Capstone Project Life After College: From an athletes perspective
High School athletes aspire to be College athletes one day. If some of these College athletes are lucky enough they might make it the NBA, NFL, MLB or NHL. Playing sports professionally is a dream a lot of kids throughout the world have. The odds are very slim in regards to getting to a chance to play sports professionally. According to the NCAA fewer than 2% of college get the opportunity to play sports professionally. To be honest this is quite surprising given how many college athletes plays sports across the United States. Based on what we now know this means approximately 98% of college athletes don’t get the opportunity to play sports professionally (NCAA, 2018). So this leaves the question what do the college athletes that don’t get the chance to play sports professionally do? Jordan Thurston, Sir Michael Tiggs, Mark Williams Jr, Keenan Brown, and Justin Brue are five young men who played sports collegiately but didn’t the opportunity to play professionally. Each of these individuals is doing quite well in their respective careers.
Case in point life must go after playing sports.
College athletes are required to select a major just like the other students. With that being said garnering a degree is the obvious impetus. However, obtaining a degree becomes an afterthought for some the top college athletes in the country. For example, receiving a 1st round talent grade seems pretty enticing if a college athlete is on the fence about going pro or finishing their degree requirements.
The target audience this research project plans to target is high school athletes and college athletes. Essentially men and women between the ages of 17-22 of African-American decent. Reason being not that many of these athletes will not get a chance to play the sport the love past college. Providing a plethora of other career endeavors to these athletes will expose to something other than sports. Finding a major in college and sticking with is very important in regards to graduating from college.
The target demographic in reference primarily uses Twitter 17%, Snap Chat 42 %, and Instagram 29% on a daily basis according to USA Today Sports (Smith, 2017). The author of this research paper uses Twitter once per week and Instagram 1 to 2 times per week. Cross promoting information on social media and one’s personal website is a great marketing tool. The author of this paper plans to do this immediately to help increase the draw a bigger audience to his website.
Incorporating links to the authors website is something he never really thought about doing. The three ways the author of this paper can help increase engagement with his target audience is to make post about new content from 3PM-7PM (Arens, 2019). Reason being this is the projected time frame African-American athletes between the ages 17-22 uses social media in the morning and during lunch in California. Second way to enhance engagement is to post more frequently. For example, instead of posting once per day post three times per day make more people aware of future content. Third way to increase engagement is to post videos along with content. Millennials love to watch videos on social media.
According to the article Tips for Journalists using Instagram stories by Luis Assardo the way to get more people to view one’s whole story is to post the image they want their audience to see in the middle of the story (Assardo, 2019). Social Media is like a gift and a curse on one hand it’s a great marketing tool for journalist. However, on the other hand it can cause a journalist to lose his or her job for reporting erroneous information.
Increasing page traffic is one way one can enhance their website and social media page following. According to an article titled ‘Effective Tips on How to Use Social Media Marketing’ by Adam Ramirez posts that contain 80 characters or less receive 27% more engagement than posts that exceed 80 characters (Ramierez, 2011). Essentially less is better. The more concise and straightforward one is the more likely they are to increase their target audience.
Another tactic that will help expand one’s social media target audience between the ages of 20-30 is to create posts when they are at work on break (Foley, 2015). This presumably makes sense due to the fact millennials are always checking their social media pages while at work on break. Millennials share a lot of what they do on a daily basis on social media. Although this can be perceived as a great way for one to market themselves as well as their page it can be detrimental. Depending on the content being posted. Case in point only post appropriate content to avoid any negative backlash.
In conclusion, the purpose of this project is to show both current and future high school/ college athletes there is more to life than playing sports. Graduating from college with a degree can open up a lot of employment opportunities. The aforementioned college athletes in this paper didn’t get the opportunity to play sports professionally but they each found a profession to be successful in. Thurston is a firefighter in Fremont, CA. Tiggs is the founder of the Yancy Life Transition Center in Houston, TX which provides less fortunate youth with free after school care. Kids are introduced to a variety of enrichments ranging from photography to journalism. Brue is a project engineer for Kimley-Horn in Pleasanton, CA. Brown is a curriculum developer for Laney College in Oakland, CA. Williams is a senior technical source at Carta in San Francisco, CA. As the cliché phrase goes when one door closes another one opens these five former college athletes embody it. They didn’t let not playing the sport they love professionally playing prevent them from being model productive citizens of society. Each of these young men could have easily got angry and decided to commit crimes. However, they chose not to which speaks volumes to their mental fortitude.
