Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
When Shomari Williams was in high school he wanted nothing more than the play NCAA Division 1 football.
He would stay up all night, meticulously loading disc after disc into his computer, burning them with game tape for recruiters.
In the morning, he would head to the post office and mail the DVDs — a process he repeated 119 times, sending a disc to every single Division 1 school in the United States.
It was painstaking, but it paid off for Williams when he was recruited to play football at the University of Houston in 2006. Four years later, he would be the first overall pick in the CFL Canadian Draft.
But for every Williams — one of Canadian football’s most prominent success stories — there are scores of others who don’t catch the breaks, don’t have the drive and aren’t afforded the resources to put themselves on the college radar.
No one knows that better than Williams.
“I went through the whole recruiting process. It was a grind,” Williams said. “I figured there had to be an easier way to do it.”
That was all the inspiration the entrepreneurial Williams would need to launch Top Prospects Canada, an online recruiting service for Canadian high school football and basketball players.
The service is free for young athletes and hosts all of their information and videos online, helping connect them with recruiters and coaches from across Canada.
It’s a service that Williams wishes was in place when he was trying to get recruited.
“It’s really helpful to have everything a college coach needs to recruit you all in one place,” Williams said. “Especially for the Canadian universities. A lot of kids don’t recognize the opportunities they have here in Canada.”
Williams has signed up close to 900 athletes since launching Top Prospects last year and thinks the sky is the limit in terms of the website’s potential. While it currently only focuses on football and basketball, Williams wants to branch out into other CIS sports as well.
“I’m definitely surprised with how quickly it’s grown. I didn’t put any money into advertising or anything like that,” Williams said. “It just shows the need of a service like this.”
Williams is just the latest in a long line of Canadian athletes who have found success off the field in the business world.
Rick Powers is the Academic Director of the Directors Programs at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. He was formerly the Associate Dean of the Rotman MBA program and has seen a number of athletes pass through his classrooms.
He feels that while the biggest barrier for athletes entering the business world is a lack of experience, their athletic background almost always makes up for that.
“You think of the qualities that you develop as an athlete. Competitiveness, teamwork, integrity, ethics, leadership skills. These are all things that we would look for in helping train future leaders,” Powers said.
Teamwork is an especially useful skill for athletes entering business programs like the one at Rotman, as most schools require students to work almost exclusively in teams during the earlier phases of their studies.
The dynamic of the locker room — from the veteran leaders to the green rookies trying to blend into the walls — is not unlike the dynamic of the board room.
But according to Powers, the athletes always seem to gravitate towards familiar roles.
“The former high performance athletes that we get in the program are almost always leaders in the school,” Powers said. “They command a certain amount of respect from the others because they know what it’s taken to achieve at that level.”
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| Rob LeBlanc asked his quarterback, Ricky Ray, to write him a reference letter for his Harvard admission, emphasizing the working relationship between the two as quarterback and receiver. |
One of Powers’ highest profile former students is Johann Koss, a four-time Olympic gold-medal winning speed skater who completed an Executive MBA at Rotman.
Since graduating, Koss has become the CEO of Right to Play, a humanitarian organization that promotes sport and health in some of the world’s most underprivileged communities. He frequently comes back to Rotman to talk to students about leadership and making the transition from athletics to business.
“A lot of the former athletes really enjoy the experience and stay involved with the school. They’re non-traditional candidates but we’re so glad when we get them,” Powers said.
One former CFL athlete who chose to pursue his education south of the border is Rob LeBlanc, who pulled double duty playing two seasons with the Edmonton Eskimos while working with consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
The wide receiver was cut by the Eskimos in 2007 and, instead of searching for employment with another CFL club, decided to pursue a career in business instead. Oliver Wyman sent LeBlanc to the Middle East for a year to work before he returned to Canada and worked two years for a private equity firm in Toronto. During that time he applied to business schools and today LeBlanc is enrolled at Harvard where he’s working towards an MBA.
“If you play team sports at any level, let alone professionally, you learn a lot of the fundamentals that translate into success and business,” LeBlanc said. “Specifically communicating under pressure and pulling together towards a shared goal.”
That’s something that LeBlanc and former Eskimos teammate Ricky Ray had to do frequently, communicating and making plays on the football field with 30,000 loud, rowdy fans looking on. That’s why LeBlanc asked Ray to write him a reference letter for his Harvard admission, emphasizing the working relationship between the two as quarterback and receiver.
Evidently, LeBlanc’s CFL experience helped him in more ways than one.
“The CFL locker room is such a diverse place. You bring guys together from all walks of life and different countries,” LeBlanc, who was an Academic All-Canadian at McGill, said. “The ability to connect, interact and be a good teammate with all these different guys is a really good skill for business.
“You learn how to earn people’s respect and how to work collaboratively with people that you’re very different from. The CFL was a really good experience.”
Another business-minded football player who has benefitted from the CFL experience is Jeff Piercy. The former fullback played four seasons in the league for Montreal and Hamilton before retiring in 2009 to pursue an MBA at Oxford University in England.
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| “I was very happy to be able to play football. But I always wanted to do an MBA. I always thought I would be better at business than I was at football anyway,” said Jeff Piercy. |
Now, having completed his MBA this past December, the 28-year-old has an internship at an American investment bank in London where he handles mergers and acquisitions.
“I was very happy to be able to play football. But I always wanted to do an MBA,” Piercy said from London. “I always thought I would be better at business than I was at football anyway.”
The hallowed halls of Oxford are no doubt a far cry from the Canadian gridiron that Piercy once roamed. But the Rosetown, Saskatchewan native said his football background helped him during the application process because it set him apart from the thousands of other applicants who had relatively similar resumes.
Many business schools are also looking for as diverse a class as possible, with candidates from a variety of backgrounds who can present different points of view and foster interesting discussion.
Not to mention the countless traits that Piercy learned on the football field that he can transfer over to the business realm.
“In football you learn about accountability and trust. Anything that teaches you those things is valuable and sport is a great example,” Piercy said.
“It’s very important to have something that teaches you how to be a team player — how to be a leader and how to follow when you need to follow. It was football that taught me that lesson.”
Football also taught Piercy how to handle high pressure situations, which come part and parcel with his current job where he values companies and helps firms defend themselves against takeover bids.
“In sport, you have these high pressure situations where if you screw up, it’s your fault and everybody knows it,” Piercy said. “I don’t think you can deal with situations like that unless you’ve been through them. You have to learn how to deal with pressure.
“The advantage of coming from sports to an employer is you’re somebody who’s been through that stuff. You’re battle tested when you get there.”
That’s something that Williams — just 26-years-old and entering his second year with the Roughriders — knows all too well.
He persevered through sleepless nights burning DVDs and mailing them around the continent, and he knows nothing with Top Prospects will come easily.
“A lot of things happen in business that are out of your control. Just like how a lot of things happen in football that are out of your control,” Williams said. “In both of them, the ability to adapt is an important trait.”
And when your job is to crash head-first into 250-pound men every week — one that most can’t do past their mid-30s — having a plan B doesn’t hurt either.
“At the end of the day, football probably won’t last forever, as much as you want it to,” Williams said. “I want to set myself up where I can be in a good position when I do leave the game to have something I can fall back on.”
