At the National Football League Draft, which was held April 27 to April 29, over 200 young men were selected in the first seven rounds and saw their dreams come true — and some will soon be millionaires.
But the majority of college football players won’t end up playing professionally. Ryan Gilliam was a Division I football player who graduated in 2007, and he’s now part of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s After the Game Career Center Task Force, which helps student athletes who have graduated find jobs.
Gilliam played football for both the University of Oregon and the University of South Florida. He’s from Tallahassee, Fla., and he and Antonio Cromartie were the defensive backs on their high-school football team. Cromartie was drafted in the first round in 2006 and went on to sign NFL contracts worth over $70 million.
When Gilliam graduated from college, he heard through a scout he knew that he probably wouldn’t be drafted in the first seven rounds.
He was 22, married, and thinking of how to provide for his family. “I wanted a consistent job. I had offers to be an undrafted free agent, and I had a lot of friends who did that. But you have to go from team to team. And maybe play in Europe and Canada. I wanted to get paid every two weeks.”
So he went to work at a financial firm and his goal was to make as much as at least the NFL league minimum paid. “I got a promotion at my first job in six weeks. I out-hustled everybody,” he says. At another job, he made over $100,000 a year running a medical center.
At 25, he and his wife started a pediatric behavioral company. They now have 50 employees and do about $1.5 million a year in revenue. “Now I make just as much as NFL players,” he says.
Gilliam says competing as a Division I athlete helped him succeed in the business world. “I was extremely competitive. Still am.” He said some of the kids he played pee-wee football with ended up playing in the NFL and that motivated him to prove “I had just as much value as someone drafted in the NFL.”
He’s now one of 11 people on the After the Game task force, which he says is made up of “thought leaders from NCAA Division I, II and III schools, athletics conference, human resources, talent acquisition specialists, and former NCAA student-athletes.”
The task force works with student athletes who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility, and the services are free. It works closely with corporate NCAA sponsors like AT&T, Enterprise, Coca-Cola and Northwestern Mutual, among others and is currently in talks with multiple Fortune 500 companies “to try to create pipeline-style recruitment programs for STEM jobs,” he says
Gilliam says college athletes make excellent employees because they’re used to being hardworking and disciplined. “It doesn’t leave you, the drive that made you succeed as an athlete. You’re an extremely competitive person if you got a Division I scholarship,” he says, adding that such athletes are used to waking up at 5 a.m. to work out before class.
Here are tips Gilliam shared with 300 college athletes when he was the keynote speaker at the November 2017 Student-Athlete Leadership Forum in Baltimore.
- Attack your career the way you attack playing sports
- Be assertive and intentional
- Get experience by having internships and jobs in your field while in school
- Find a mentor in your field of choice and make yourself valuable to them
- Compete in business the same way you have competed in your sport
And here are some job listings on After the Game’s website.
In an interview with NYSE, Gilliam said that former student athletes are especially a good fit in jobs with high burnout rates.
His message to employers: “Student athletes will always show up 30 minutes early and leave 30 minutes late. There’s a level of commitment that other people don’t have. They don’t want to just meet goals, but exceed them. And they know how to work with managers who might be abrasive — because they’re used to playing for coaches who were similar.”
But he also acknowledges that even the most driven individuals in the working world have limits. Gilliam wrote the book “The Cost of Greatness” in 2016, about the things you sometimes have to give up to achieve your goals. “I was vulnerable in the book about how I screwed up a lot. I was running a medical center while my wife and I started our business and she was pregnant. I was making great money, but I forgot my dad’s birthday. That’s the cost of greatness. I was making a lot of money, but my family wasn’t happy with me. I made some changes after that. You have to decide your priorities.”
This post was tagged in:
