Post-Athletic Career Transition

Keyword: Post-Athletic Career Transition

Malik Allen: Finding Post-Career Success With inRecruit

by Steven Cohen 03-29-2020 06:06 PM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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Professional athletes like Malik Allen remind us that success at the highest level of athletics can be defined by something other than championships, enormous salaries, and lucrative corporate sponsorships. After playing four years of Big East basketball at Villanova and making the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament twice, Allen entered the NBA in 2000 as an undrafted free agent. The dedicated and determined Allen was able to spend 10 years at the highest level of his profession – more than twice as long as the average professional in his sport.

Allen was not one of those guys one would assume would make it at the pro level. But he persevered and pushed through a career in the pros that was filled with the uncertainty that comes with short contracts and frequent trades. Starts were rare, stat sheets arguably less than stellar, and the windfall checks and seven-figure shoe deals elusive. He was a role player and he understood his role perfectly. His own measured assessment of his playing days is neither modest nor self-deprecating. He understands there aren’t legions of kids out there putting themselves to sleep at night with dreams of being like Malik, just like he understands that anyone with professional hoop aspirations would be lucky to achieve a fraction of what he has. Allen worked hard to earn every minute of the decade he spent in the NBA, and he is proud of what he accomplished and grateful for the opportunity.

NOW RETIRED from the game, Malik Allen has co-founded a company called inRecruit, an online recruiting community for players, parents, coaches, fans, and sportswriters. inRecruit is a place where players can build profiles advertising themselves and search out schools and coaches they’re interested in. Coaches meanwhile, can track the development of players, as can sportswriters and fans. And Allen, along with co-founder and former Villanova classmate, Joe Rocco, is behind it all.

A few innovative features have received some early attention, like the software that automatically updates online news mentions of a player or team, or the one that tracks who has been looking at your profile. But inRecruit brings to the table mostly the same things any social media site does: access. Everything is all in one place with available search options that make connecting with people simple. As such, it is the Malik Allens of the world who stand to benefit.

“Athletics for many people is an opportunity,” said Malik Allen. “And that’s what we’re trying to offer: an opportunity for coaches to take notice of kids they never possibly could have in the past, an opportunity for players to learn about schools they maybe didn’t even know existed.

“When you look at the recruiting landscape, there’s so much guessing that goes on. No one really knows what’s out there and what to make of the information they have. At the end of the day, inRecruit is about cutting through the noise.”

inRecruit is not for Division I coaches with scouting budgets or blue chip high school seniors with a jump shot. It is really for the small town varsity starter who, like Allen, isn’t ready to call it quits after high school, but doesn’t know where to turn. It is for the Division III coach who can’t offer a scholarship but needs a well-rounded player who will fit the team.

“InRecruit fills a void in recruiting,” said Joe Rocco. “An information void. People can’t be everywhere. Most people don’t have the time or money. And exposure is tough to come by. We wanted to create a space where people who wouldn’t otherwise can come together.”

JOE ROCCO AND MALIK ALLEN met during their freshman year at Villanova. And from the beginning, says Rocco, Allen impressed him as “A very focused person.” One who Rocco describes as “grounded and humble.”

“He (Malik) worked extremely hard at basketball, because that was his ‘business’ at the time,” Rocco said. “But he was always aware that the odds were against him, that he needed to be ready in case it didn’t work out.”

According to Rocco, Allen carried that same level of self-awareness with him throughout his professional career. “Especially when he knew it was winding down,” said Rocco. “He would talk a lot about what he was going to do afterward. He always knew that basketball wasn’t forever, and I think it lasted for him a lot longer than he expected it to. But when it did come time to retire, [the next step] was something he had been mindful of for years.”

