Latest in a series of "Where Are They Now?" features on members of the Colgate athletics family. Click HERE for previous profiles.
 
HAMILTON – Howard Blue '04 took a chance at a critical stage in his life.
 
The four-year Colgate basketball letterwinner came to the Raiders from Washington, D.C., earning an athletics scholarship under head coach Emmett Davis. Blue made the Patriot League All-Rookie Team his first season and went on to stamp his name throughout the Colgate career charts.
 
He finished 16th in scoring with 1,201 points and also was sixth in field-goal percentage, 11th in steals and 12th in rebounding when he graduated. He was team captain his senior season alongside current Colgate director of basketball operations, Mark Linebaugh.
 
And he finished on a high note, earning All-Patriot League Tournament honors in 2004 after an injury had limited his play during the regular season.
 
But Blue's path to Colgate success was obstacle-filled. And like most college students, the early days were the hardest.
 
"Actually, it was a tough adjustment for me," Blue said. "I didn't adapt to the small place right away as some people did. I was recruited by a lot of different places that varied in size and in levels of competition for basketball. Some of them were in bigger cities and bigger arenas. But the adjustment to Hamilton, New York, was tough."
 
Based on where he was raised in the heart of D.C., Blue thought that if he wanted to succeed then he needed to get away.
 
"Where I was from a lot of people just did things the same old way. And after my high school experience, I just knew I needed to see something much different than D.C."
 
Colgate Ties Take Hold
Blue attended Gonzaga College High School, and it just so happened that the Colgate basketball program had several connections to the historic Jesuit institution in the nation's capital.
 
"Basketball was a big piece in getting me to Colgate," Blue said. "One of my former teammates from high school, Devin Tuohey, was a player on the Colgate basketball team and his older brother, Brendan, was one of my assistant coaches at Gonzaga."
 
Brendan Tuohey '96 was in Blue's ear about Colgate. From the time Blue was a sophomore at Gonzaga, Tuohey would drive them up to Hamilton for alumni weekends and they would hang out with Devin and his friends. Then on his senior-year official visit, Blue spent time with another Colgate basketball student-athlete, LaMarr Datcher '02, who was the same class as Devin and also a D.C native.
 
"Those guys were from D.C. and they showed me around and made me feel comfortable," Blue said.
 
Another interesting piece to Blue's Colgate puzzle is Davis, the Raiders head coach at the time. In the 1980s, Davis had served as an assistant coach at Navy, including one season under Paul Evans during David Robinson's heyday. Evans went on to a 21-year collegiate coaching career and, upon retirement, just happened to be helping Gonzaga High as a part-time assistant.
 
Colgate became the choice and Blue headed north.
 
Surviving Winter's Fury
Blue laughs when he recalls how different Hamilton was when the calendar rolled into late fall. You see, he had visited Colgate on a number of occasions, but never in winter.
 
"A couple things I didn't know was how cold it got, how much it snowed, and how early winter started," he said. "Every time I had gone to Hamilton it was nice – 65-to-70 degrees and beautiful. So when I got to Colgate and it was snowing by Halloween, that was a big surprise."
 
Blue also was finding the decision to leave the inner-city a little more challenging than advertised.
 
"I did not understand what that would entail as far as how secluded Colgate was, and it definitely took me some time to get used to the fact that there wasn't a major city and all we had to do was just in the town," he said. "But my teammates helped me get over some of the struggles I had, and that's the beauty of coming to Colgate on a team. I didn't have to go through any of that stuff alone. I had a built-in support system."
 
"I don't know if I would have made it through that first semester and that first winter without those guys."
 
The experience played right into Blue's career path. Blue returned to the District after graduation and is celebrating his 10th year at Washington Jesuit Academy, a boys school for fifth-through-eighth-graders from lower-income families.
 
"Our mission is to serve low-income families throughout Washington, D.C.," Blue said. "We provide a high quality and comprehensive education to boys from low-income communities, offering them a safe, rigorous, academic setting, and advancing their spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical growth."
 
First-Generation College Students
Blue was a teacher, but now he's director of both graduate support and athletics.
 
"When our kids graduate, we try to stick it out with them throughout their high school and college process and help make sure they're successful as best we can," Blue said. "I run different support services and develop initiatives for them and their families – usually around college access and career readiness."
 
Blue calls it challenging but definitely rewarding, and something he's really passionate about. He knew from his success at Colgate that he wanted to return home and help kids who started in similar backgrounds to his.
 
Blue, of course, plays off his personal experiences when talking to eighth-graders in his building or to kids later on who are applying to college. He's able to help with the application process and with some of the selections.
 
"A lot of our kids are first-generation college students, so their parents haven't been through this," he said. "I help relate things for them and I'm able to draw on what I went through – from the time I was in high school to the time I was choosing a school, what colleges were like and some of the pros and cons of different colleges."
 
"It is important to us that we support our students through high school with the graduation rate among minority men in the country, and especially D.C., being as low as it is."
 
Closest Thing to Brothers
Blue's Colgate-D.C. connections began back in 2000 and continue today. He works at Washington Jesuit alongside J.B. Gerald '04, who was a Raiders wide receiver and key contributor on the 2003 football team that made it to the Division I-AA national championship game.
 
"I see J.B. every day," Blue said. "We started the sports program here at WJA and now we coach football and basketball together. We just won back-to-back city titles in basketball and now we are gearing up for another season of sport. We're also working on a nonprofit to help with academic enrichment for student-athletes, so we spend a lot of time together."
 
The two of them started Vertex, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide character and academic enrichment to student-athletes.
 
"The combination of Vertex's approach allows student-athletes to improve in sport specific areas by taking a holistic approach to their development," Blue said. "Along with academic enrichment and test prep, training consists of strength, skill and mental aspects aimed toward balanced and rapid improvement."
 
And Blue stays in touch with several of his former teammates and classmates, calling many of them the closest thing to brothers he ever had.
 
"Colgate was such a small community that a lot of arms were open," he said. "I didn't know what to expect from college, but I didn't think I was going to get up there and meet some pretty special people who I would still be in touch with today.
 
"It had a pretty lasting effect on the life I live now."