Former Iowa, NFL standout Micah Hyde embraces full-circle experience with Iowa business students

IOWA CITY — Having not walked inside the University of Iowa’s 228,888-square-foot Pappajohn Business Building in possibly 12 years, Micah Hyde needed to refresh his memory ahead of visiting an old professor’s class.

“He told me to go to S107,” Hyde said. “I’m like, ‘Where is S107?’”

As he did find his way to Joe Sulentic’s Wednesday evening entrepreneurship class, it brought back “a bunch of memories.” A student wearing a Hawkeye quarter zip and a Green Bay Packers hat quickly caught Hyde’s attention.

“I like it,” said Hyde, a former Hawkeye and Packer, to the student who happened to be sitting not far from where he used to sit roughly 12 years earlier.

Hyde’s midweek return to his alma mater in April was not simply a walk down memory lane, but rather a full-circle moment for the retired NFL safety in his philanthropic journey.

More than a decade after Hyde came up with the idea for his nonprofit in Sulentic’s class, students in Sulentic’s Sustainable Innovation and Management class are working with Hyde to organize his charity golf outing in Iowa City this summer.

“I’m extremely happy that it’s kind of coming full circle,” Hyde said. “This is where the foundation started. And now being able to have this class put on the event for the foundation that’s going to benefit the Children’s Hospital — just an awesome event.”

The Iowa students — both Sulentic’s fall and spring semester classes — have been tasked with organizing and running the July 11 event, which will take place at the University of Iowa’s Finkbine Golf Course. They have the help of Inspyr Sports, which works with professional athletes on their philanthropic efforts.

“What classes do you get to take where you are working with such a big name like this, running such a cool event, with such an awesome cause?” said Marina Mihura, a student in Sulentic’s class.

The Tippie College of Business students’ work organizing the tournament spans from big-picture questions about using “charity” or “celebrity” in the name to granular details such as golf carts, beverage options and foursome sales.

It also includes fun details, like what can be auctioned off at the event. One quickly-dropped idea was to sell the opportunity to get tackled by Hyde.

“I’m not tackling anybody ever again,” the recently-retired Hyde said to the class. “I’m done.”

Hyde’s Imagine for Youth nonprofit officially began in 2015 to “help financially disadvantaged kids thrive academically and athletically by providing them with necessary supplies, resources and equipment,” according to its website.

Imagine for Youth’s work has included free football camps, backpack drives and school supplies for teachers. The Fostoria, Ohio-based nonprofit raised $524,972 in the 2023 calendar year, according to its publicly available tax form 990, without any staff compensation.

Back in Sulentic’s classroom in 2013, Hyde’s initial charity concept was called “Imagine.“ That changed to ”Imagine for Youth“ when Hyde tried registering the nonprofit in Ohio, where there already was an ”Imagine“ nonprofit.

“We were supposed to come up with a business plan, and I didn’t have the newest remote-finder invention or anything like that,” said Hyde, who now lives in the San Diego area since retiring from the NFL earlier this year. “I just said, ‘Hey I got a nonprofit that I want to start,’ and he allowed me to do it in this class.”

Sulentic and Hyde kept the original business plan Hyde created in the Social Entrepreneurship class. Sulentic has a hard copy, and Hyde has the digital version.

“I don’t keep many papers, but I switched offices recently, and I had that exact paper,” Sulentic said. “So I sent him a text of the cover with everybody’s name on it. He still had the digital copy of the report, looked it up, read it and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this was terrible.’”

But what made Hyde’s project really stand out was the execution — something that was not required for that class — as the class gathered sports equipment to be donated to the Boys & Girls Club of Cedar Rapids.

“For all the kids that he touched at the Boys and Girls Club in Cedar Rapids — that’s what was important,” Sulentic said. “And it worked.”

Now with a different seat — literally and figuratively — in a similar classroom with the same professor, Hyde has something in the works with an even bigger potential impact.

“We want to make this so that in Year No. 2, it’s continuing to get bigger and better,” Hyde told the class. “And then hopefully 10 years down the road, we’re still doing this. And you guys are able to come back and see that it’s blown up from there.”

Comments: john.steppe@thegazette.com

Sign up for our curated Iowa Hawkeyes athletics newsletter at thegazette.com/hawks.