CCU’s Moglia teaching ‘Life After Football’

Since taking over the Coastal Carolina football program more than three and a half years ago, coach Joe Moglia has had a clear and steady vision for how he wants his operation to run.

Among those tenets, he’s big on efficiency, on maximizing every minute. He likes to point out that his players get more reps in practice than most teams because of how the Chanticleers structure their workouts. He’s also quick to reiterate how his guys are sufficiently prepared for anything they may encounter, be it sub-zero temperatures in a road playoff game at Montana or a deafening dome in Fargo, North Dakota.

But it’s not all about football. It’s never been all about football.

Since his first year with the Chants in 2012, Moglia has given up a chunk of that valued practice time each week to get his players thinking beyond the next game, beyond the season, beyond their collegiate careers in general. He calls these sessions “Life After Football,” and the topics have ranged from heavy discussions about depression, the 9/11 and international issues like the ongoing struggle against ISIS to other real-world lessons about capitalism and the role of democracy.

It’s just another kind of preparation and perspective he feels is his responsibility to impart to the players.

“I really truly believe that you’ve got to have two things if you’re going to have a great nationally recognized program at any level in college,” Moglia says to that end. “One is you’ve got to win. If you don’t win, you don’t have credibility. And at the end of the day, even if you’re good enough to play in the NFL, your tenure in the NFL is limited and at some point for everybody there’s going to be life after football – and you need to be able to have a plan for that. …

“So to me it’s everything about preparing to be a man, preparing to be a woman, preparing to lead your life in a way that gives you great satisfaction, where you have an impact on others, you’re productive, you feel good about who you are and you’re happy.”

Over the course of the year, he says, he’ll put on 35-40 “Life After Football” sessions. Some last 15 to 30 minutes, but earlier this month, he invited guests to join the players and coaches for a special presentation that would span about two hours inside the team’s meeting room on the third floor of Adkins Field House.

The speaker was a woman named Catherine Hoke, who runs a non-profit organization called Defy Ventures Inc., that works to put released convicts on the path to success after they leave prison. She brought two of her “entrepreneurs-in-training” along to offer their real world success stories of overcoming significant mistakes to make the most of a second chance.

And after speaking for about an hour and 15 minutes, Hoke saved the rest of the planned 90-minute session for questions. The Coastal Carolina players, who had seemed significantly engaged in the presentation despite a long day of practice, were initially slow to speak up until the first hand went up in the air.

That player mentioned having a friend serving time in prison and asked how to get involved with Defy Ventures. A second hand then followed for another question, and they kept coming from there.

Just before 8:30 p.m., as the Chants were scheduled to move to the next phase of their evening, Moglia stood up and asked how many players still had questions. When seven hands raised in response, he decided to cancel the scheduled team meetings that night so the session could continue for another half hour.

This, he had decided, would provide a greater benefit from that time.

“The stuff you guys are talking about is far more important than whether or not we go to another meeting,” he told the players.

Making a connection

Several years ago Moglia’s chief of staff at TD Ameritrade, where he is the former CEO and present chairman, told him about the work of Defy Ventures and the coach followed with a donation to the organization.

The next year he did it again, and Hoke became curious as to who he was.

“He didn’t even know me, but someone who worked for him was a Defy volunteer and he just sent me a check for Defy. The guy that worked for him said it was good and he just wrote a generous check, and it was hard for me to even find out who that check came from,” Hoke said after her presentation. “… [But] I researched and I found out about him and I said, ‘I need to know this guy. His story is freaking amazing and his background is really interesting for us.’”

Hoke tracked down Moglia and asked if instead of another donation he would appear on a video that she could use in her work, and Moglia in turn asked if she would come to Conway and speak to his team.

And so two Thursdays ago she took the microphone inside the team room after practice and gave her first ever speech to a college football program, a frankly honest and candid talk of how she left behind a job in venture capital that paid her more than $200,000 a year for a more rewarding pursuit.

The tie-in to the Chants, as with many “Life After Football” sessions, was to get the players thinking about their own purpose and plan for their post-collegiate life.

