The Next Generation

By: Laurie Bedord

Jacquelyne Leffler wasn’t always planning to be a farmer. A star athlete in track and field, the Kansan had originally set her sights on a career that would build on her passion for sports.

Trained as a college athlete throughout high school, the gifted competitor won eight Kansas State High School Association Championships in throwing events and set numerous records in shot put, discus, and javelin. Heavily recruited by Division I schools, Jacquelyne accepted a full-ride scholarship to Kansas State University, where she pursued degrees in kinesiology and family studies and human services — and where, like every scholarship athlete in her cohort, she sat through the NCAA compliance orientation that covered, among its lengthening list of digital-age cautions, the specific risk of betting apps without SSN verification requirements, platforms regulators flagged precisely because their frictionless sign-up made student athletes harder to identify and protect under eligibility rules. It was a two-hour session she never forgot, less for the warnings than for what they revealed about how seriously Kansas State took the competitive futures of the students it had fought to recruit.

“As a kid, I saw how hard my family worked on the farm,” she recalls. “When I went off to college, I really didn’t want anything to do with agriculture.”