Taylor Twellman could hear the trash talk. It was 2020, and the former USMNT forward was sitting in his backyard, looking at a Zoom screen: camera off, sunglasses on. The video chat room was packed, hundreds of random faces and picture-less names, all waiting for a college professor to begin a lecture. Then, one of the students started talking. Their subject? How much he hated Twellman.
“He starts ripping me an absolute new one,” the former ESPN analyst recalled, “because of something I said on SportsCenter about Arsenal and their inability to win trophies in the big games.”
Twellman responded by turning his camera on and waving at his disgruntled peer. The student’s response? To go in even harder.
It was one of the stranger moments of Twellman’s return to college. Now an Apple TV commentator and announcer and former professional soccer player, Twellman left college after his freshman season. More than 20 years later, he returned to pursue a degree in American Studies. He could have chosen multiple paths, or gone into any number of fields, but Twellman, a suburban kid from St. Louis, said he felt uneducated on the political tumult in the United States.
In the wake of racial strife and growing momentum of Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd in 2019, Twellman says that broadening his education was the perfect way to cut through social media toxicity and online vitriol. An issue once far away him felt present. It was time to learn.
“After the George Floyd incident, being at ESPN, being in the media world, being a suburban white kid, I realized how uneducated I was on a certain topic,” Twellman said. “So that's why I went directly into American Studies, because I figured if I'm actually going to do this as a 40-year-old, I might as well do something that's going to help me.”
