Concordia’s Nick Scissons is the Quebec University Football Conference’s nominee as the player who best combined athletic and academic achievement and community service
By Randy Phillips,
Montreal Gazette
Nick Scissons knows life isn’t always fair and that the most important thing is how you play the cards you’re dealt.
At 23, the Concordia Stingers fourth-year receiver already has lived a lifetime of experiences few could fathom.
After games this season on the weekends, he headed home to Ottawa to help attend to his mother, Shauna Bartlett-Scissons, who was diagnosed with lung cancer on Aug. 27 and is fighting for her life.
A few years ago, Scissons buried his father, an alcoholic who had been estranged from the family. Scissons eventually found his father in a homeless shelter where Scissons was doing volunteer work while attending high school.
“It’s been a long road,” Scissons said. “There have been highs and lows. But everyone has to deal with things in life, good and bad. We’ve each got to try to handle them. Take care of things and learn from them.”
Scissons is the Quebec University Football Conference’s nominee for the Russ Jackson Award, one of five major individual honours in Canadian university football. The Jackson Award, which is named in honour of CFL Hall of Fame quarterback Russ Jackson, has been presented since 1986 to the player who best exemplifies football skills, academic achievement and community service.
Scissons was one of the top receivers in the QUFC this season and is a big reason why the Stingers have a date with the Laval Rouge et Or in Saturday’s conference final in Quebec City.
Academically, Scissons is due to graduate in the spring with a degree in history, after attaining a 3.45 grade-point average (out of 4), and will be taking entrance exams for law school next month. That’s quite an accomplishment, considering Scissons says he “coasted through high school” and was placed on academic probation a year after arriving at Concordia because of a lack of appreciation for education.
As for community service, the list of Scissons’s involvement is long, starting with the days spent volunteering at the Shepherds of Good Hope homeless shelter in Ottawa and continuing with his current involvement with Montreal’s Sun Youth emergency food and clothing bank. He is also preparing a program for AIDS Community Cares Montreal aimed at helping volunteers cope with the stress of their work.
But the No. 1 concern in Scissons’s life right now is his 53-year-old mother, who had surgery to remove a third of her lung on Sept. 21. While the prognosis was positive, that’s no longer the case.
“We received bad news after she went in for preliminary procedures for chemotherapy a little over a week ago,” Scissons said yesterday while en route to Quebec City, where the conference nominees for the CIS major awards were announced. “They found the cancer spread throughout her body. Definitely not the best news.
“She’s going through radiation now,” added Scissons, who has an older brother and a sister. “We moved her out of our house a weekend ago, which was tough. But she’s in a family member’s house now and doing OK considering everything. Mentally and emotionally, she’s handling it, but physically, it’s tough on her.”
Scissons’s mother has been the rock in his life. In Ottawa, she worked as a horticulturist during the day and taught horticulture classes in the evening at Algonquin College to make ends meet in her husband’s absence.
“I don’t want people to think I grew up in poverty … I didn’t,” Scissons said. “I grew up well. My mom made sure of it and she had to work extremely hard to do it.”
It was his mother who contacted Concordia head coach Gerry McGrath in 2003 about her son playing university football. Scissons played with the Ottawa Myers Riders, but at the time his mother called McGrath, her son was in Sydney, Australia, “trying to find myself.”
Scissons, who also travelled to Central America and southeast Asia, eventually ran out of money and was forced to take a job shovelling garbage in a city dump in Sydney.
“It was just me and a bunch of homeless guys,” he recalled.
Scissons decided to go back to school because he wanted to do something good for himself and his mother. It was a challenge he found to his liking.
“I guess I’m surprised I am where I am now,” he said. “I had to learn all over again how to study when I got to university. My first year was certainly a learning curve. But I figured out how to study and how much work you have to put in to get good grades.”
Scissons’s desire and enthusiasm to help others began with the time spent at Shepherds of Good Hope, which was one of the options he had while attending Catholic High School, which made volunteer work mandatory for students. He liked it and returned to the homeless shelter regularly, eventually running into his father there.
“He was in and out of our life, mostly out,” Scissons said. “I bumped into him there. He was in rough shape. On his last legs. But it gave me the chance to spend time with him. He definitely wasn’t at his best, but we had the opportunity to talk and he told me what was going on in his life. For me, it was nice to know that people I knew were getting help through such an organization.”
Stingers coach McGrath says many players come through the football program at Concordia having had tough times in their lives, but what separates Scissons from others is his ability to play the cards he’s been dealt extremely well.
Scissons points to the support of his teammates as a big factor in his success on and off the field.
“As much as you want to shut down, you can’t,” he said. “My mother wouldn’t want me to and there are (teammates) depending on me to be there. I depend on them, too. They are my friends and family. This whole struggle I’m going through, the team has been there with me, helping me to stay positive and to keep going.”
Scissons’s future is uncertain at the moment. While there’s a chance he might be drafted and given an opportunity to play pro football, he hopes to attend law school and eventually work in some aspect of law pertaining to public service.
“I want something where I can help people because I’ve taken advantage of such things out there,” he said. “I’ll keep working toward that, but whatever comes my way, I’ll accept it.”
