Seattle Seahawks player wants to start a team book club

Michael Bennett plays football for the Seattle Seahawks as a defensive end, but this season he wants to try a different sort of team bonding: Bennett wants to start a book club.

“It’s going to be pretty cool,” Bennett told ESPN, noting that he’s already picked out the first book for the guys to read, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. “I think Outliers is the perfect book for us because we are outliers when you think of the sense of what we’ve been through and who we are and the situation we were born in,” he explained.

The defensive end wants to get his fellow players off their phones and into some books. Vice president of player engagement Maurice Kelly hopes some Seahawks accept the challenge telling ESPN, “It’s a good thing, kind of taking everybody out of their comfort zone. I don’t know too many guys who read a lot of books. Mike reads. But to put the onus on everybody else, to challenge everybody else, I’m accepting the challenge.”

Bennett and Kelly hope that the book club will promote discussion amongst players about non-football topics and encourage them to speak up about social issues.