Shortly after his retirement, Allen connected with Rocco to discuss business ideas. Allen, says Rocco, a practicing corporate real estate attorney, was the driving force behind it. The two decided to build a business that focused on modernizing sports recruiting. Convinced this was the right direction, Rocco said the two didn’t even discuss anything else. "I was grabbed by it immediately,” Rocco said, “and Malik’s passion really got things moving. From there, we just went about trying to figure out how to make it a real thing.”

“Joe was sending me a lot of research and general background information on the tech world and running a startup,” Allen said. “I found and still find a lot of the information out there to be fascinating, but it was so different from what I had been doing. I hadn’t been reading like that since I graduated, and totally new stuff, too. But I had that hole in my life where my old routine had been, and I was happy filling it in with anything. After a while, it gets to be second nature. You get up, and you know you have to work. You can’t go to sleep at night unless you know you’ve put in the hours and done what you’re supposed to.

“The idea had always excited me, but there’s no such thing as a smooth transition from basketball. It wasn’t until I started really diving into the reading that I realized how passionate I was about it, and that was when I think it actually clicked that 'hey this is something I can really devote myself to,'” he concluded.

Allen’s contacts in the sports world played a crucial role during the development stages. “He knew lots of people from his playing days: coaches, directors,” Rocco said. “They all had a lot of respect for him just because of the way he carried himself along with the fact he had stayed in touch with a lot of them – that’s just how he is. They were happy to talk to us and gave us some great feedback. And from there we just tried to gather input from as many people as possible. Players, obviously, coaches, even journalists and admissions officers.”

Rocco had prior experience working with startups, so he started sending Allen reading material to bring him up to speed on the process and all the considerations that go into it. Before long, though, it was Allen sending him the research, and Rocco was the one struggling to keep up.

“I couldn’t believe he was reading so much,” Rocco recalled. “I had my regular job, but new stuff would be coming in every day. It got to be too much. After a while, I just told him, ‘do your thing,’ and kind of let him take over.”

PROFESSIONAL SPORT doesn’t seem like the endgame it is usually made out to be. When I spoke with Allen, he told me “there’s no such thing as a smooth transition [out of the pro life].” And that’s easy enough to understand. How do you move on from the reality of having fulfilled, what has been up until that point, your lifelong dream?

Life in general is difficult and not just for transitioning athletes. Allen’s experience gives credence to the sometimes-contrived notion that sports can prepare you for it. In Allen’s case, the professional life was the transition. Specifically, it was training for the exhaustive, maddening labor of developing and launching a startup company. But that’s just how things happened to play out. With Allen, you get the sense that sports would have inevitably dictated whatever he chose to pursue afterward. And a large part of the success of his rising business entity, inRecruit, can be attributed to that.

“People don’t see all the work that goes into it,” Allen said. “All of the effort, all of the sacrifices, all of the little decisions and choices […] more so for guys like me. I wasn’t a great player but I was professional.

“That’s what made it meaningful for me,” Allen continued. “Knowing that I had been there in the gym, in the tape room, and active in the locker room, and that I was getting to live my dream because of it. You just have to be so grateful for the opportunity to prove yourself on that level, and grateful for when people see all that extra stuff and acknowledge you for it.”

IT’S HARD TO AVOID THE CONCLUSION that Allen fell into the perfect range of success as an athlete. Had he been more naturally talented, he may never have cultivated the love of labor that underlay his professional career and that has since gone on to power his entrepreneurial ambitions. Had he not possessed whatever combination of ability and physical attributes that allowed him to compete at the level he did for so many years, the utility of putting so much time and effort into basketball would have been rendered null.

Allen’s work ethic is impeccable and for Allen, working has become “a compulsion.” With inRecruit, he has found something that rewards the energy he pours into it, something that makes him want to work. But if it hadn’t been inRecruit, it would have been something else. And yes, it’s fair to say that he has sports to thank for that.

Allen discounts completely the notion that the Kobe Bryants of the world do not also hone their craft over hours and hours of grueling work. But Kobe Bryant works to be the best basketball player ever, whereas Allen worked because he understood that his very future in the sport was dependent on it. The balance of success and hardship that was Allen’s playing career was better – more stable – in the long run than gaudy success could have been, even if it perhaps didn’t feel like it at the time.

