Jose Hernandez: Pillar of Light

Rudolf Fitness Center Director Jose Hernandez grew up in significant poverty in Caracas, Venezuela, a city of more than 7 million people. His dad was not very present in his family’s life, and passed away when Jose was 15.

His mother was the family’s rock, working most of her life as a school custodian, trying her best to make ends meet for her nine children.

Jose might have been his mom’s favorite. He worked shifts with her cleaning toilets at a local college. His first three brothers were not good students. Mom would tell Jose as he was cleaning toilets, “This is why you need to go to school,” and she constantly urged him to go beyond what she had accomplished, which in Jose’s eyes, was most significant.

Jose didn’t realize he and his family lived in poverty – sometimes only eating five meals a week. “Sometimes we just didn’t eat, period,” Jose says. After his dad passed, Jose would help his mom decide which meals the family would eat each week.

Poverty was not just found in the family’s meager means for food, Jose’s one pair of tattered green pants with holes in the pockets, and housing. He didn’t see a dentist until he was 22. That was just before he ventured to the United States on a full-ride scholarship to play basketball at Jacksonville College, a junior college in Texas. He had a chance to play baseball in the U.S., when he was 16, but the family wouldn’t have it.

At Jacksonville, about halfway between Dallas and Houston, “I couldn’t believe how much they gave us to eat,” Hernandez says, thinking back to his lean offerings at home. He earned an associate degree there, a bachelor’s degree in finance from Central Missouri, and a degree in special education and PE in Venezuela while playing professional basketball there.

His playing days concluded, Hernandez returned to the U.S., became assistant men’s basketball coach at Community Colleges of Spokane in 1996 and served until 2001 as both coach and physical education instructor.

Imagine Jose talking in his distinctly Venezuelan accent, “We won the community college championship in 2000 and my head got real big with ideas of what we could do the next year. We didn’t make the playoffs and the head coach left. I applied, but never had a chance.” In the meantime, Hernandez had begun a master’s program in sport and athletic administration at Gonzaga. After the first year of his two-year program he was broke. “I told Dr. Diane Tunnell (chair of the program) about my situation and she and Dr. Jon Sunderland put me to work as a graduate assistant teaching activity classes, and I was able to complete my masters,” he says.

But then, “I had a master’s, I spoke two languages and I had two small kids, but I could not get a job,” Jose recalls. (Side note: Jose proceeded to earn his Ph.D. from Gonzaga in 2012.)

A friend at church was developing a daycare afterschool program, and she asked Jose if he could help.

“I told her, ‘You tell me what you need and I’ll write my own job description,’ ” which he did.

For one year Hernandez was chief diaper changer. “The kids got so attached to me that every time they pooped their diapers they came to me to change them.”

But Jose felt like he was SOL, please excuse this obvious metaphor.

Life has a way of making daffodils out of dandelions. In 2002, when the Rudolf Fitness Center was under construction at Gonzaga, Tunnell and Sunderland were instrumental in Hernandez’s hiring as assistant director of Gonzaga’s new transformative facility. Two short-tenured directors later, Hernandez became the third director of RFC, a position he has held since 2007.

And no one ever did the job better. Today, through extensive expansion of programs, classes and equipment, RFC is a bustling center of physical and mental activity. And it is one of the happiest places on campus.

Dr. Hernandez clearly knows where he came from and appreciates where he is. He emphasizes five things to his permanent and student staff: “Possess humility, empowerment, honesty, humanity and empathy. Understand the human aspect of everyone and everything.”

There might not be a kinder, more considerate or benevolent soul on campus. Jose has used his vacation to accompany his wife of 31 years, Kim, and Whitworth students on study abroad excursions.

He loves hearing GU students tell others how much they love it at Gonzaga. He wears his emotions on his sleeve. And he credits his success to his dear mother, who passed away two years ago from cancer.

“Mom would always take responsibility for herself and her family. She was honest, fair, humble and direct,” Jose says.

And it is no surprise that you can find those same qualities in Jose in the RFC, often at all times of day and night. A 12-to-14-hour day is nothing when he thinks, “What would mom do?"