The Sportstar MBA

When sportstars turn to business, the MBA becomes an excellent option to help with the changing of worlds. David Williams looks at how this has been possible for some stars of the outdoors.

Here, the TopMBA Career Guide talks to an American footballer, a Hungarian Olympic swimmer and an Indian national league cricketer and asks them how their experience of the MBA differed from the norm. 

The American Footballer

Billy Cundiff was a kicker in the NFL.  He spent four years with the Dallas Cowboys and also played for Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Green Bay Packers, the New Orleans Saints (where he got to one game away from the Super Bowl), the Atlanta Falcons and the Kansas City Chiefs. He did an on-line MBA with Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business and now works for a venture capital firm.

“When I started my MBA I had already been to a place that most men in the US have only dreamt about,” he says. “As they grew up, most boys want to be in the NFL, to play on Sundays in front of 90,000 fans and to be on TV. I had done all of that. It didn't make me better than other people on the MBA, but it meant I had something that put me on the same playing field as the highest of achievers. I had taken a totally different route to someone who had came out of undergraduate school and got into an entry-level job. My background gave me a lot of confidence. When I met a successful CEO, I never thought I couldn't speak to him. I just thought, here is a successful CEO and I would really like to get to know him.”

The Swimmer

Norbert Agh represented Hungary at the 1988 Olympics and won the 400 meter freestyle at US Nationals in 1989 and 1990, the last non-US citizen to do so before foreign competitors were excluded. After doing a full-time MBA with a sports specialization from the W. P. Carey School of Business, he ran a successful swimming coaching business in his home country before moving back to the US. He is now the European Correspondent for Swimming World Magazine and the Director of Research for the College Swimming Coaches Association of America.

“I had been an Olympic swimmer for many years,” he says, “and that gave me a certain attitude and a certain confidence. For example, I always believed I was doing things much better than anyone else.”

The Cricketer

Hrishikesh Shende represented both the Mumbai and Maharashtra state teams in India's national cricket league. He also captained Bombay University, the Mumbai second eleven and the Mumbai under-21s. While playing full time, he completed his bachelor degree in commerce and qualified and worked as a lawyer. He did a football industries-specialized MBA at the University of Liverpool in the UK, and he now works for Liverpool Football Club in its sponsorships and international business division.

“Cricket gave me a lot of self confidence,” he says. “As a batsman you are out there on your own, and the whole idea of being performance-driven was instilled in me at an early age. Learning to deal with nerves was also helpful, and having experience of captaincy meant I learned to strategize and play for the greater good of the team.”

Character

Confidence is clearly not something these sports-star MBAs lack. However, it is the more character-based traits that they emphasise when it comes to talking about the skills they brought in to their MBAs.

“As a sportsman, I had some things that didn't quite go my way,” says Billy Cundiff. “But the lesson I took from these events wasn't about not screwing up, but about how you respond when you hit adversity. I think there are lots of people who crumble when they get into a high-pressure situation, they back down from it and choose a career in which they are not going to get themselves into that kind of situation again. But in sports you get used to just bigging yourself up and trying again.”

“Being an athlete at a high level gave me an advantage in that I am very hard working,” says Norbert Agh. “Twenty years of top, international-level swimming made me very tough and competitive. It helped me with the MBA and helped me with my life. I am tougher than the others, I don't give up. If you can't do this, if you can't adapt to setbacks, you wouldn't be a great athlete, because there is no such thing as not having setbacks in a sports career, unless of course you are Michael Phelps.”

“Knowing that you have done something successfully in the past gives you a great starting point,” says Hrishikesh Shende. “In sport you have so many failures and disappointments that you learn to deal with them and get on with the next challenge. This attitude really helped me in law and the MBA.”

Transferable skills

But how do you convince employers that you have what it takes to succeed outside the sports arena? Billy Cundiff was the only one of the three to move completely away from the sporting world.

“When I tried out for jobs people said, 'It's great you played in the NFL but what kind of skills do you have apart from kicking a football?'” he says. “But there are lots of things you learn being an athlete that can be hard to put on paper but which your boss will know when he sees them. I tried to play this up in the interview process. For example, I would tell people that I am good under pressure, that I can handle stress and that you will find that out when you put me in a tough situation. Having been in the NFL, I can speak to the owner of the team, to media people and to guys in the team who have made a lot of money. When I interviewed for my current venture capital role, I tried to sell my boss on the fact that I had skills dealing with very high net-worth individuals. I told him I wouldn't back down from them and they wouldn't intimidate me.

“There is no magic sauce to doing business. It all depends on how well connected you are, how you develop relationships and on how hard you work. After I got on to the program and started speaking to people who are successful in business, I realised that, while doing an MBA is great, if I didn't apply the things I had learned about myself and about human nature on the football field, then I might as well not have done one. There is so much more to being successful in business than the nuts and bolts you learn on the MBA.”