us five O-lineman. What's the percentage of the plays were gonna go 5-for-5? That was our biggest jump from our 6-4 year last to last year was our percentage of going 5-for-5 up front skyrocketed and that led to more rushing yards and less sacks. We really decreased that 11 guy offense to just us five and focusing on what we can do.

Alan Babbitt: An exceptional season for the team, 8-2 and right on the verge of possibly getting an at-large berth to the playoffs and then also individual accolades for you as an All-American from D3 football.com as well as a College Sports Communicators academic All American when you look at in the bigger picture with being an offensive lineman, how is that shaped you as a person now and as a student is that translated anyway to help you I mean you're studying civil engineer and we're gonna go in a little bit about more on your academic accolades as well. How's being an t and playing football help to you thrive in the classroom, too?

Dylan Clem: Honestly, it's been we keep bringing up team aspect of it, but when I got back from Christmas break, I obviously had received these accolades and stuff. I just pulled all my linemen together and I was like 'Guys I may have gotten this award, but It was all of us that mindset of going if all 50for-5.' linemen don't do their job, no one lineman can shine, and that's just how it is. I think that's just been the biggest maturity as I've been in my time at Hope I feel like our 8-2 my sophomore years it was a lot of individual accolades. Individually, I'm going to do this and that worked for us. That's another thing that I've learned about football is there is no secret sauce, every team is different, every team is going ot interact differently. My sophomore are we were 8-2. We're very individualized and there's no drama at all. We just handled business and we won and we played football games and we won. Then my junior year all camp we were super close, we were very different from the year before we ended up having drama that year. We went six and four and then last year, I would say it was very similar to my junior year where we were super close and it ended up working out for us. So I mean relating that to the classroom, The one thing I learned is you can never ask for too much help, especially in engineering, especially I'm down here in Virginia right now with an internship and every day I feel like I'm annoying but I want to ask questions. I want to ask the people who know things so that I can learn and expand my knowledge for engineering. Especially in the classroom. I've really found to find a family in engineering where I could sit around and study for three, four hours and really dive into what we were learning and make it fun. Cole Harger, who just graduated this past year, he was a center on the team, he was my study buddy. We'd have practice till about 7, 7;15, and then would go grab dinner. Then we'd go do homework in the library. We had our spot and we'd be there to about 11 o'clock. I think that's the biggest thing is just you can do more stuff in a team, the individualized stuff,  you're not going to get it done as quickly as if you can bring people together and pass off tasks and do things together. Then you really get stuff done.

Alan Babbitt: Tell us about that who are you interning with. What is your role as you're learning this summer?

Dylan Clem: I started looking in the DC area when my girlfriend accepted a job down here. She's working down in DC starting July 13th, so very excited for her to get that started and start her working world. I get six more months of fun before I do that, so I started looking down here and it was a little scary just moved to entirely new place, living in a studio apartment right now. It's about 300 square feet. I can show you the kitchen in the bathroom at the same time, but it's been a great experience. I took that leap of faith to come down here spend the money on rent basically for knowledge and a little bit of money. The first four weeks have been great. A lot of what Hope taught me in the engineering program has correlated, along with just the ability to work hard and that comes in the classroom and the football field and just honestly campus in general. That's just why I love Hope everyone has that mission to want to succeed, to want to work hard, to want to do all those things. I've really felt the presence of Hope in my life around here. I found a church down here and it just feels like Hope know what I mean. It just has that Hope feeling. It felt a little bit like home and so I've been there the past couple weekends and I'm loving that. I'm happy I took this fate of leap of faith. I hope and works out for me and get a job at the end of this, so that I can start when football's all over but yeah, It's a lot hotter down here. I can tell you that.

Alan Babbitt: Is engineering always been something that you've been wanting to study or is that something when you came to Hope you discovered?

