Preparing Young Athletes for the Real World:JANESH Blog for this week with Josh Williams(former Runningback Guilford College football)

Preparing Young Athletes for the Real World
from Josh Williams with JANESH and former runningback for the Guilford College Quakers….

How we can prepare our kids for the real world. In this piece, I am going to highlight some of the issues my peers and I faced while transitioning from college into the real world. Credit and job placement are among the top issues we faced. We were always told that finding a job in the new economy was going to be difficult but the reality struck once we walked across the stage. And credit, we heard on commercials and periodically throughout our time growing up with our parents, but the need for good credit practices didn’t show until we needed to finance our first car by ourselves or when we wanted to purchase our first house.

Allowing your youth to build credit and a relationship with the bank while under your roof is a safe way to start instilling good financial discipline. Once they go off to school, you won’t have much of a chance to teach these things, as colleges don’t include this in general education classes.

I know there are some parents/guardians that already teach these principles and for you, this may seem redundant but I was not taught these principles and I know an entire college football team that also agrees when I say we could have benefited by learning these principles before being out on our own.

I am 23 years old and I just applied to finance my first car. So this blog is very relevant in my own life. I have a decent credit score, above 700, and I make decent money too but when applying to purchase an 09!X5 BMW, I was turned down because I had no credit history. So upon learning this, I was told to start building my credit with a credit card. I’m a little hesitant because I’ve always used cash/debit exchange. But credit is a necessary evil.

Not taking anything away from my parents, because they did an awesome job with me, but maybe I could have been practicing my credit discipline with my weekly allowance back in high school. Something so that it didn’t take for me getting declined for me to learn this lesson.

– Allowing time for your athlete to volunteer or intern somewhere that is similar to their desired career path is another way to start prepping them for the real world. We always heard that it was going to be tough finding work in our field but truth was evident once graduation rolled around. Job placement period for my peers averaged from 3 weeks to 6 months. When I heard about the people who had landed prime jobs in their field, it wasn’t a surprise. These were the people who had stacked resumes and interning for top corporations junior and senior year of college. The people who took a little longer were the ones that were forced to adjust rapidly to reality. No preparation, no experience, just an undergraduate degree.

I knew a few people who landed jobs quickly after school and all of them had been volunteering or interning before coming to college. Granted most of these kids weren’t athletes but, the facts still remain. Maybe we could put our youth athletes in the position to win by pushing them to spend some time in the job force while in high school. Not just any company, but one that could potentially be a career choice for them, one that is related to their choice of study.

These were just a few tips from my personal life and the lives of the people around me. We are leading a younger generation and I want to be able to equip them with everything we didn’t have. Early credit knowledge will be one thing that can easily be done while you still have control over your kid. It’s a useful tool, and simple if you control their finances by an allowance. Also, allowing your youth to get active in the job force will be helpful to them in the long run. Give them more experience and more confidence to go land a job after college. These are low effort things that can give you a nice return on investment.