Throughout the year, the Southern Conference is featuring former student-athletes from around the league in a series called Where Are They Now. This will be an opportunity to get reacquainted with the student-athletes after their competition days have come to an end. The question and answer session focuses on a former student-athlete who has gone on to excel away from the field, course, mat or court.
Our next Where Are They Now feature focuses on former Appalachian State quarterback, Chris Swecker.
The former quarterback finished his collegiate career with Mountaineers in 1978 before attending Wake Forest University School of Law. Following his graduation from law school, Swecker joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) where he rose to the Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division.
Chris Swecker
Appalachian State Football (1974-1978)-B.A. Political Science
Wake Forest University School of Law (1978-1981)
Current Profession: Attorney/Consultant, Financial Crimes Strategies and Control at Chris Swecker Enterprises
How did you end up at Appalachian State?
It is an interesting story on how I ended up at Appalachian State. The principal of my high school played football for Jim Brakefield at Wofford when he was the head coach there and he was a very strong proponent of both Jim Brakefield and the Appalachian State football program. When the Appalachian State Mountaineer recruiter came to Virginia Beach, Va. to my high school looking for some recruits, he began the process of feeding students from Virginia Beach and Tidewater area to App State. So I was one of those students he mentored into going to Appalachian State.
Talk about your time at Appalachian State. You said you were from Virginia Beach, what was the transition like from Virginia Beach to Boone?
That was interesting. A beach kid going to college in the mountains. It was an interesting transition for someone who had lived around beaches all my life. It took about a month and a half for me to really adjust to the mountain setting. One of the reasons anyone goes to Appalachian State is because of the beautiful mountains and it's a good school. I remember waking up one more and walking to two-a-day football practice about midway through those two-a-days. You were sore you could barely get out of bed and at 7:30 in the morning you're walking towards the field house and there's this big beautiful mountain in the back drop. I just remember thinking, 'yeah I'm in the right place.'
What's your fondest memory from your time at Appalachian State?
There are quite a few interesting memories. Some of the great memories are all the football players skiing in the off-season. You had these big football players skiing down the mountains in blue jeans. We weren't exactly the model ski patrol types, but there were a lot of good memories.
The memory that I remember the most is filling up that stadium in the fall and looking to the right and left and seeing these people that you've lived with for four years and you know that you can count on. Even to this day we are still really good friends. That camaraderie of playing a college sport in that setting on Saturday afternoon when you've been working hard and now you're playing East Carolina or South Carolina and some of the schools that we played and you just thought, 'I'm really lucky to be able to do this.'
What was your favorite game at home that you played?
My favorite game was the first game that I started against Western Carolina. I was scared to death and I just remember the first series when I got popped really hard. Once you're on the field and things are moving and you're in the heat of battle, all your nerves start to go away. I still have a rib that sticks out from that day.
That was a big rivalry between Appalachian State and Western Carolina and it still is. I may have played the very first year they had the mountain jug. And I remember thinking, 'this is not the game you want to walk into as a rookie starter and mess up.'
Do you still go back to football games? And is the atmosphere still the same for you?
I do. What's interesting about people from my generation is just how much has changed over the years. There is now this double deck stadium, it looks and has the feel of big time. When I was playing football at Appalachian it was single deck on both sides. It feels like a big time college program now.
While you were a student-athlete at Appalachian State, did you have dreams of going to law school? Or how did that whole idea come about?
I wanted to go to law school from the time I graduated from high school. I was involved in a prolonged court case, it was a criminal case. I was a victim, I got assaulted and this guy got four years in prison so I got familiar with the whole court process and I became fascinated by the court room. So I had set my sights on going to law school after I finished at Appalachian. That was in question after my first quarter (we were in quarters then), I sat down with my advisor, who was my coach's wife and she looked at my grades and said, 'what do you want to do?' and I told her I wanted to go to law school. And she told me that maybe I should set my sights a little lower. That really got me going so I pulled 4.0's for four semesters, I really got after it after that. Rightfully so she sounded the alarm and said if you're wanting to go to law school you're going to have to toe the mark in the classroom as much as you do on the football field.