The tenuousness of his career in the NBA forced him to be “highly conscious” of money and plan ahead for the inevitable day when people were no longer giving it to him in exchange for playing a game. And the characteristics that helped him survive longer than his stat sheet are now being put to use in his post-career.

“I was lucky, in that the things I learned in basketball apply directly to running a startup,” Allen said. “Most of all, what I learned was resilience. Basketball was never easy for me, and that resilience is the most important thing with a startup.”

Indeed, for most people, the startup world takes a level of willful stubbornness that surpasses even that of athletes who have managed to make it pro. Failure is almost guaranteed at some point. But with any luck, Allen won’t experience too much of it.

Wesley Mallette assisted in editing this story.

Published 03-29-2020 © 2024 Access Athletes, LLC
Keywords: inRecruit, Joe Rocco, Malik Allen, Post-Athletic Career Transition
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For Sports In America, Authentic Hero Status Is Just A Perspective Shift Away, But Let’s Not Wait Too Long!

by Dr. Timothy Thompson 10-26-2013 04:56 PM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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I’m about to step out onto a high tree limb here by asserting that so far, sports industry professionals have only scratched the surface on solving the post-playing depression problem. Furthermore, the only thing keeping us from actually solving the problem is that too many people, beginning with the leagues themselves and ending with the fans, don’t believe they can actually do anything about it.

That’s where they’re mistaken, though. The core causes of the level of post-playing depression that leads to suicide and other extreme negative reactions are sitting there right before our eyes, just waiting to be acknowledged. Somebody just needs to be courageous enough to keep showing sports industry officials the links between players’ career transition woes and the developmental experiences that elite athletes start having long before they turn pro.

If nobody else is willing to go that extra mile, I’ll step up and volunteer to accept the sneers and dismissals of those who firmly believe that athletes everywhere are too arrogant and/or immature to change.

But before I do that, I want to make sure you understand clearly where I’ll be going with my comments in this third column of my trilogy about self-identity formation and its relationship to the ease with which pro athletes exit their playing careers (voluntarily or otherwise).

In the first of my previous two columns from this trilogy (see Welcome to the New Training Camp: Preparing players for the game of life off the field), I suggested that helping high profile athletes to cultivate more balanced self-identities both before and after they become pros is by far the surest and most practical way to nip post-playing depression in the bud, so to speak.

My second column from this trilogy then focused on a growing movement in the sports industry towards helping players transition into post-athletic careers (see Enter The PLAN and The McCombs Athlete Entrepreneurship Initiative: NFL Players can now get real help with changing careers). In that piece, I highlighted an agency and a consulting company that have stepped up to the challenge of helping their athlete clients balance their identities in more practical ways.

So now begins part three of my problem-solving exploration of this subject of how to make post-playing transitions more seamless and less depressing. I’ll start this phase by saying that I’m happy to see so much attention being devoted (since the great Junior Seau killed himself on May 2, 2012) to the unique psychological challenges associated with leaving behind such intense group bonding experiences.

Having said that, however, it’s also time for me to point out that as diverse and extensive as I believe the conversations about pro athletes’ “two deaths” (retirement from playing and eventually physical death) have become, these examinations are still missing a key focus that would enable the problem to be lastingly solved.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great that more and more NFL, NBA, and players from other pro leagues/environments can get a growing variety of types of assistance with transitioning to post-playing careers. And I’m even grateful that a lot more sports industry folks are studying more seriously the issues that I raised on behalf of Access Athletes in May 2011 (see Athlete Education on the Rise: Get into the Game) and the following month of that year (see Rookie Symposium: You Don’t Miss It Until It’s Gone).

