Alumni Spotlight: Sadiq Olanrewaju

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A journey that began for Sadiq Olanrewaju in his native Nigeria has included stops in Maryland, Connecticut, Virginia, New York, Illinois and the Washington, D.C., area.

He’s made an impact everywhere he’s gone. Olanrewaju, who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in African American and African studies, recently received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He’s now back in the D.C. area running NuArc Partners, a search fund looking to acquire and steward a U.S.-based small business.

After graduating from Salisbury School in Salisbury, Conn., where he was a boarding student, Olanrewaju arrived at UVA in 2013 with the dream of one day playing in the National Football League. At 6-foot-6 and close to 300 pounds, he had the size required of an NFL offensive lineman, but a series of injuries forced him to give up the sport before the 2016 season.

Olanrewaju played in five games as a true freshman in 2013 and eight in 2014, when he made two starts.

Had football been his only interest, Olanrewaju might have struggled to find his footing when he retired from the game. But he was a serious student who never let athletics define him. That wasn’t surprising, given his family’s emphasis on education. His father is an attorney, and his mother is a retired physician.

“Football was very important to me,” Olanrewaju said, “and I loved the game. It would have been nice to play in the NFL, but I also really enjoyed getting an education at Virginia.”

Olanrewaju was 10 when his family immigrated from Nigeria to the United States. The Olanrewajus settled in Gaithersburg, Md., and Sadiq still has relatives in that area.

A member of the prestigious Z Society on Grounds, Olanrewaju also found time to serve internships with the Virginia Athletics Foundation and took part in the UVA in Valencia summer program in 2015. He spent a month in the spring of 2015 as an intern with the NFL Players Association in D.C.

“I was doing a bunch of stuff before it was clear that my goal for the NFL wouldn’t work,” Olanrewaju recalled. “And so I think I was just fortunate that I went hard on both. And then one showed it wouldn’t happen, but I was fine. I wasn’t in survival mode when it came time to go do the next thing.”

As a UVA undergraduate, Olanrewaju said, he focused on “taking care of business on the field, taking care of business in the classroom, and then whatever God’s plan was [would follow] …  I think it turned out the way it was supposed to. I thank God for the opportunity to get the education that I did. I also thank God for the opportunity to play on various teams, to be coached by various different coaches, and build relationships.”

His wife, Kelsey Watkins, a double Hoo, graduated from the College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Law. Olanrewaju remains active at their alma mater. He’s co-founder and chairman of UVA Athletics’ Alumni Career Advisory Board. The group connects current Cavaliers with young alumni who were student-athletes at the University and can provide expertise about careers in such areas as finance, consulting, technology and sales, as well as law and medicine.

The goal is to focus “on those areas that are overly competitive and foster ways for student-athletes to access those pipelines by equipping them with early awareness for the timelines and support for application processes,” said Heidi VandeHoef-Gunn, director of career development for UVA Athletics.

VandeHoef-Gunn began meeting with Olanrewaju during the 2021-22 school year, after he proposed that such a program be established in the UVA athletics department.

“He came to me with the idea,” VandeHoef-Gunn said, “because he had been connecting with other alums who said that they wanted to do something to help current student-athletes transition into corporate roles. We started with strategic conversations about what makes sense and how to engage our young alumni. So it is a way to highlight the experiences of our alumni who are in the early years of their careers, and that resonates with our student-athletes, since they are going to be in those types of roles soon.”

The Alumni Career Advisory Board “puts alumni in front of the students,” she added. “Instead of connecting students with a website or a link, we’re connecting people to people, which fosters relationship-building, and it’s an easily accessible way to get their questions answered.”

Olanrewaju, 30, never forgot the obstacles he had to overcome as a student-athlete who was interested in learning about career options.

“I remember picking up internships here and there, trying to figure it all out,” he said, “and also thinking to myself, ‘All right, I just finished practice, and I know the consulting firms are going to be at the business school. I know they’re going to be at the public policy school. I have a suit in my locker, and I’m going to throw this suit on.’

