Ernie Lowery just wrapped up a four-year career with the UTD men's basketball team, which won the 2009 American Southwest Conference championship and advanced all the way to the "Elite 8" in the NCAA Division III National Championship Tournament. For the second straight season, Lowery was one of the team leaders in scoring. In addition to winning All-Division honors for his play on the court, Lowery is a top performer in the classroom as well, earning three American Southwest Conference Academic All-Conference awards and two UTD Distinguished Scholar-Athlete Awards. He was voted second team Academic All-District last year and was a nominee for the Academic All-America award this season. An Accounting & Information Management major, he graduated in three years and is enrolled in UTD's graduate school. He will serve an internship with PricewaterhouseCoopers this summer.
“In high school, I had originally thought after I graduated, I would probably just go to a big school somewhere and quit playing basketball altogether. But it hit me after the final game of my senior year that it was all over, and I realized I wasn't ready to quit playing. So, I started thinking about finding a place where I could do both – play basketball, but still get a great education.
"I had received a few recruiting letters from several places, including UTD. I thought it looked pretty interesting. I talked with my high school counselor and she told me that UTD was one of those “best-kept secrets”, a really great school that not a lot of people knew about. So, I started looking into it and decided to come out for a visit.
"I really liked the campus. It was open and small, a place where it didn't take a long time to get across campus. I liked the apartments. And, I liked Coach (Terry) Butterfield's approach. He was real straightforward with me about what college athletics would be like. He didn't promise me anything and told me I'd have to earn any kind of playing time if I really wanted to play. He was honest with me, and I appreciated that.
"Of course, academics played a role as well. I've always been highly competitive with myself, wanting to challenge myself and prove that I was good enough to do the work. Then, when I qualified for an Academic Excellence Scholarship from a university that my counselor had told me was so highly respected, that made my decision easy. It was important to me that UTD was interested in me not just as a basketball player, but also as a student. That's probably what pushed me away from some of the other schools – the ones who were only interested in my basketball skills.
"Athletics is so different in college than it was in high school. It's a lot more serious approach, which I like. In high school, you just basically practice and then play the games. But in college, we watch film on the other teams and do a lot of preparation on the opponent we're going to play that night. It's a lot bigger than what I'd done before, like stepping up to another level. I think it's more of a maturity thing. The older you get, the better the talent you're going to be playing against, so your preparation has to be that much more serious.
"There are lessons here you can apply in later life. When I worked at the Family Dollar store in high school, it was just like high school sports. You showed up, did your work and went home. I'm sure later, when I get into the professional world, it's not going to be like that at all. You're going to be expected to prepare more for what you're doing and take it more seriously.
"The biggest thing I've learned from playing sports in college is teamwork and communication. One of the main questions I always get asked in job interviews is about how you work with a team. I can really go off on those kind of questions just based on my experience with athletics. It's all about how you work and communicate with others.
"Another thing I've learned is how to take criticism. All coaches are different, but I'm sure that the supervisors and bosses I will encounter in business are going to be the same way. I can't imagine that I'll do everything perfect the first time out in the business world, so I've got to learn not to get upset when someone corrects me. It's just like sports. You have to work together as a team to solve challenges, and not let things get to you when they don't go your way the first time.”
