Raiders FB Alec Ingold was adopted and is working to help other kids get the same opportunity

Raiders FB Alec Ingold was adopted and is working to help other kids get the same opportunity

Alec Ingold is what is often referred to as a ‘grinder.’ In particular, he is on this Raiders team because he’s a ‘Gruden Grinder.’ He was on Jon Gruden’s 2019 Senior Bowl squad and his performance made him a priority free agent for Gruden and later a spot on the roster.

A Wisconsin Player of the Year in high school as a dual-threat quarterback, Ingold accepted a scholarship at Wisconsin as an athlete. Then found his way to fullback, and became one of the best in the country, earning a Senior Bowl and scouting combine invite.

He did all that thanks in large part to the confidence he had gained from the love and support of his family. That in and of itself may not seem unique. But there are a lot of people in this world who aren’t as lucky as he was.

People saw Alec differently growing up. He knew it. As a bi-racial kid who had outgrown his all-white parents by the fourth grade, he couldn’t exactly keep it a secret; He was adopted.

Thanks to the way his parents raised him, he never wondered why he looked different than they did. He knew why. And thanks to his upbringing, he also never felt any need to keep being adopted a secret from anyone.

“Just having that open conversation, that open dialogue my entire life has been I think really key for me in being able to grow and understand who I am as an individual and who I am as a part of my family,” Ingold said in a phone interview. “Just having my parents there to support me at a very young age, I think helped me develop my sense of worth and my identity and self-realization, all those key things that could be an issue as an adopted kid.”

Ingold was one of the very fortunate ones as he was adopted at birth. He knows full well how lucky he is to be in the situation he’s in.

His parents are the only parents he’s ever really known. He also has a younger sister Sydnie who is the biological daughter of his parents. She was born when he was eight years old. They grew up together. She’ll be 16 in September and they are very close.

As for his birth parents, he’s never met his birth father and met his birth mother in person once and has had a couple brief conversations over the years.

The important thing is that his parents never kept him closed off from his birth parents. Studies have shown that openness with regard to an adopted child’s birth parents is healthy. They know they are loved and wanted with few lingering mysteries. It also respects the child’s intelligence and ability to accept their family dynamic. And that makes for a healthy adult.

“They were probably telling me about it before I really understood what was going on,” Ingold said of his parents’ approach. “But just to that point having that understanding from as soon as I could really figure out what was going on was enormous for me because then you have your whole life to just be yourself and have those conversations. There’s no big, awkward, huge discovery. It’s just who we are and that’s who we are as a family.”

This type of environment is one that many children aren’t given. They can be taken from an unstable situation and placed into ‘the system.’ For those children, they may spend years in foster care, dreaming of a healthy, long term, loving environment as Ingold had. He credits that environment for his ability to become a football star and ultimately play in the NFL.

And he wants other kids to have that chance.

Ingold has teamed up with AdoptUSKids, which is an organization whose mission is to help connect children in foster care with permanent families.

“Now that I have the platform I do and followers on social media and play in the NFL [I can] use that to hopefully reach out to kids that might not have had such a great upbringing or such an opportunity to live through my parents and live through that family life,” Ingold continued. “To kind of give them perspective and openness when trying to find a home and a family. So, when AdoptUSKids came to the table and said ‘we have a mission to try and find homes for all of our teenage kids that are in foster care right now,’ that’s something I feel is just a match meant to be.”

“Hopefully the more events, the more I can be connected to those kids that might be tuned out or might be saying they just want to turn 18 and do things on their own, to hopefully strike a chord with them and understand that family is irreplaceable. It doesn’t have to be blood-related or be the people that gave birth to you to create a family that is supportive and can help you succeed. That’s what happened to me and hopefully it can happen to more and more kids.”

These children and teenagers need all the moral support they can get. They can get discouraged and feel a severe lack of self-worth. It could take just a few words from someone like Alec to turn their whole world view around. That’s what he’s hoping for.

Along with speaking to kids, trying to help them find homes, and getting the word out about adoption, Ingold would like to break down the barriers of adoption and any potential stigma with being adopted. To open up the lines of communication and hopefully remove a lot of misconceptions and awkwardness people feel discussing it.

“I appreciate having a constructive conversation [on adoption] because I don’t think it happens enough,” he continued. “To be able to communicate with one another and relate on difficult heavy topics like this, I think it makes everybody better.”

Every professional athlete has a story. Some are of struggle, such as Ingold’s backfield mate Josh Jacobs who was homeless for a time as a kid. He rose above it and overcame. Others are more blessed. Ingold considers himself in the latter category. And is wasting no time in trying to use whatever platform he has to help other kids find the family they deserve.

You can learn more about adopting from foster care here.

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