Dylan Clem: I think every engineering in the world might say this one-liner but I started when I was playing Legos just from a little age. I had a ton of Legos that I was gifte from a family friend and I would always just sit in my room and try to build these mass structures that my mom would make me clean up at the end of the day. I was always pretty good at math, science. I never really liked writing and English and grammar and all that stuff. I knew I wanted to do something with math. Someone who actually came back to my high school from Hope he was a teacher at my high school. He had said that the Hope Engineering Program was growing and I should look into it. That was actually my start and I hadn't even been getting recruited by Hope at this point. This is my sophomore junior high school. I looked at the engineering program and what Hope started . I was like, 'Yeah I want to do and I think engineering is what I want to do.' This was going into my senior yearr now. I'm going to all these football camps and I'm telling these coaches I want to be an engineer. It's crazy to say this but a lot of the coaches were you can't play football and be an engineer it's just too much time. You're going to get done with practice and you're not going to have too much tough time to do your homework. We don't want you to fail and I was like, that's interesting because I'm like that doesn't really make you want to come here because football's only five years of my life. I want to find something that I love, soa lot of those schools, I can cross right off my list. When I came to Hope the first thing I think there's said was all right. Let me get you the football player who's an engineer. I think he showed me Dan Romano who was probably the smartest person I know. Ever since then, Hope's been that place where I felt like I could do it all Coach (Peter) Stuursma and all of our coaches really gave us that chance to succeed and gave us that chance to feel like we can do whatever we want. I actually show up to Hope and the coolest thing about the Hope engineering program was that their intro class takes you through all different types of engineering. You'll do civil two weeks. You'll do mechanical two weeks. You'll build circuits and do electrical. I really loved the bridge section of the civil and then we got to make concrete and crush it. So I was like, that's pretty cool. I like that and so I stuck with civil and I've loved it ever since last summer. I did a civil internship. It's weird. You get a civil degree and then there's two branches you can go from there. You can do actual civil which is below the ground that's piping and water and stuff. Then what I'm doing this summer is structural which is building skyscrapers stuff above the ground. I think I'll probably stick with the structural side of things. That means I'll have to probably go get a master somewhere and stuff like that. But Hope's civil program definitely set me up for success and I'm liking it so far.

Alan Babbitt: What have you learned, as you delve into this about balancing that doing everything they want to do and getting it done? I mean that's part of the challenge of college whether you're an athlete or not, but then you throw the athlete responsibilities on that whatever you learned that kind of find a way to accomplish all that you want to accomplish. 

Dylan Clem: Honestly, it's doing the things that you don't want to do. High school is a little difficult and I feel like there I don't know as a young adult. You're under 18, your parents are still making you do things. But when you go to college, you're dropped off, you're an adult. Everything's on your own. If you don't want to play football, you don't have to go to lifting at 4:30 in the morning. You can just quit. I think that's the biggest maturity from high school to college to real life. I think why that college portion of your life is so important because you really learn to do hard things on your own. Three years I did not want to get up at 4:30 am four days a week in the coldness of January, February and March where I'm up at 4:45 scraping off my car just to go get yelled at by [Dan} Margritz, our strength coach, for an hour and a half and come back sore and then go to class. but honestly, the life I'm living now is easy compared to that. I mean I get up at 6:15. Now I go lift. I get my left in and then I go to work. I'm show up to work by 8:30, 8:45. I'm still learning a lot at work, but the lifestyle is now someone's coming to me 'Hey, I need to get this done by the end of the week' and it's like, I can get this done in two days. I just think that the football aspect and the learning aspect of Hope in general and really a lot of colleges, but Hope in general has just taught us all how to work hard, get our work done, do things we don't want to do because you'd be surprised how many people out there don't have that drive to just I don't want to do that. I'm not going do it.

Alan Babbitt: You've been blessed with a supportive family too. Talk about your family growing up in Stevensville. I'm sure that's been something that shaped you as well that got you prepared or the opportunity that you found at Hope.

Dylan Clem: Stevensville, Michigan, is a very big athletics town in general. I have a healthy familiy. Dad and Mom are doing good. I have three older sisters. Two of them are pregnant right now, so that's exciting for the family first grandchildren for my parents. My childhood, I grew up on weekends at the soccer field watching my sisters play sports. A lot of my time my early high school years was going all over the country watching my sister [Lauren] play at Northwestern. She was an All-American goalkeeper there. and basically the moral story is that I had huge shoes to fill. My three sisters were the light of my world. They were the motivation for me to succeed to work hard. They won so many district and regional state championships they were basically women's sports in a general at my high school like you just of it all. When I was in my early high school years I had seen my sister winning All-America award.s And at that point I was like I want to do that like that. That's my goal. I want to do that and that sparked my want to be a college athlete. My time at Lakeshore it was good. I loved it. I would say I'd love to basketball more than football. Unfortunately. I'm a basketball player at heart. We play some o-line pickup games on Fridays [at Hope] and they can tell you I ball out. I'm only 6-3, so I knew that my greatest chance for success would probably be to play football. I made that decision probably halfway through my junior year and then the rest is history now, Lakeshore's an awesome awesome place. It's centered around Sports. I'll say that people really buy to their sports teams. I mean people show up. Our football attendance was down but our basketball stands for packed but I just remember growing up and I was going to the football games and just being absolutely packed. I mean the town would shut down for us and it means a lot to grow up in a place like that because you can always go back and feel like you have that home. 