What was it like being a student-athlete in undergrad and making the jump to law school?
As a college athlete, in a way you're really working your way through school because of the time commitment because of the practices, you even had classroom sessions. And quarterbacks even had an extra hour and a half a day of class for football so you really had to understand time management and what we call multi-tasking. So I really think the athletic experience and the rigor you had to adhere to in the classroom served well when I got to law school because it wasn't really a huge transition in how to manage my time because I already knew how to do that. I knew when I had to study and I also knew you had to have some down time as well. Most of the law students that I observed were studying 24/7. It was a situation where they sometimes couldn't step back and look at the broader picture and see what we were all striving for, which is well-rounded, balanced attorneys. I felt like the football experience prepared me well to be more balanced in my approach in law school.
How did the transition from law school at Wake Forest University to being an FBI agent come about?
I took a job as a district attorney to be consistent with my goal of being in the court room. As luck would have it when I was a third year law student, a former pro basketball player was an FBI agent and was the recruiter in law school and he really got me fired up about the FBI so I went ahead and put an application in. I thought if everyone in the FBI is six-foot-nine former athletes, it's probably the organization for me. So as a backup I went ahead and applied which was during the Reagan years and they froze hiring for almost a year. So the counsel I was given by the recruiter was to take a job and when the time comes you'll have to make the decision on whether or not you go into the FBI, but it took about a year and a half to finally get to that point. At that time, I decided that if I didn't take the opportunity I would regret it forever. So I told my then-finance that I would do it for two years and then go back to practicing law. Well it took 25 years to get it out of my system, but it was a very good match for me.
That sounds like an awesome career and I'm sure you have tons of stories.
Any job you're going to work for 35-40 years, you have to have some passion about what you're doing and you have to look forward to getting up and going to work in the morning. That's exactly what I found with that career. It had its frustrations like any job does, but you had that overall sense of mission and being able to have that feeling that you were saving the world one day at a time, and just having that sacred mission every day. And you get to do things that most people will only read about.
During your 25 years with the FBI what is one thing that sticks out to you the most?
There were a lot of interesting things. One vivid memory I have is riding in a boat down the Miami River about 3 a.m. in the morning with a boat load of FBI agents and we were working a drug smuggling operation. We were going to put a GPS tracking device in a boat that was going to pick up a pretty large load of cocaine. The moon is full we are armed to the teeth and we have this other group of technical agents with us. I remember looking over to this other guy and saying, 'I can't believe we get paid to do this.' It was event after event like that. I remember when I was in Iraq, I just remember thinking this is the most fascinating place to be at this time, and it was 2003. The UN had been bombed and it was chaos over there but it was just a fascinating place to be at the time. The military was always so happy to see us wherever we showed up.
September 11, 2001 was a day our country will never forget. Could you talk a little bit about where you were on that morning?
Another one of those strange twists of fate. I was in Washington about to meet with the FBI Director, who had become the new director before 9/11 and I had been elected by the agents in charge to represent them in briefing the director in briefing him about various issues across the FBI. I and a couple agents in charge were about to step into a meeting with the new director, so we were in the command post waiting when the first plane hit the tower. So here we are in the command post of the agency with the primary investigative jurisdiction to, in the first instance prevent it from happening and to investigate and find out what happened. In another 30-40 minutes, the other plane had hit and that's when everybody really swung into action and this three-person command post became 100 people or more. The president was calling and I remember this vividly, he was talking to somebody and he asked who did it and where are they. That's what we did the next three or four days was piecing together who the hijackers were. I put a composite together so the FBI Director could brief the president on who had done this and what organization (Al-Qaeda). Most of the population had never heard of Al-Qaeda at that time, it was a brand new concept, Islamic terrorism had been around for a while, but this was a ferocious attack and I think everybody that day realized we would never be the same.
Could you talk about how things changed for you?