The common theme in both of those columns was and still is an 800-pound gorilla standing in the middle of a room filled with folks who seem reluctant to acknowledge the great beast’s imminently threatening presence among them. Yet the gorilla stands there wearing a sign containing a powerful message written in large bold letters.

What does the message say? It’s simply that the entire sporting infrastructure – within which players are merely the central product – needs to raise its consciousness to a level where a critical mass of league, team, player association, agency, and financial management officials have collectively internalized the understanding that I’m about to explain right now. That understanding is the realization and official acknowledgement that players who are happy with themselves first as human beings (and only then as athletes) are infinitely more valuable in every way to themselves and to everyone else than are the one-trick-pony loose cannons!

Let’s face the truth here. Immature loose cannon players drain valuable resources from their teams’ coffers by carelessly and arrogantly behaving in ways that must be rectified by their employers and other managing representatives. Yet a climate of cynicism that has traditionally surrounded and engulfed the sporting world in our country has left most of our beloved industry‘s key decision makers believing that they somehow need to put up with the sometimes anti-social antics of those same loose cannons because of their great athletic talents.

On a larger scale, the end users of our product – the fans – have also historically been bombarded by a steady stream of sports product marketing messages that equate the admittedly vital traits of mental toughness and fierce competitiveness with the term “character.” Unfortunately, while mental toughness and fierce competitiveness are useful traits in specialized contexts such as sports (and war), they tend to function as destructive forces in most non-athletes’ daily activities. So they don’t transfer particularly well into most types of post-playing careers.

Furthermore, the confusion and devastation resulting from this gross contradiction between the true spirit of the definition of the word character and its common usage by sports industry pros and fans should no longer be underestimated. Specifically, if you look up the word character (the set of qualities that make somebody or something distinctive and/or appealing, especially somebody's qualities of mind and feeling), you’ll find synonyms like charm, appeal, charisma, attractiveness, eccentric, and honor, to name a few. What you won’t see, though, is a dictionary definition of character that emphasizes mental toughness and fierce competitiveness.

Of course, these traits appeal greatly – and appropriately – to warriors and sports fans. That’s perfectly fine, too. The problem with defining the word “character” so narrowly, though, is that for all human beings, our definitions and our emotional attachments to those definitions drive all of our actions at all times. Therefore, the natural outcome of viewing our athletes one-dimensionally is the current design of our sports infrastructure that often traps them on a treadmill of sometimes extreme social and economic developmental imbalances, followed by irresistible temptations to indulge in what they may have lacked earlier in their lives.

In other words, what I refer to as the misdirected and excessive competitiveness that motivates so many of us sports fans leads us to assign special social status to children who demonstrate potentially elite athletic abilities (see ESPN writer Dave Telep’s 4/26/2013 article, The entitlement culture of elite HS hoops and my own 4/3/2009 Access Athletes column, Just Let the Kids Play). Not only do we assign special status to these athletic children; but also along with that special status comes an extended period of enabling them to feel exempted from any responsibility to their communities and supporters beyond entertaining them on the playing surface.

Therefore, the precise moment of special status assignment is also the exact beginning of a potential elite athlete’s entrapment and the set-up for social and financial ruin.

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Welcome to the New Training Camp: Preparing players for the game of life off the field

by Dr. Timothy Thompson 07-16-2012 10:11 PM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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Thankfully, nowadays it’s easy to find articles in sports information publications that focus genuine attention on sticky questions about how to create a soft landing pad for pro athletes whose high-flying playing days have ended. But that conversation topic hasn’t always been so popular, though.

In fact, as easy as it has now become to join in on public dialogues about pro athletes’ career transitioning traumas, it’s just as easy to conclude that before May 2, 2012, far too few sports writers and pro teams demonstrated any authentic caring about what causes athletes’ retirement woes.

May 2 is when we found out about NFL great Junior Seau’s shocking suicide. Since that sad day, perhaps the best news relating to Seau’s death is that all of the top sports publications and most of the major pro sports leagues have been trying hard to figure out why pro athletes struggle so badly with life outside of playing their beloved sports.

