Brittany Wagner, Last Chance U: Where Is She Now?

Fans of the hit Netflix show Last Chance U know Brittany Wagner as the loving academic counselor for the EMCC football team. Season two ended with Wagner packing up her office then leaving a note for the person taking over her old position.

Wagner may have left EMCC, but she has been busy since leaving her old role as academic counselor. According to the USA Today, she originally left EMCC for a marketing job at a Birmingham, Ala. food company, but left the new position after a few months to start her own business.

Wagner founded 10 Thousand Pencils, LLC. The company is an academic counseling service that provides customizable student-athlete coaching, academic evaluations and the implementation of athletic academic counseling best practices among other services.

Wagner describes part of her services on the company website:

10KP works directly with your school/program over a 5 or 10 month period. Brittany Wagner engages with selected at-risk student-athletes; acting as a student-athlete manager for this select group. She manages various aspects of these student-athletes lives including academic success and life skills – working to change their mindset regarding academics, improve their chances of maintaining academic eligibility and increase their willingness to accept personal responsibility and make successful decisions.

According to The Detroit News, Madison Heights Madison High has already hired Wagner as an academic consultant. Madison is located about 30 minutes north of Detroit. Superintendent Randy Speck spoke with The Detroit News about the partnership.

“Last winter when I watched the first season I really just started to see that a lot of the kids from East Mississippi Community College, a lot of them have similar backgrounds to a lot of our kids,” Speck told The Detroit News. “Our kids are coming from Detroit, Madison Heights, Hazel Park, Warren and some of our kids are going through some different challenges and obstacles…One of the things that spoke to me was [Wagner’s] background isn’t necessarily the same as these kids, but she found a way to connect with them and it’s because she cares and genuinely and authentically wants to see them do well.”

Speck also noted Wagner is one of the most well-connected athletic academic specialists in the country.

“Quite frankly, if Nick Saban wants to get someone eligible, he calls Brittany,” Speck told The Detroit News. “Butch Jones from Tennessee wants to get someone eligible, they call Brittany because they know if they send those kids to that junior college when she was there, she was going to put a plan in place. And if those kids were willing to do the work, they were going to get themselves eligible.”

Wagner explained to the USA Today that Last Chance U had given her a platform to create her own organization. She spoke of one athlete whose demeanor changed after learning the counselor was the one from the Netflix show.

“…When he was told he had a new advisor: ‘Someone else to yell at me,’ Wagner told USA Today. “When his coach told him it was Miss Wagner, that changed. He loved the show and he’d seen me working with players and he understood that, he was open with me from the beginning and very honest about his own weaknesses and what we could do to fix them. He bought right in and usually that’s half the battle.”

Season two showed some of the friction Wagner had with EMCC coach Buddy Stephens. He spoke with USA Today about their differences.

“…Brittany was not the first person to love the kids, not the first person to walk a kid to class. That’s just the thing: she had her way of doing it, and now she’s moved on. She went to another job but she’s already left that and is trying something else…She could have had some of those conversations away from the kids and not at her present job. Had I known that, I would have had a problem with it.”

Wagner also discussed her perspective of their relationship with USA Today.

I think that, to me, was my issue with him. It was always surface-level things that he was trying to change and it seemed to me that he was changing them for the perception of everyone else but he wasn’t learning to value himself — you can’t value other people until you value yourself — but he wasn’t learning to value the people that helped him build that program, which would have been myself and his assistant coaches and our administration, our teachers, our staff members, the people of East Mississippi that helped him build the program. And then he wasn’t valuing the players that he was bringing in there.

Wagner has created her own fan base with over 80,000 Twitter followers. Abby Jenkins is the new athletic academic counselor at EMCC. Last Chance U Season 3 will move on from Mississippi, and head to Independence Community College in Kansas.