“I get it that you guys are totally consumed here, what 13 days of straight training in camp? So you’re totally consumed with football, but how much time do you put into planning the rest of your life? If you can’t count on playing in the NFL, what else is your life going to be about? So that’s what I want to talk about,” she told the room. “… You might have lived a quarter of your life right now, right? So in a game, would you start playing the game in [the second quarter]? You wouldn’t. I don’t think you guys play that way. I think that you play 100 percent all the time, right? That’s what I’ve heard. So are you playing 100 percent right now for your future too?”

With that, she got into her own tale.

After reluctantly agreeing to go on a series of prison visits at the invitation of a friend, Hoke found her calling and started an organization called the Prison Entrepreneurship Program that worked with inmates in the Texas prison system to provide mentorship and connections to help them find success upon their release. She told of the uphill challenge she faced getting the necessary approvals to work within the prisons and how she simply wouldn’t take no for an answer, how she went about asking for and securing funding and the documented success PEP had in reducing recidivism among the inmates it coached.

“I wish I could skip this part of my story,” she then continued before telling how she forged her own second-chance success.

Hoke explained how she herself bottomed out, reaching a low point in her life after a divorce that led to relationships with some former inmates she had helped through her work. She was forced to leave PEP and wrote a starkly honest letter to the organization’s 7,500 supporters and donors owning to her regrets in decision making.

“I lost my identity as a leader. I was completely dead broke financially. I didn’t know what was next. I thought I screwed up God’s will for my life, and I was covered in the thickest wall of shame,” she said.

Instead of giving up, though, she told the players how after a year off, she launched Defy Ventures in New York with the continued support of a number of the donors who had supported her work in Texas.

And later in the speech, she introduced two of her “graduates” and their own redemption stories.

Here guests included Seth Sundberg, a former professional basketball player who served five years in federal prison for tax fraud, and Coss Marte, who ran a drug delivery service in New York and recapped for the room how he went from making more than $2 million a year through his illegal activity to serving five years in prison. Both later used Defy Ventures to help transition to new paths in life as Sundberg is launching a company that makes food bars he concocted while working in prison kitchens and Marte has developed a successful gym/fitness business.

Hoke told the players of the 100 companies Defy Ventures had financed and incubated and how the organization had produced a 95 percent employment rate for the ex-convicts it works with and “only a 3 percent recidivism rate compared to like 76 percent nationally.”

“Our stuff has been written up in the news all over the place and they like to talk about my story of falling on my face, which doesn’t make me feel that awesome, but I realize that it’s part of my journey of coming back as well,” she told the Chants.

Then she challenged them to find their own passions and not be complacent with their future career choices.

“To achieve greatness I believe that you have to be willing to take a risk,” she said. “You have to be willing to maybe get an F, and they say that the best entrepreneurs are people who started businesses early in life because the earlier in life you learn to fail the more you’re like, ‘OK, I might fail, but I’m going to get back up and [try] again.’”

Moglia sat in the back of the room jotting down notes throughout the presentation, insights that he might recycle at another time, and his assistant coaches sat on the floor in the back of the room taking in the session as well while watching the players steer the final part of the conversation with their own thoughts and questions.

It was his hope the players would connect to Hoke’s story and find value in the perspectives she and her team had to offer, and he seemed pleased by their engagement in the conversation.

Sundberg, meanwhile, would comment afterward that the response was more than he was expecting.

“It was great,” he said. “I didn’t know how a group like a bunch of guys playing college football would react to this.”

The value of ‘LAF’

For the players who have been in the Coastal Carolina football program for several years now, such conversations and discussions have become a familiar part of the routine.

Moglia frequently takes time throughout preseason camp for “Life After Football” talks and during the season the sessions come before Thursday practices, counting against the NCAA allotted hours the coaches are allowed to work with the team each week.

“For the last four years it’s been impacting me personally a lot more than I thought,” junior wide receiver Bruce Mapp said after Hoke’s presentation. “I’ve actually put a lot of thought into my future. I graduate early this December and it made me want to go for my Masters in January, and a I feel like a lot of this is [because of] the LAF meetings that Coach Moglia has.

“For the most part, I think the freshmen don’t really understand it too well when they first come in – I know I didn’t. So I feel like the more and more you have it, the more impact it will have on you.”