“So if I just think back to all the hurdles that I had to overcome just to get in front of employers, I made a promise to myself in 2016 that when I had enough time and resources, that I would make it so it was 10 times easier for other student-athletes. I wanted to figure out a way, so that the next Sadiq isn’t running from practice, sweaty in a suit, struggling to get into an info session with a consulting firm at McIntire [School of Commerce]. It was just so tough.

“Being a student and being a student-athlete, those are like two full-time jobs in and of themselves. It might have been easier to focus on just those two commitments. But I knew I wanted to build a career and however difficult it was, I just knew that I had to figure it out.”

After graduating from UVA, Olanrewaju spent six years with Accenture, a global company that specializes in information technology services and management consulting.

“I learned so many lessons there,” he said.

Olanrewaju worked first for Accenture in its Arlington office. After their marriage in 2019, he and his wife moved to New York. “And during the pandemic, we moved back to the [D.C. area], and I was working in the Arlington office again,” he said.

In partnership with Accenture’s recruiting team, Olanrewaju began thinking about ways to connect the company with ambitious student-athletes at UVA.

“And the reason I thought about that was I knew the skills student-athletes had,” he said. “I knew the skills that were needed to work in Accenture. At that point, I’d been in for quite some time and had been promoted a few times. I know the skills student-athletes have, and there’s a perfect marriage, in my opinion.

“Outside of folks that have been in the military, I think that for entry-level business jobs student-athletes are the best candidates. But they were missing each other.”

Olanrewaju approached VandeHoef-Gunn, UVA athletics director Carla Williams and then-associate AD Heather Downs with an idea he believed would help student-athletes in the job market.

“I said, ‘I want us to do something at UVA, and I want it to be focused on the industries that recruit most at this college,’” Olanrewaju recalled. “So that’s consulting and finance—and within finance that could be investment banking, private equity, sales and trading, asset or wealth management—plus general management sales and tech. And so I pitched the idea. We went through a couple of different iterations of it … Heidi and I got the go-ahead and we started planning. We put a whole vision and mission behind it.

“And then the most important part was like, what does the team look like? I knew that I’d gone to school with some super-smart folks, and there were enough of us student-athletes who had found a way to make it from our sport to a large company doing finance, consulting or business. So I just went and essentially recruited a whole team.”

Olanrewaju enlisted the help of such former UVA student-athletes as Kate Harper (women’s golf), Jasmine Burton (volleyball), Paul Freedman (football), Chesdin Harrington (baseball), Reilly White (rowing), and Thomas Rogers (men’s basketball), all of whom have distinguished themselves since leaving Charlottesville. The team works closely with another alum, John Stacey (track and field), as well for strategic guidance and support.

VandeHoef-Gunn is grateful for the contributions of the board members. Now, instead of having to run across Grounds after practice for an information session, student-athletes can work around their busy schedules and connect directly with employers in athletics facilities or online, she said. To coordinate the program, VandeHoef-Gunn and Olanrewaju talked regularly during his two years in Chicago, and she looks forward to seeing him more often in Charlottesville now that he’s based in the D.C. area again.

“He’s a big-picture thinker who evaluates all of the details, which is great,” VandeHoef-Gunn said. “He wants to make sure that we’ve not only thought through the first part of a process, but also the steps to make it sustainable and to find out what the students actually need. He didn’t want to approach this program solely from the alumni lens without thinking of the students participating and where the gaps are. Given that the pandemic has left residual effects on education, we continue to modify programming each year accordingly.”

During his time on Grounds, Olanrewaju said, “I just kind of took all the opportunities and tried to make the best of them.” Nearly a decade later, he’s setting an example for current student-athletes at UVA to follow.

“I’m just fortunate to have the folks around me that I do: my wife, my family, my friends from UVA, friends from [Booth], colleagues like Heidi,” Olanrewaju said. “So it’s a community effort.”

Student-athlete alumni interested in getting involved with UVA Athletics’ Alumni Career Advisory Board or other career initiatives can email Heidi VandeHoef-Gunn at gohoos@virginia.edu.

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