College Crosse Prospectus: Paul Rabil On Athletes In Business & Pro Lacrosse

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD MORNING, College Crosse Nation!! Thanks for making us a part of your day! Here are your links for July 6, 2017.

What You Missed

The first episode of The Little Boxes Project is out with former Albany Great Danes attackman Tom Nuckel as the first guest. Read more about our special Crossecasts here.

Former Johns Hopkins attackman Ryan Brown is a unique talent.

Lacrosse The Nation

Daniel Roberts from Yahoo Finance profiles Paul Rabil and how he’s become one of the best modern pro athletes to utilize business outside of playing:

Leverage your fans using social media, and make investment decisions based on your expertise. That sounds almost simple. “There’s more opportunity for players, while they’re still playing, to leverage an audience that they’ve built,” he says. (His own following is 374,000 across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.) Athletes also have the luxury, he adds, of “connectivity with a customer that brands want to pay for, and then being liquid enough to invest or operate.”

Rabil’s role models for athletes in business are Roger Staubach and Joe Montana—he calls them “the OGs”—but clarifies that the model has changed. In the past, athletes like Staubach and Montana (and Gary Player, George Foreman, Cal Ripken) mostly transitioned to business after they were firmly done with pro sports. These days, athletes like the Williams sisters, NBA star Jeremy Lin, and Golden State Warriors player Steph Curry are getting into startups while they’re still playing their sport—and doing a lot more than investing, often taking an active role in a new business in exchange for an equity stake.

Rabil points specifically to the Golden State Warriors as an example. “What we’re seeing [in the Warriors] are business owners operating, and extending a hand to some of their players to help them bridge before retirement.”

He also puts his input in about growing pro lacrosse:

Rabil has a prescription for how MLL can grow more: start with the tech, and then the athletes need to drive fans to it themselves. MLL partnered up with Twitter this year to live-stream one game per week on Twitter—a step Rabil praises—and all MLL games go on Lax Sports Network, an OTT subscription service. But Rabil acknowledges that platform serves “the more niche, hardcore fan.”

To reach mainstream sports fans, Rabil says MLL needs to “offer games where eyeballs already are, where the daily actives and monthly actives are—and to me that’s Facebook… and then creating meaningful, original content, and that’s up to players like myself.”

I agree with Rabil on this. I know a ton of people use Twitter and there’s no such thing as Lacrosse Facebook, but there’s plenty more people using that platform than Twitter. He should honestly be the head of marketing and digital content over at the MLL. Imagine how lacrosse would be without his presence in anywhere but lacrosse?

In college news, the Cornell Big Red are the first team to announce their incoming class:

The group hails from six different states, including a class-high six New Yorkers, as well as one player coming from Ontario.

"As a class, this group is going to provide us with depth and competition at all positions," says [Peter] Milliman. "A few of these young men are expected to compete for some time immediately but all of them are expected to contribute to the overall success of the Big Red over the next four years. They represent some of the very best high school lacrosse programs in the country and that experience at such a high level is something that we are very excited to add to our program."

Let’s check in with Fetzer Field, the former home of the North Carolina Tar Heels:

The latest episode of Fear The Turtle features the Maryland Terrapins rivalry with Hopkins:

I think we got a problem in Buffalo:

Stand up, SALT LAX CITY!

The BBC will be airing some of the FIL Women’s Lacrosse World Cup games in a couple of weeks!

#ICYMI:

Philly Jawns

It’s Kevin Hart Day in Philadelphia!

World News

How did Despacito become one of the top songs of the summer?

Video of the Day

Sean “Diddy” Combs goes sneaker shopping:

That’s it for today!! I’ll see you out there!! Make sure you follow us on social media!

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Managing Editors: Safe Fekadu, Chris Jastrzembski, Ryan McDonnell