A game plan for success
There are about 360,000 Division I college athletes in this country and they’re drilled to focus on winning.
So when they get out into the world of work, they’re unprepared for losses — especially the financial kind, said Nancy Lieberman, a former college and professional basketball standout and coach and now an ESPN and NBA-TV sportscaster.
Lieberman teamed with Allen Pinkett, a former University of Notre Dame and NFL running back, and Bill Poutre, a University of Hartford golf coach, to talk to Gonzaga University students and student-athletes about creating their own financial game plans.
It’s all part of The Playbook for Life, a national education initiative by The Hartford insurance company and the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Lieberman and Pinkett said they were adults before they learned how to handle money. Unfortunately, they said, they did it the hard way — choosing bad business partners and buying stocks based on friends’ recommendations.
Because both won full-ride scholarships to college, most money matters that crept up when they were in college were handled for them. “It’s a mixed blessing,” Lieberman said of the financial supervision accorded to scholarship winners.
After graduation, however, they were instantly expected to know all about credit, interest rates, mortgage loans, paying taxes, repaying debt and balancing your budget, said Pinkett, who’s talked to athletes on 12 college campuses since the financial education campaign started about 18 months ago.
He and his adult sports peers want to steer college athletes away from the money pits they fell into.
Their messages?
“You have the opportunity to put in place a sound financial plan and the ‘Playbook for Life’ is a great place to start,” said Pinkett, now a Hartford insurance agent in Houston and an inaugural consultant for the company’s student-athlete outreach program.
“That’s why we’re giving it away and offer it online,” he said of the recently revised 33-page book of tips and worksheets, which includes subjects such as creating a budget to evaluating job offers and buying cars. There are plenty of sports analogies to keep it moving. Free downloads and mail-order requests can be made on the program’s Web site.
The sports celebs believe college athletes relate better to other sports figures than say, a cut-and-dried financial whiz.
“We talk their talk. Even if they don’t know us, they recognize Notre Dame,” the WNBA and ESPN, said Lieberman.
Pinkett pointed out that less than 1 percent of college athletes will turn pro. “Most of them are going to work,” he said.
It’s important they learn now that it’s not how much money they make, it’s what they do with it that counts.
“It’s never too soon to start planning for the financial future,” Pinkett said.
He added, “If I’d had a program like this, it would have enabled me to make much smarter decisions. I didn’t have a budget until I got cut from the NFL.”