Sam Heisman is the Founding Head of School at Great Hearts Harveston, the first Great Hearts Academy to break ground in Louisiana. The newly constructed campus will be opening in Baton Rouge for the 2023-2024 school year.
His last name may sound familiar to you and for good reason. The Heisman Trophy is the most prestigious award in college sports and named after John Heisman, the great great grand uncle of Sam Heisman. John Heisman was the athletic director of the Downtown Athletic Club, the organization that created the award in 1935 to recognize “the most valuable college football player east of the Mississippi.” The award was named in his honor after his death in 1936 and broadened to include players west of the Mississippi. John Heisman had a rich career in college athletics as a football player, a head coach, and an athletic director.
Sam Heisman grew up the only boy in a family of six. Although football was in his namesake, Heisman’s favorite sport in high school was basketball. He wasn’t a naturally academic or gifted student. “I didn’t really know what hard work looked like in an academic context until college. I realized that I had a lot of catching up to do.”
He has a great love for poetry. Among his favorite poems are the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and Sonnet 73. Heisman specified that it is not so much because of their content, but for the transformational experience he had while reading them, writing about them, or teaching them.
To learn more about the work of the Foundation, please visit braf.org.