For example, in ESPN NASCAR analyst Marty Smith’s May 11, 2012 ESPN.com article entitled “How do you cope when it’s over?” renowned sports author John Feinstein was quoted as summarizing the problem faced by transitioning out of playing in the following way: “Athletes die twice.” Feinstein was referring to the shock that athletes experience once they have to leave the cocoon-like social world that they’ve been nestled in for most of their lives, and their corresponding struggles to adjust to the same life challenges faced by the rest of us.

Feinstein’s analysis definitely shows great insight into some of the core causal elements that are ultimately responsible for so many former pro athletes going broke shortly after they’ve stopped playing. And Jack Bechta, National Football Post contributor and sports agent, has taken this insight to the next level, particularly in his May 9, 2012 post entitled “NFL is in need of a better exit plan for its players.”

In that solution-oriented piece, Bechta listed four specific action steps that he believes would help the NFL to smooth out its players’ transitions from celebrity to Average Joe status. I’ve summarized his well-justified ideas for you here:
1. The league should make year-round life skills classes and programs mandatory for the first three years of a player’s career.
2. The NFL should form a committee of retired players and professionals (who don’t have an axe to grind), who can help develop a transitional program out of the league and in to a stable life.
3. Team owners should give retired players (who maybe played for 5 years or more) greater access to club facilities and get them involved in team activities, similar to what colleges do.
4. Each team should allocate perhaps $500,000 per year towards building life skills platforms, hiring more support staff, and creating more self-actualization information resources for current players.
As you can plainly see, this conversation topic is extremely vital for the future of sports in the U.S., and we’re surely off to a good start. But those of us who’ve dedicated ourselves to helping high-profile athletes reach self-actualized status in all aspects of their lives are painfully aware that we still have many miles to go before we’ve accomplished that lofty goal.

In that light, we at Access Athletes are pleased to offer you a three-part series of columns – of which this piece, which will steer us all to a sure way to actually solve the problem, is the first installment.

Expanding high profile athletes’ identity formation

After having completed extensive research at Marquette University for his doctoral dissertation focusing on the mental and physical effects of playing pro football, one of former NFL linebacker George Koonce, Jr.’s main conclusions matches John Feinstein’s. Like Feinstein, Koonce insists that leaving a professional athletic career behind is metaphorically like dying. In fact, Koonce, whose doctoral research was actually focused specifically on the NFL, refers to life after a player’s retirement as the “afterlife.”
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Can the Players' Associations do more?

by Joe Jackman 09-07-2011 02:20 AM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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Another NHL Enforcer Found Dead.

Fifteen-year NHL defenseman and pugilist Wade Belak, who spent his career with the Colorado Avalanche, Calgary Flames, Toronto Maple Leafs, Florida Panthers and recently retired as a Nashville Predator, was found dead on August 31 at the age of 35. Reports indicate that it was a suicide.

3 NHL Players Dead This 2011 Off-Season

Belak joins other deceased NHL enforcers Rick Rypien (depression) and Derek Boogaard (pill addiction). Belak, who retired in March, didn't show any signs of similar afflictions. In fact, he seemed to be transitioning well from the life of a professional athlete. He had secured a media role with the Predators and was to appear on Battle of the Blades, a Canadian television reality-show partnering former professional hockey players and figure skaters in competition.

“The NHLPA Does Nothing To Prepare You”

Former NHL enforcer and current ESPN broadcaster Matthew Barnaby commented on Twitter, “Nhlpa should do better job of preparing to enter league- and departing it! FACT.“ These deaths are raising questions about the NHL and NHLPA programs aimed at reaching out to active and former players.

