Bucknell University Athletics
Shawn Tidwell: Not Your Everyday Bucknellian
10/23/2003 8:00:00 AM | Football
Oct. 23, 2003
by Andrew Borders
In football, coaches often question their team's hunger. Shawn Tidwell knows people for whom hunger is not a question, but a reality.
The same coaches wonder if their team is giving it all they've got. Tidwell knows people who don't have much, but give just the same.
Shawn Tidwell, a 6'2", 280-pound senior defensive tackle, managed to find his way to Lewisburg from Nampa, Idaho, Salt Lake City, Utah, and plenty of other stations in between.
One of those stops sets him far apart from most of his peers, not only in experience but in age as well. Since graduating from Vallivue High School in Caldwell, Idaho, Tidwell has crossed more lines of latitude than quarterback Daris Wilson has crossed yard lines this season, spending two years in the Central American nation of Guatemala.
As part of his religious duty to the Mormon church, Shawn lived as the Guatemalans lived, spending his nights with a host family and his days trying to make life a little easier and a lot more fulfilling for his new neighbors.
"People we lived with had huts with dirt floors, though other areas are a lot nicer," Tidwell says. Despite their relative poverty, he explains that it is taken as an insult to turn down food offered by a Guatemalan family.
"We would show up to teach and they would cook food for us, even when we had more food than we could use," Tidwell recalls. "They don't have the same sense of ownership and selfishness. They would give you the shirts off their backs. Coming from the U.S., you think 'What squalor,' but it's all they've ever known. They grow their corn, and they're happy."
Tidwell had a scholarship offer waiting for him from the University of Utah when he returned, acknowledging with a laugh that his family sees him as the black sheep of the group for not going to Brigham Young University, a Mormon-administered school where most of his siblings attend.
However, the lifestyle he experienced and a temporary illness he contracted in Guatemala had dropped far too many pounds from his frame to allow him to be a college football lineman. Following a redshirt season, Tidwell was promised a role on the Utes' defensive line, his preferred position. Instead, his coach placed him on the offensive line with a carrot of time on the other side of the ball to come. That time never came, so he left.
 Shawn Tidwell spent two years in Guatemala before finding his way to Lewisburg.  |
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"I couldn't play for a coach who I didn't respect" recounts Tidwell, who has started all six games for Bucknell this season and ranks fifth on the team with 26 tackles. "He didn't keep his promise, and that's an important value to me."
All told, his time as a Ute was far more positive than negative. In his apartment complex, he met Wiley, the woman who would soon become his wife. After a stint at Ricks College, a two-year school in Rexburg, Idaho, also affiliated with the Mormon church, the new Tidwell family weighed its options and decided that Lewisburg would be best.
Bucknell is a long way from Guatemala in more ways than an odometer can show, but the humility he learned on his Idaho farm growing up, and had reinforced in Guatemala, is more central to him than the orange and blue '60' on his chest. Along with their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Grace, he and Wiley call home a place Tidwell unabashedly describes as low-income housing, while Wiley plays the role of a full-time mother, allowing Shawn to play football and pursue his accounting degree.
"My wife is great because she has made it easy for me," Tidwell says. "Having a child hasn't been an enormous burden, though I haven't had as much sleep as before we had Grace. Every day I'm excited to go home. The freshmen say to me how nice it must be to go home to a home-cooked meal every day."
Another of Tidwell's many homes was Santa Clarita, California, where he spent the past summer doing a different kind of pest control than he does on Saturdays between white lines. He had a hand in developing a door-to-door marketing company that sought to discover in what areas his products would sell most successfully.
"We sold pest control services and satellite subscriptions," Tidwell says with a sense of ownership he will likely retain for years to come. "It's only a stereotype that people get annoyed, because we went where people would want what we're selling. It's not a fun job, but you can't beat the money you can make doing that."
It is a safe claim that most Bucknell students haven't sold door-to-door, nor are they married, nor do they have a child, nor are they closer to 30 than 20, as is the 26-year-old Tidwell. However, he says that his lifestyle, whether speaking religiously or personally, has raised only eyebrows and not walls between him and his teammates.
"The freshmen are really surprised when they find out," he says with a chuckle. "They react like, 'You're married?' I'm the grandfather of the team. I don't drink or smoke, and being married, I don't go to many parties. But a lot of guys on the team come to me with questions, since my life outside of football is so different from theirs. Being married is a good thing for me, because I never had straight A's before now."
Tidwell's newfound academic heights - he carries a 3.55 cumulative grade-point average and is a member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll - will pay off for him and his future plans. He and his young family eventually would like to move back west, where Wiley will resume her own academic pursuits as Shawn attempts to begin his career as an accountant or an entrepreneur.
With the life experiences that Tidwell has had, anyone with a termite problem or a bigger appetite for cable television now has someone trustworthy to call.
