Former University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football stars are trying to tackle the health and financial problems that often afflict ex-athletes after their college playing days.
Many financial advisors view athletes as an important potential niche of clients. Among the many issues specific to the coveted potential customers, athletes typically need a guide through the challenges of sudden wealth and professional careers that can last a few years or less. Beneath the glamor of the big names and paychecks, many experts express concern that the young people lack financial literacy and fall victim to bad actors who defraud them for their hard-earned fortunes. The tragic stories display another lens of the trauma and other psychological factors relating to money.
A dozen former Irish football players have died by suicide in the past 10 years, according to Tom Carter, a one-time Notre Dame safety who played eight seasons in the National Football League and later spent 15 years as a director at the NFL Players Association. Another ex-Irish player who’s chairman of a pharmaceutical solutions network, Jack Shields, and his spouse Kathy teamed up with Carter and a third former Irish player-turned-entrepreneur, Pat Eilers, to start “Life After Notre Dame.” The five pillars of support for ex-Notre Dame athletes include career coaching, entrepreneurship training, mental and physical health services and emergency financial assistance, Carter wrote in a LinkedIn post from April about the launch of the program.
“There’s no silver bullet,” Carter said in an interview, describing Life After Notre Dame as a “comprehensive plan” that gives “a fighting chance” to ex-athletes of any sport. “We wanted to be the first university in the country to offer our former athletes these benefits and services,” he added.
Carter, Shields, Eilers and Brandyn Curry, a former star basketball player with the Harvard Crimson and professional teams in Europe who’s now the program director of Life After…
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