Ex-Notre Dame football stars boost former athletes' health and wealth

Former University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football stars are trying to tackle the health and financial problems that often afflict ex-athletes after their college playing days.

Many financial advisors view athletes as an important potential niche of clients. Among the many issues specific to the coveted potential customers, athletes typically need a guide through the challenges of sudden wealth and professional careers that can last a few years or less. Beneath the glamor of the big names and paychecks, many experts express concern that the young people lack financial literacy and fall victim to bad actors who defraud them for their hard-earned fortunes. The tragic stories display another lens of the trauma and other psychological factors relating to money.

A dozen former Irish football players have died by suicide in the past 10 years, according to Tom Carter, a one-time Notre Dame safety who played eight seasons in the National Football League and later spent 15 years as a director at the NFL Players Association. Another ex-Irish player who's chairman of a pharmaceutical solutions network, Jack Shields, and his spouse Kathy teamed up with Carter and a third former Irish player-turned-entrepreneur, Pat Eilers, to start "Life After Notre Dame." The five pillars of support for ex-Notre Dame athletes include career coaching, entrepreneurship training, mental and physical health services and emergency financial assistance, Carter wrote in a LinkedIn post from April about the launch of the program.

"There's no silver bullet," Carter said in an interview, describing Life After Notre Dame as a "comprehensive plan" that gives "a fighting chance" to ex-athletes of any sport. "We wanted to be the first university in the country to offer our former athletes these benefits and services," he added.

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Carter, Shields, Eilers and Brandyn Curry, a former star basketball player with the Harvard Crimson and professional teams in Europe who's now the program director of Life After Notre Dame, unveiled their plans earlier this year in a series of LinkedIn posts and a group on the social site. So far, 32 ex-Notre Dame athletes have received services, with several acting as "ambassadors" of the program to their class and the larger alumni community. 

Organizers like Shields and Eilers, who after playing for Head Coach Lou Holtz as part of the 1988 national championship team and time in the NFL became a managing director at BlackRock and started a sustainable energy investment management firm called Transition Equity Partners, say they're carrying out Holtz's "4 for 40" mantra. "Four years at Notre Dame sets you up for the next forty years of your life," the former players recall Holtz telling them frequently.

"To our knowledge, there's nobody out there who has something as comprehensive as we do," Curry said. "That's why we hope to get it right and scale it nationally, because every school could benefit from this. There are so many athletes out there who need help."

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A common problem
The program's goals rang true to other former National Collegiate Athletic Association athletes and wealth management executives familiar with the client niche. The team camaraderie and crowds of students, boosters and fans who "want to be around you because you're a top athlete" vanish quickly when a player's career is over, according to SaVion Harris, a former safety for the University of Texas at San Antonio Roadrunners who's now an advisor with San Antonio-based registered investment advisory firm Intercontinental Wealth Advisors.

Athletes should "actively and proactively" ask for career advice from mentors around their athletic programs who care about them and represent the type of "people you aspire to be," Harris said. "Finding your own identity" off the field and developing new routines in place of the strictly-regimented and time-consuming schedule of playing for an NCAA team are two of the biggest challenges facing athletes as they make the transition to a new career, he said.

"No matter what you do, it's never going to be the same as athletics," Harris said. "When you get out of that, now you have to find your own routine."

Unfortunately, many athletes "have never really had any mentorship or any types of services that would help them identify other aspirations or interests," according to Frederick Blue, the head of the high net worth segment in Wells Fargo's Wealth and Investment Management unit. 

Wells Fargo Advisors announced its new Sports & Entertainment Program earlier this month, following the suggestion of more than a dozen planners with athlete and entertainer clients at the firm who asked the wirehouse last year to start its own programs supporting advisors who seek to work in that niche, Blue said in an interview. Nearly 100 Wells Fargo advisors are now pursuing their Sports and Entertainment Accredited Wealth Management Advisor, or "SE-AWMA" designation through Kaplan's College for Financial Planning. The company aims to recruit more teams serving athletes and entertainment clients through its program, Blue said.

Life After Notre Dame shows a "fantastic" approach to easing the player's adjustments into their post-athletic days, Blue said.

"It really has to be a coalition of partners that help these athletes transition to second careers. For many of them, their whole life has been centered around competitive sports," Blue said. "It's more difficult to make a transition."

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LAND's services
The vast majority of NCAA athletes will navigate those changes without ever reaching the professional level in sports. Like a "name, image and likeness" deal started this summer by an RIA that teaches the athletes financial literacy, Life After Notre Dame is technically an NIL program but works much differently in practice from the growing array of endorsement contracts.  

Life After Notre Dame's benefits for the ex-athletes consist of: "1:1 career coaching, resume building, mock interviews, goal assessments, and professional profile curation"; "innovation and entrepreneurship training" ; mental health services such as "immediate access" to "telepsychiatry, in-person rehabilitation clinics and an online education platform" ; "one of the nation's top virtual physical therapy networks, a leading inpatient rehabilitation hospital and a high-quality national network of vetted musculoskeletal care providers" ;  and "emergency assistance through a needs-based, relief mechanism available to qualifying individuals having difficulty paying daily living expenses," Carter said in his LinkedIn post.

"We say to former student-athletes and student-managers who may be uncertain that Project LAND can help them: our services are designed to meet individual needs and goals," Carter wrote. "Some may need to top off the tank and continue flying. Others may need a more comprehensive program, and not just when they first transition from sports, but if needed, throughout their lives. That's our 4-for-40 commitment."