Alan Babbitt: And now, obviously Hope has been your home and you're coming back for one last season. As you've had your time this summer and has the thought much about the end of your athletic career been there for you? This is your final season and there's a lot of emotions kind of an excitement and with that kind of what's in the mind of, someone with their last season ahead of them kind of what's gone through your mind is you think about that and trying to make the most of it.

Dylan Clem: I didn't know if I was going do it last year. I think my sophomore, junior year. I was always telling myself that 'Am I'm going to play my fifth year?' Going through that senior last year, being fortunate enough to have success individually as a team, then going through that decision process it being a difficult one to say the least and then sitting where I am now, I mean I wake up I go to the gym and I experience the same type of feeling when I was a senior in high school because I didn't know whether is this my last time playing football or not. I'm feeling that same type of feeling working out is easier doing those harder things is easier. Not that I'm not working less hard. It's just like this is the last time I ever get to on June 6 to work out in the summer for my final season of football. I'm really hoping the other seniors at Hope are feeling that same thing. I'm really trying to send texts and stuff just to motivate everybody but I don't know. it's a bittersweet moment because I'm I'm in it the decision was made a long time ago. I'm ready to roll. I wish I could play tomorrow. The best is yet to come for us, but we'll see where it goes. I mean It's still so unpredictable. We still don't know what's going happen. That's the craziest thing about sports. But everything we want is sitting right in front of us. I mean you saw Alma last year. The MIAA is now making a mark. I mean. I like if one team from the MIAA did that two years ago we would have easily been in the playoffs this year.Now it's like our conference is people starting to realize this conference is pretty dang good. We need to let more than one team in. But obviously goal is to win the conference, go undefeated. But we're all worried about game one Loras. That's the mindset we had last year. We're going keep going with that.

Alan Babbitt: I wanted to close on this. One of the things I've done with this podcast is talk to the male and female recipients of Be Strong. Be True. Athlete award and Natalie Hammer from the women's soccer team was the women's recipient. This award is given to the junior or senior who demonstrates the true essence of being a student-athlete and embodies Divison II model of "Discover, Develop and Dedicate." You have got to have at least a 3.5 GPA and play significant role on the team and involved with the Hope and Holland community. As you talk about, messages to teammates and now they're seniors and even maybe someone listening to this who's either coming to Gope this fall or as a student athlete or thinking about coming to Hope. What would be your message to them about making the most of their hope experience so that they can experience and grow as much as you have.

Dylan Clem: I'd say the biggest thing is appreciating the people that are there to support For me my parents from day one have been in every game and have been a lot of practices even. My one sister flies from Florida to come to a couple games a year. My girlfriend comes to three or four games a year and is always there to support me and send me text for the games and even all the way down to the people who are right in there with me like Coach Stuursma. He's always there for me. He's always willing to do whatever he needs to make me happy. Living into that it makes me proud to have received this award because those people showed me the way. All those people who were there for me that supported me,  they made me into the person I am today and that's just what Hope does. You can walk anywhere around campus from President Scogin at the top to anybody like student workers who are in the library. Just helping you out 'Hey, I need a marker for the whiteboard. Can you get me that?' It's like I'm not a part of that department, but I can go get that for you you. Ut's just the every day ife of Hope that's what's amazing. That's what's just really wholesome about this place.

Alan Babbitt: Thank you for that Dylan and stay cool the rest of your summer and Virginia and we look forward to seeing you on the football field again soon and that'll wrap up for the second episode here this summer in the Orange and Blue Podcast will be in another two weeks have another conversation about Hope Athletics in this wonderful wonderful place in the Wonderful people that join us. Thank you very much, Dylan. And again, we look forward to seeing in the fall.

Dylan Clem: Thank you.