Pat Brown is a wealth manager in the Lawrence, Kansas-based office of Creative Planning and the founder of Financial Literacy for Student Athletes. Credit: Pat Brown
Four years ago, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association began allowing name, image and likeness pay for student athletes, financial advisor Pat Brown heard from his alma mater. The onetime all-conference linebacker with the University of Kansas Jayhawks football team got an invite to speak to the men’s basketball team about financial literacy from Fred Quartlebaum, the “blue-blood” NCAA hoops program’s director of basketball operations.
“When NIL started, he was the first person to call me up,” Brown said in an interview. “From a background standpoint, a lot of the athletes are going to be African American, and there’s not a lot of representation in the financial world.”
That meeting inspired Brown, a wealth manager in the Lawrence, Kansas-based office of Creative Planning, to create an organization called Financial Literacy for Student Athletes, where he leads pro bono coaching and educational seminars for college athletes at programs across the country as NIL deals accumulate in size and volume around the NCAA. Now, with the help of a fleet of a half dozen new websites, he’s expanding those efforts. He aims to reach more parents and coaches and branch into the legal and medical fields, as well as collaborate with Black-owned beauty firms and barbershops.
The “a-ha moment” came when a couple of Brown’s clients who are doctors at the Kansas University Medical Center told him they were “just embarrassed that we don’t know this stuff,” Brown said in an interview.
“The clients that I have who are doctors, they just don’t get taught this stuff, and they normally don’t take these courses dealing with exposure to financial topics,” he said. “My passion and my little soapbox is exposure to financial literacy. … A lot of these professions deal with money. They’re making quite a bit of money, so I think it’s important to have exposure at a basic level as opposed to just getting thrust right into it.”
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Athletes turned advisors like Brown are taking a leading role as NCAA programs and the wealth management industry ramp up their collaborations in the NIL era, amid concerns that there aren’t enough standards for financial education resources to match student-athletes’ newfound and often high pay.
Brown’s initial website for his organization and seven others that are under development or already up and running — parentsofstudentathletes.com, financialliteracyforproathletes.com, financialliteracyforcollegecoaches.com, financialliteracyfornil.com, financialliteracyfordoctors.com, financialliteracyforattorneys.com and financialliteracyfortheculture.com — also reflect the role of media and marketing in boosting money education and coaching, as well as the influence of advisors through their personal brands. Amid concern that so-called finfluencers are filling a vacuum with faulty financial information, advisors are stepping up their online presences to present credible guidance.
Brown’s approach reminded Chris Caltabiano, the chief program officer of the nonprofit Council for Economic Education, which designs and promotes curriculum and other resources for teaching K-12 students about money, of the financial education courses that former National Football League player Brandon Copeland started at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
Advisors can play a crucial role in educating people about money and investing because they’re able to “serve as models and examples for others” by inspiring pupils to consider financial careers or simply to learn more about wealth, Caltabiano said. As more states require young people to take financial literacy courses, advisors can aid the teachers in boosting their own knowledge, too.
“That to me is really the next frontier is, how do we ensure that we’ve got great teachers of personal finance who understand the material and really know how to communicate in an engaging way,” Caltabiano said.
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In that regard, Brown is seeking to meet athletes, families, legal and medical professionals and beauty store and barbershop customers “where they are,” he said. Initially, he sought out athletes, given his own experience in sports and viewing other athletes’ stories, like those presented in the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary, “Broke,” starring Andre Rison, Herman Edwards and Bernie Kosar.
In addition to the Financial Literacy for Student Athletes website, Brown started a YouTube channel featuring conversations about how athletes can be smart about managing money. Then he got the idea to work with more coaches after watching a video with University of Colorado Buffaloes Coach Deion Sanders discussing the salary increases on his coaching staff in 2022 after moving en masse from his prior post at Jackson State University.
In that kind of a jump, coaches could see their pay soar to about $150,000 to $200,000 a year from only $20,000 to $40,000, Brown noted.
“I just thought it was amazing that he would have a financial advisor come in and talk to them as a staff,” he said. “He’s getting them exposed to what they had never been exposed to before.”
Other ideas for direct, niche-focused appeals to financial literacy have been occurring to Brown in recent years, such as “what questions should parents ask universities about life after sports” if their children are going through college recruiting outreach and fielding NIL offers, he said. He often finds himself “jotting down things” while watching a game, to the point that “my wife probably thinks I’m crazy,” Brown said. The notion of going to a barbershop to talk through concepts such as an individual retirement account, credit and 401(k) plans gave rise to “Financial Literacy for the Culture.”
“You go get your haircut, and you learn quite a bit at the barbershop. It’s been like that for years and years and years,” Brown said. “They’re very, very basic questions that, unfortunately, my community may not know about.”
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That applies to many communities, though, as nascent financial literacy efforts that have started in the past decade only begin to take hold. Like many advisors who are trying to give back to the public and the next generation of industry professionals after advancing in their professions and businesses for a couple of decades, Brown aims to simply “get out the word on something that folks may have questions on,” he said.
“At this stage in my career, I’m not trying to get business from every single person who can fog a mirror,” Brown said. “At this point, I want to leave things better than I found them.”