It was an interesting paradigm shift after 9/11. Before 9/11 terrorism was something you investigated after the fact and the prevention part of it was unfortunately was not the primary focus of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA. We all were working hard in the terrorism field, but resources were scarce and the information sharing wasn't nearly what it is today. The biggest shift has been from reactionary (react, investigate, solve and prosecute) to prevent, preempt and be very active about rolling up those terrorist cells and organizations before they do something, especially here in the US. They are operating all throughout the world and the drumbeat of terrorism hasn't really slowed down internationally, but we haven't had a single terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11.
Following 9/11 what was your time with the FBI like? Who were some of the people you had the opportunity to meet?
After 9/11, President Bush invited all the FBI agents to the Oval Office, so we marched down to the White House and met with President Bush and had a very interesting session with him. I've also met the first Bush, I've met several generals, all the various attorney generals, it was very interesting to be sitting the Oval Office or any of these other places, briefing about things you were reading about on the front page of the newspaper.
After Iraq, about 2004, I became the head of all criminal investigations for the FBI and that was a very interesting time period for two and a half years to be on every case across the country. The public corruption cases, we were putting congressmen in jail, we were working Enron, we were working the UN Oil for Food issues, we were working MS13 and the gangs. All the organized crimes you read about the five families up in New York, etc. all of it very interesting and shifting constantly due to the fact that we were losing agents over to counterterrorism. So the FBI's criminal program was changing on a daily basis.
You mentioned earlier that you worked at Bank of America. How did that come about, FBI to Bank of America?
Here's the interesting thing about the FBI, you can retire at 50 under their retirement program and you're mandatory at 57. After 9/11 there were tremendous opportunities in the area of private and corporate security and Bank of America recruited me from the FBI, so when I turned 50, I retired from the FBI and took over as head of security at Bank of America. It was a very interesting transition; I called it my "half-way house." I was in the private sector about almost 27 years with various government agencies and getting a good education on finance because finance touches everything. The responsibilities that went with that job were bank robberies, investigating fraud, screening BofA employees, it was fascinating crash course in the financial sector, but they really weren't that different. I was familiar with bank robberies and fraud, we were probably the ultimate employment screeners in the FBI conducting full background checks.
You talked about making public appearances to speak to a group of people. What sort of things do you talk about during your appearances?
It's a wide variety of speaking engagements. I speak on financial crimes and money laundering; I speak on cybercrimes, cyber security and cyber intrusions. I speak generally about leadership, for example the App players on life decisions and things like that so it's a pretty broad spectrum of topics, most of them organized crime and fraud related and some of them get into other areas.
There's always a weight thrown on the quarterbacks shoulders. Do you think that has helped propel you to this success?
There's no doubt about it. Assuming responsibility whether it goes right or wrong, the quarterback will get credit and you also get the blame if something doesn't go right so it goes both ways. Being willing to step up and accept responsibility and confidently marching forward and executing. I call it analysis paralysis in the corporate world. Yes you have to analyze your decisions and make good decisions, but there are times that you have to make the decision and go with it.
I will never forget one football coach telling me if you make a mistake, make it full speed. I think in life people get very hesitant or unsure of themselves and once a decision is made its confidence, execution and marching forward towards the resolution. So I think being a quarterback and being a football player in general, you don't have a whole lot of time to make decisions and you take everything available to you and in that one or two seconds you're making the decision; most of the time if you're committed to that decision it won't go wrong.
You mentioned about the advice you give the football team. What kind of advice did you give your daughters?
First and foremost have confidence in yourself and what you're doing, even during those times you have to project confidence; most of the time that will carry you through. The other piece of advice is to keep showing up every day and do the very best that you can do that day. A lot of people talk about long range goals and mid-range goals, but I think one of the best recipes for success is you get up in the morning and you commit to doing the very best that you can do that day and it will build on itself. Things don't come quick; there is no get-rich-quick techniques. It is really your hard work and that foundation that you have to build. Part of the foundation is your reputation, you want people to look at you as someone who works hard, is dependable and above all a very strong work ethic.