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Ray Rice to Speak to Alabama Football Players About Title IX, How to Treat Women
August 22, 2019
Former NFL running back Ray Rice will speak to the Alabama Crimson Tide's players about Title IX and the treatment of women, according to Alex Scarborough of ESPN.
"He's obviously going to talk about how to treat the opposite sex," head coach Nick Saban told Scarborough.
Rice isn't the only former athlete or celebrity to speak with the Alabama players this offseason:
Rice, 32, was indefinitely suspended by the NFL and eventually released by the Baltimore Ravens in 2014 after video surfaced of him punching his now-wife, Janay, and dragging her out of an elevator. He never played in the NFL again.
Rice has spoken to Alabama in the past, along with Ohio State, Georgia, Notre Dame and other college programs and NFL teams like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Oakland Raiders and Baltimore Ravens, according to Ian Rapoport of NFL.com.
For Rice, talking to other players about domestic violence in an effort to help young men avoid making the same mistake he did has become his goal, as he said in a 2018 interview on CBS This Morning:
"For me, it's like, you got to put in the work and you got to get a real response and make a connection. I see teams are hiring sports psychologists—and I don't have a formal degree for this—but after my experiences, I know that my peers in the NFL need peers that have been through things and know how to see and present what the other side looks like. I have bounced my life story off players at different levels over the years. I try to share things and make my experience relatable."
He added: "One of the underlying issues for me was—I never wanted to ask for help. Football, for me, was my counseling. It was my therapy. It was my psychologist. It was everything."
