Research Assistant Juggles Nuclear Engineering, Soccer Officiating
Promise Adebayo-Ige wanted to find a soccer outlet once he joined the University of Tennessee as a nuclear engineering graduate research assistant in 2020. Adebayo-Ige played collegiately at the University of Pennsylvania and wasn’t ready to leave the sport behind.
He tried playing in pickup games, but the competition level wasn’t high enough for him. He decided to explore becoming a referee, a role where he could stay on the field and make some extra money.
Adebayo-Ige’s first game assigner told him something that stuck with him.
“He said not everybody can be a professional soccer player, but anybody can become a professional referee,” Adebayo-Ige said. “I really took that to heart. I know the game, I love the game, and study the game.”
Moving Up the Referee Ranks
Adebayo-Ige has quickly progressed up the officiating ranks in the last three years. He’s gone from refereeing youth games to high school to college and now has been receiving professional opportunities with Major League Soccer NEXT PRO (MLSNP) and the United Soccer League One (USL-1).
No matter how high he climbs, Adebayo-Ige doesn’t intend to leave nuclear engineering behind.
“That is really important to me. I want to do both,” he said. “I have seen referees who have both careers. I want to be a professional referee, but I also want to keep a professional life in nuclear engineering.”
Rooted in Soccer and Engineering
Adebayo-Ige’s parents are Nigerian immigrants, and soccer was the only sport his father knew when they arrived in the United States. His parents enrolled Adebayo-Ige and his brothers in a local soccer league in New Jersey. Once the family moved to Southern California when Adebayo-Ige was nine, he joined a club soccer team.
Adebayo-Ige comes from an engineering background. His dad is a mechanical engineer, and his older brother is a chemical engineer. When Adebayo-Ige was a freshman in high school, his brother told him what he learned about nuclear fusion from an Introduction to Energy Systems class he took at UC Santa Barbara.
“I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” Adebayo-Ige said. “I ended up doing my 10th grade chemistry project on ITER, a collaboration of 35 countries building the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor in France. I knew wanted to be a nuclear engineer when I grew up.”
The Best of Both Worlds
Not many colleges with nuclear engineering programs offered men’s soccer, so Adebayo-Ige majored in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Penn.
After his sophomore year, he attended a Brookhaven National Lab scientific computing program. He spent the summer before his senior year interning at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab and participated in a crash course about plasma physics and fusion energy while he was there. At the lab, he learned the area of focus in nuclear engineering that he wanted to specialize in and started to research schools for postgraduate work.
“I visited Rocky Top, and I really liked it a lot,” he said. “Meeting with all the professors, I knew it was a great place for me to pursue nuclear engineering given the expertise in our department.”
Adebayo-Ige’s research at UT involves understanding how much heat flux nuclear fusion reactors can withstand before they begin to break down. Handling the heat on the soccer field without breaking down is a lesson Adebayo-Ige earned early in his officiating career.
“Dealing with the parents was hard,” he said with a laugh. “I remember losing control of an Under-10 game and the parents were screaming at me. I was 23—a grown adult, but I felt really small.”
Pursuing Both Passions
As he continues pursuing his joint passions of nuclear engineering and soccer officiating, Adebayo-Ige hopes he can be a role model for others. Although the two aren’t always associated with one another, Adebayo-Ige sees immense benefits of staying involved in a sport that helped shape him.
“I think the challenge of officiating is really cool because of the leadership aspect. I am learning a lot about myself and how to manage different personalities,” he said. “You can’t manage every game the same way depending on who is playing. I really enjoy developing certain skills that can help me in life beyond soccer.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)