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Tom Osborne and Bill Snyder are, once again, competing against each other for recruits.

TeamMates, a mentoring organization started by Osborne in 1991, started a “Coaches’ Challenge” competition Tuesday against Kansas Mentors, which is led by Snyder. The organizations will add up the mentors each organization signs July 28-Nov. 21, when Nebraska and Kansas State meet on the football field.

Osborne made the announcement Tuesday at St. Mark’s Church in Lincoln as part of TeamMates’ annual partnership meeting for coordinators of the organization’s 112 chapters in Nebraska and Iowa. Snyder was not on hand; he'll be in Dallas Wednesday for Big 12 Media Days.

The friendly contest is in its second year, and it started before Osborne signed on as Nebraska’s athletic director and Snyder came out of retirement to coach Kansas State again.

“Bill and I, at that time, were a couple of old has-beens, unemployed with nothing else to do,” Osborne said.

Osborne said TeamMates is the underdog because Nebraska has a million fewer people than Kansas and Kansas Mentors encompasses all of the state’s mentor groups. Kansas Mentors got its paws on the trophy last year.

“This is a new year,” Osborne said. “It’ll be a tremendous effort for us to beat them. But I think we can.”

The group’s goal is to sign 1,000-1,200 new mentors by the football game. Osborne told the coordinators that it is important for each chapter to hit their goal. Compared to football there is a larger and older recruiting pool, as TeamMates have had mentors in their 80s.

But the recruits still have to be dedicated.

Suzanne Hince, the executive director of TeamMates, said the goal of each mentor should be to stay with the mentee until they graduate high school and head to college.

The 4,000 mentors average 31 months of weekly meetings with their mentee. Some mentors have spent more than eight years guiding a youth.

The best successes of mentoring programs occur after a lengthy pattern of consistent weekly contact, Hince said. The hour-long meetings take place at the child’s school.

Another theme of Tuesday’s event was young people’s increasing use of technology. Technology has connected the mentors to their mentees. A short video titled “Mentor Your Mentor” was put together by several mentor/mentee pairs and was played Tuesday. The video is now a recruiting tool on YouTube.

But the Internet also poses a serious threat for school-aged children. Enter the luncheon’s keynote speaker, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, who has taken on national companies like Yahoo and made it a point to push bills through the Legislature that have limited sex offenders’ access to social networking sites.

“Part of the fun for me is getting bad guys … For whatever reason I feel like a street sweeper or a chimney sweeper,” Bruning said. “It’s like cleaning out your garage; I’m the guy that cleans out the people in the streets who are trying to get your kids.”

Bruning said his dad was a compassionate mentor who taught him to treat everyone fairly and his mom was the “hard-nosed” kind that pushed him to do well in school.

“Kids need both types of influences in their lives, and that’s one of the important things about TeamMates,” Bruning said. “Frankly, not all kids are fortunate to have a mom and a dad around.”

Ann Gradwohl, a Lincoln artist and a TeamMate mentor, started meeting with her mentee when he was in second grade. Their relationship started through a different mentoring organization; when the child entered the fifth grade, the duo switched over to TeamMates. The boy will enter the eighth grade this fall with Gradwohl as his mentor.

“The child I began mentoring was learning to read. He was doing things one does in the second grade,” she said. “Now he has become an active thinker in the world. We talk about the local environment and the larger world…I believe that college has gone from a very abstract and remote idea to something that is attainable and realistic for him.”

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