DeAndre Hopkins‘ plan in life means going from ‘Put me in, Coach’ to Coachella, from being pressed to CMA Fest.
Hopkins, the Tennessee Titans’ star receiver, re-enrolled this semester at Clemson, taking online classes to pursue a degree in parks, recreation and tourism management. He wants to organize country music festivals once his playing days are done — a fitting desire for a South Carolina boy who calls Nashville home.
More importantly, he says, he wants to get his degree to fulfill a promise to his parents.
“My father died when I was 6 months,” he said. “When I went to school, it was kind of something that I promised my mom. My mom and obviously my father, I kind of vowed that I would make both of them proud and graduate.”
Juggling a college course load with an NFL schedule isn’t easy. But neither is Hopkins’ profession of choice after he’s done with football.
DeAndre Hopkins the country music fan
Music festivals are integral to why Hopkins signed with the Titans in the first place. Titans general manager Ran Carthon took Hopkins and his girlfriend to CMA Fest in June when the veteran receiver was a free agent the team was wooing. As part of the visit, the Titans had country superstar Tim McGraw reach out and send Hopkins a personalized message.
“Believe it or not, he’s a big Tim McGraw fan,” Carthon said. “I’m thankful to Tim and his team because they reached out and let him know that we wanted him here in this city.”
Hopkins told The Tennessean he grew up listening to stars like McGraw and Kenny Chesney. He’s a lifelong fan who took a class on country music history during his first stint at Clemson from 2010 to 2012. His passions have converged since coming to Nashville; just last week, he posted a TikTok video featuring a cameo from country star Kane Brown.
Hearing from McGraw during CMA Fest was a big deal for Hopkins. They mostly talked business, Hopkins says, which isn’t much of a surprise given what McGraw’s responsibilities were that weekend.
So you want to organize music festivals?
Tiffany Kerns is the senior vice president of industry relations and philanthropy for the Country Music Association. One of her responsibilities is overseeing CMA Fest, which she says she has to work on and think about year-round.
It’s not just booking talent and locations. It’s communicating with managers and publicists. It’s concocting weather contingency plans and making deals with vendors and ensuring large crowds can stay safe in crowded spaces. It’s understanding the difference between how to court an emerging artist with three people in her camp and how to approach a legacy act with 30 or 40 employees on the bankroll. It’s about being intimately familiar with every corner and crevasse of the music industry and structuring a four-day event so that the only people who feel any burden or stress are those planning everything.
Her best example actually relates back to McGraw. At about the same time McGraw was palling around with Hopkins, he also was preparing to sing “Humble and Kind” with a chorus of schoolchildren on the final day of the festival. During rehearsals, one of the children passed out from low blood sugar. Staff had to find a way to cool him down in the sweltering Nashville summer, get some food in his system and make sure he was able to perform without scaring the other kids.
The boy rebounded and sang that night. McGraw went off-book and started talking about the CMA Foundation “as if he were a staff member,” Kerns said, as he went beyond what anyone behind the scenes could have imagined to help raise awareness for the organization’s charitable causes.
“I got to see both the, ‘Oh man, we couldn’t have expected that’ and the, ‘Man, it couldn’t have been planned better,’ ” Kerns said. “It all happened in the same day in the same performance.”
Student life and festival life
Prior to the Titans’ Week 3 game against the Cleveland Browns, a clip of Hopkins walking around the Titans’ practice facility while attending a Zoom class went viral on social media. His classmates were just as gobsmacked to see him as the general public.
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According to Mack, the class is a junior-level parks, recreation and tourism management course. Between undergraduate and graduate students, Clemson has about 600 people pursuing PRTM degrees. Mack says a lot of class time is spent on perfecting résumés and giving students tools to be able to succeed in their chosen field. It’s not exactly a group project kind of class, so Hopkins shouldn’t have to worry about skipping practice to help his classmates design PowerPoint slides.
“It was kind of crazy,” said R.J. Mack, one of Hopkins’ classmates. “I’m just used to having all the football players in my class. That’s nothing out of the normal. But seeing him in my class, it was like, ‘Oh, snap.’ He’s doing the same thing I’m doing but he’s already made it in life.”
When asked about the rigors of going back to college in the middle of an NFL season, Hopkins pointed out it’s not like he’s going to law school. His professor understands his schedule and Hopkins says his grasp of the playbook is strong enough now that he isn’t splitting his study time between football and school.
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Festival season mainly lives in the summer. Kerns says the best way to crack into the music festival industry is to observe and learn as much as one can about what’s going on behind the scenes, so he’ll have opportunities to do that once the season is done.
Kerns is quick to warn, however, that the job isn’t for everyone.
“The first thing that I say to anyone is let’s make sure that there’s due diligence in finding out what programs that are out there that pour into you as you go on this journey,” she said. “Don’t try to figure this out on your own.”
Hopkins probably doesn’t need to worry about that part. He’s already hanging out with Brown and talking shop with McGraw. Nashville is his playground and he’s taking advantage of it to get closer to pursuing another passion of his.
But he’s not losing sight of his promises, either.
“I don’t think I do it for the support or the validation of anyone but myself and my father and my mom,” he said.
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Nick Suss is the Titans beat writer for The Tennessean. Contact Nick at nsuss@gannett.com. Follow Nick on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, @nicksuss.
