Ex-Husky Hakim Weatherspoon is back in the classroom, teaching not studying

As he leaves his fourth-floor office on the University of Washington campus, Hakim Weatherspoon can look to the right and see the Husky Stadium in the distance.

But if he closes his eyes almost everywhere, he can imagine the place up close, down to the last goal post and the meter line.

Weatherspoon is visiting professor and teaching at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering and is uniquely qualified to share his college experience with the next generation.

With great authority, he can tell his impressive audience how he found a way to put lots of computers and storage in the cloud at a fraction of today’s cost.

Capture him in a nostalgic moment and Weatherspoon will provide details on what it feels like to put the great Corey Dillon on your bum while practicing soccer.

Weatherspoon, 44, is a former husky walk-in safety trainer who turned into a full-fledged Ivy League educator.

“I wore two different hats,” he said of his long student life. “I had two completely different universes.”

While many UW football players have taken on the most demanding post graduate careers, such as CEOs, actors, doctors, and even an intelligence agent, Weatherspoon may be the only one who has swapped out their helmet and pads to stay in the classroom for the highest academic level and is for a one year sabbatical returned to his alma mater.

As a visiting professor at UW, Hakim Weatherspoon is never far from the Husky Stadium.

Dan Raley

Known as “Spoon” during his time as a husky soccer player, he enrolled at the UW in 1995 without a scholarship. He joined a Jim Lambright program that gave suspended sentences for post-national championship offenses, which meant fewer players could get financial aid. So the school had to get extra creative and do lots of walk-ons that it believed could add more than usual.

Weatherspoon from Evergreen High School in Vancouver, Washington, was one of them.

As the son of a teacher, he was as talented in class as he was in football, if not more. UW professors, realizing his academic potential, even encouraged them to give up the game. But he was determined to do both. He played in secondary school and special teams, and that 6-foot, 185-pound struck anyone in the weight room as a defensive back who could bench press 350 pounds.

Husky teammates teased him about his school skills by holding up a soccer ball and asking, “What trajectory and speed am I throwing this?”

Weatherspoon played against Nebraska, Michigan State, BYU and all Pac-10 schools and wrote as a senior. He was a sponsor of Nigel Burton, now a Pac-12 Networks soccer analyst. He played for four bowl teams and a league champion. As a sophomore, he even introduced himself to the great Corey Dillon one day in the office.

“Somehow he got around [the corner] and he went off and I was playing safety back then, or rover, and I came up to him to do the tackle, ”Weatherspoon said. “I don’t know if it slipped or if it was a nice tackle – I put it down.”

Hakim Weatherspoon breaks open a pass for the huskies.

Hakim weather spoon

He graduated from the UW with a GPA of 3.68, became the then Pac-10 soccer team and applied to graduate schools everywhere. He was a Rhodes Scholar. The University of California at Berkeley didn’t normally accept anyone with a lower than 3.9, but it did take Weatherspoon, who was heavily aware of his full-time football involvement. Nobody did what they did.

“By combining the two, I had a good argument that I was just as good, if not better, as a graduate student,” he said.

While at school in the Bay Area, Weatherspoon was fortunate enough to be with Cal when Google was founded, the Dot.com bubble was in full swing, and a lot of computer-age influencers interacted with him. He wrote his doctoral thesis on “How to keep the world’s information forever,” a cloud concept that eventually all major tech companies and that won one of the most influential paper awards years later.

Weatherspoon, whose reading level was below par as a teen before becoming a voracious reader, joined Cornell’s faculty 15 years ago and became a full tenured professor in 2015. He’s still wearing two hats.

He is currently the Associate Director of the Cornell Institute of Digital Agriculture {CIDA} and he is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Exotanium, a cloud solutions startup that has 25 employees and recently raised $ 5 million has financed in capital.

Meanwhile, the father of four spends the school year at UW sharing his vast computing knowledge while taking a moment to remember his college football career, all information that should be kept forever on Cloud -Storage.

“I’ve done well enough,” said Weatherspoon, with a satisfied look, “to play with the big Dawgs.”

Find Husky Maven on Facebook by searching: Husky Maven / Sports Illustrated

Follow Husky Maven’s Dan Raley on Twitter: @ DanRaley1 and @HuskyMaven