This “Life After Lax” interview appears in the March edition of US Lacrosse Magazine. Don’t get the mag? Join US Lacrosse today to start your subscription.

At 33 years old, Abdul El-Sayed has achieved what seems like a lifetime of accomplishments.

El-Sayed, the former Michigan club player who graduated in 2007, made it through medical school, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and received his doctorate in Oxford, served as the executive director of the Detroit Health Department and announced he’d be running for governor of Michigan. He remains in the Democratic primary race despite a recent challenge to his eligibility stemming from time he spent living and working in New York.

If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim governor in U.S. history.

Although he’s entered the political sphere, El-Sayed — whose father immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt — still takes time to remember his days playing for the Wolverines.

How did you get into lacrosse?

I got my start playing hockey and football. I

was a hockey goalie and I was really into football in seventh and eighth grade. When I got to high school, I realized I was either going to start developing in football or hockey. I decided to drop hockey and that left my spring open. I started playing my freshman year, and it was a great fit athletically. It took the speed and power of football and extended it in a very different type of game.

How did you explain the game to family?

There aren’t many people from my background that play lacrosse. My dad, his father was a vegetable salesman. His mother never had the privilege of going to school, so she was illiterate. My dad would get caught playing soccer and he’d get in trouble because he’d have to be working.

For me, playing sports, my parents understood why it was important, but letting me play was a really big deal.

How was the Michigan lacrosse experience?

The privilege of wearing the winged helmet is something that I’ll always cherish. My helmet is hanging up in my office. I’ll always look back at that experience as one of my fondest. I got to make friends with a group of guys that I probably otherwise would not have come to know.

Demographically, lacrosse tends to have a stereotype that there’s less diversity in terms of the talent pool. That’s grown substantially since I was young. I was the only Egyptian-American when it came to the teams that we played and certainly on my own team. It really gave me an opportunity to extend beyond the demographic limiters that limit who we come into contact with every day.

Some of my most important growth experiences as a man and an ethnic minority happened on the lacrosse field. I remember playing a team in California, and in the middle of the game, some of the fans came and heckled and were using some pretty serious racist and Islamophobic epithets. I didn’t react because I was there to do a job and play lacrosse. After the game, the coach came up to our bus and he said, “Look, I’m really sorry for what you just experienced, but it says a lot about you that you reacted the way you did.”

When did you first think about a career in public office?

The first time anyone told me to run was actually Bill Clinton, back
in 2007 when I graduated from Michigan. I was the valedictorian
in my college and was selected
to give the commencement speech. He gave his speech and
I gave mine. He said some really nice things about my speech in his, and afterward, pulled me aside and asked me why I was going into medical school. I explained to him my reasoning and he said, “Look, you should consider
a career in public service.”

What inspired you to enter into health?

I loved people and I loved science. My love for people comes from growing up in a multiethnic, multi-religious household where my father was an Egyptian immigrant. My stepmother who raised me was a woman who grew up in the middle of Michigan. I had the opportunity to be exposed to all different people. Both of my parents were engineers, so science was just a language we spoke in the house.