When I think of my favorite colleagues throughout my career, it stands out that they are disproportionately former college athletes. I have seen the advantages of athletics really translate into the professional business setting – grit, teamwork, time management, and more. It is also no secret that super competitive roles (e.g. investment banking or consulting) view being a college athlete as a resume bonus, especially when hiring early-career candidates.
The positive traits among college athletes have now expanded to include proven business savvy, further differentiating them in the job market. It is something I have noticed among current and recent US college athletes I have worked with, and I have discussed this phenomenon with my professional business peers.
In today’s American college athletics environment, every recruited college athlete is essentially an experienced marketing professional. This starts in high school where those with the ambition to join a college team need to proactively self-promote themselves to college coaches. Doing so means building marketing content, which includes:
- A marketing pitch (with stats)
- An edited highlight reel (often posted on YouTube)
- A tasteful social media profile
- Endorsements from coaches.
These students also have to develop a marketing strategy as to which colleges to target based on program competitiveness, coaching fit, school cultural fit, and academic preferences. If a high school student gets multiple offers, the student can lead negotiations to gain more favorable conditions.
The additional layer is the advent of NIL (name, image, and likeness), whereby college athletes can earn endorsements or sponsorships to make money. College athletes that pursue such monetization opportunities essentially have to do B2B marketing to gain such opportunities and then negotiate terms. Although the big-name college athletes make the most money with NIL, it is increasingly common for any college athlete to partake.
The big picture is this – the college athletes from American universities are essentially seasoned marketers. They might not know the specific business terms, but they get branding, marketing channels, and pricing. This gives them an extra advantage in competing for internships or entry-level jobs for any business profession.
I want to highlight how this advantage translates into differentiated professional value based on anecdotes I have witnessed or sourced from business talent conversations.
- Consulting: I meet athletes who note how a product launch or a go-to-market motion feels very familiar to them as it is analogous to their efforts to break into the college recruiting market.
- Startups: I have encountered former college athletes who excel at the marketing strategy and brand content creation part of launching a startup because it is analogous to their content creation to promote themselves and craft their athlete brand.
- Investment Banking: Evaluating and pitching prospective deals is rather similar to evaluating and pitching prospective athletic talent. In today’s college environment, there is an additional quantitative analytics angle for money sports. Former college athletes have noted to me that deal analysis in investment banking is analogous to market research performed to evaluate schools, themselves, the competition, and NIL deals.
Of course, being a college athlete alone doesn’t make someone a smart business talent bet. Even athletes must display academic chops and an ability to translate grit and teamwork in athletics into an office setting. There are plenty of stories of athletes who struggled to translate performance on the field to performance in business because they couldn’t adapt.
However, if I see an American recruited college athlete demonstrate athletic performance, brand management capability, and proven business adaptability (e.g., good academic grades, a strong internship, and a strong capstone project), I will prize that person and bet on them to be a top prospective hire for most entry level business roles.
If you haven’t already considered it, maybe your next hire should be college athlete, if there are any still available. They tend to get hired quickly.
Hall Wang is a dual degree MBA and Master of Public Policy graduate from Georgetown University. He currently works as an AI health tech startup co-founder and operator. He previously worked as an internal strategist at a Fortune 50 US company and in a major management consulting firm. Prior to consulting, Hall has worked at some of America’s most innovative companies, including Blue Origin and Facebook (now Meta), as well as having done two combat deployments as a US Army Officer.
Image: DALL-E
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