"With what's transpired in the last few months, with the guys that we've lost, it makes us open up our eyes and look at programs and know that once guys are done playing hockey we just don't kick them to the curb," said former NHL player Nick Kypreos in a sportsnet.ca column. “We've got to come closer to the current players and the people who run the league and say: 'Once you're in this fraternity, you're in it for life.'"

Former NHL enforcer Tyson Nash also Tweeted, "Ur entire life is dedicated to hockey and then one day it's all over and ur kicked to the curb! And the NHLPA does nothing to prepare u."

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Athlete Education on the Rise: Get into the Game

by Dr. Timothy Thompson 05-19-2011 11:59 PM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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In a May 10, 2011 Yahoo! Sports website article entitled Fighter summit educates about finances, author Kevin Iole showed his readers that athlete education about a variety of subject areas that are closely related to the athlete's professional status is on the rise. Iole's article explained how the recent third annual Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Fighter Summit focused much of its attention on teaching the pro fighters how to apply their training discipline to the management of their money, as well as to other important life decisions.

I regard this as a highly encouraging sign that there's a real growing market among some athletes for learning how to be smart about leveraging their influential social roles to achieve lasting benefits for themselves, their families, and their communities. And the more this market of life-long learners grows, the bigger the part pro athletes will be poised to play in inspiring young people to develop the kinds of multi-dimensional decision-making skills that will help our country's future leaders to respond effectively to the new and different challenges that we're all facing.

Whenever I read stories about guys like all-pro tight end Tony Gonzalez or former all-pro linebacker Lavar Arrington, among others, making the most of their life opportunities beyond pro football, I get an increasingly hopeful feeling that the stage is being set for pro athletes to show others how to get and stay in "the zone" off the field as well as on it. After all, the holistic thinking, precise mental focus, and painstakingly consistent ritualistic performance preparation behaviors that all highly tuned athletes must sustain can easily translate to any type of human activity. Therefore, all a pro athlete really needs in order to taste similar success outside of his or her sport is a strong desire to make it happen and effectively conveyed guiding information that emphasizes practical how-to tools and techniques.

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Athletes, Find a "Life After Sports" PASSION While You Are Playing

by Joe Jackman 03-29-2011 01:19 AM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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Should I Stay or Should I GO?
Peter Forsberg, winner of 2 Stanley Cups, 2 Olympic gold medals, and a former NHL MVP, is the latest athlete to try the "comeback". It lasted 2 games. Like Brett Favre and Michael Jordan before him, this is yet another great player to add to a long list that didn’t need the money and had difficulty knowing when the time was right to retire.

Why Do Athletes RETIRE & Then Un-Retire?

For many of today’s stars that have been fiscally responsible individuals, they will never have to worry about their financial status. So why not go out on top? NHL Hockey Hall of Fame Inductee, Henri Richard, had this to say about retirement, “It was a dream, and everything I dreamed came true. Now my dream is finished. That’s a new life for me. Because what I do now, what I keep on doing is something I never dreamed of.”

The REALITY of Retirement

Retirement is a status for which professional players are often ill-prepared for, mentally and emotionally, and a position in life they never dreamt about. Not surprisingly, many world-class athletes mourn the passing of their playing days, the spotlight, locker room camaraderie, a purposeful life, and the structure their work provided.

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Athletes in Transition: 5 Tips on How to Find Your Next Passion

by Nick Murphy 02-21-2011 09:52 PM Life After Sports | Sports Business

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Transition Advice for Athletes by Former NFL Player Nick Murphy

Transitioning from sports to business is about more than finding another job. For your whole life (or at least all that you can remember) you’ve been consumed by a passion to compete in a sport. While there are intramural leagues and co-ed softball tournaments aplenty, nothing will ever replace competition at a high level. The crowds, the noise, and the energy—they’re all irreplaceable.

What isn’t irreplaceable is the passion for which you approached your sport. Will anything be the same playing on a NFL field on a Sunday in December? No, of course not. But once you’ve come to terms with this fact, your transition into the business world—the “real world”—will be so much easier.

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