Junior running back De’Angelo Henderson says the range of topics Moglia’s sessions cover finds a way to connect with most of the players on the team.

“The stuff we go over is very valuable. You get to hear different stuff throughout the year so it touches home with different people different days,” he said. “I never was used to anything like that so when Coach introduced ‘LAF,’ it was like, well not a lot of people actually care what we do after football; it’s what we’re doing now. So for somebody to really care about it, it kind of enhances your respect for them. It’s been a different ride and definitely been enjoyable and [I’m] appreciative.”

Mapp says the most memorable sessions for him have been the talk about 9/11 and one featuring former Ohio State star running back Maurice Clarett, who has notably turned his life around after a string of poor decisions and consequences derailed his promising football career.

“It’s always about what’s in the best interest of the players and what kind of impact it’s going to have,” Moglia said. “So if there’s something relevant going on in the world, we’ll focus on that – but how that relates to the players. And there’s always something going on in the world that is relevant to our guys.”

He thinks back to one of the heavier “LAF” talks in December of 2012 after then-Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed the mother of his infant daughter and then later shot himself in the team parking lot.

“That gave us a chance to talk about … how does your responsibility change before you have a plan if all of a sudden you become a father? What kind of responsibility do you have as a 19-year-old single guy or a 19-year-old parent – what’s the difference there? And that led to some great conversation back in 2012,” Moglia recalled. “I have also gone through that experience [of early fatherhood] so I can contribute to that. Then, we talked about [how] everybody in the room would like to play in the NFL, you’d think this guy had the world by the tail. He’s 23 years old, he signed a multi-million-dollar contract, he’s starting in the NFL and he kills himself. Why would somebody kill themself? It probably has something to do with depression. How do you handle depression? It’s a significant topic for us to be able to talk about.”

That same year, with the 2012 presidential election upcoming, he spent several weeks asking the players to consider the issues and the candidates. He focused on the topics of energy, education and terrorism and broke down the views of President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney on those matters.

“I said, ‘Guys, just spend 30 minutes on one of those topics. Which of those topics touches you and what’s best for you and your family? That’s who you should vote for,’” Moglia said. “And I think we had a reasonable amount of our guys vote. That’s not true of most college football programs around the country. That’s what we do literally every week.”

While these “LAF” talks are now an ingrained part of the routine for the Chants’ older players, for the speakers of this particular session a couple weeks ago, it was a far from ordinary concept given the setting.

Sundberg, who played college basketball for Hawaii, played brief stints in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers in 1997 and 2000 and had an extended career playing professionally overseas, was especially impressed by the Chants’ commitment to making time for such topics.

“I haven’t been on a team that specifically had these types of things regimented throughout the season,” he said after the session. “Having a ‘Life After Football,’ ‘After Basketball,’ any athletic [endeavor], there’s a value there that I don’t know how you measure that. Teams will help, like, ‘OK, we’ll bring in a financial adviser, we’ll bring in these other people to help.’ But even if you make [good money] playing basketball, you can only do that for so long. What comes after that? Having that foresight and that thought now, it develops so much in guys that is going to be great for them.

“They may not even understand it at this point, but they’ll look back on this [and think] that was very influential.”

The number of raised hands kept growing over the final half hour of the session with a dozen or so players waiting to ask a question. They asked if they could get involved with the organization, they asked how a non-profit functions, why the United States prison system fails in certain regards, even about advice for those who don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their life.

Henderson was one of the players who found a connection in the subject matter and asked Marte, the former drug distributor turned entrepreneur, how he managed to distance himself from the negative influences in their life.

“Given the situation that I grew up in and the place I grew up from, I was kind of faced with the same stuff of distancing myself from bad people,” Henderson said later. “So I just wanted to hear what he did and the things he went through with that, and it kind of hit home with me too.”

Eventually, just before 9 p.m., the session drew to a close and the players were told the Defy Ventures group would be around the team facilities for the next couple days for further discussion. Still, a handful of players lingered behind waiting to talk one-on-one with the guests before the night ended.

“When we were preparing to come down here, I was honored to be invited, but I’ve never spoken to a football team and I honestly didn’t know that we would have anything to offer them,” Hoke said afterward. “I didn’t know if they were going to care. I speak to business audiences for the most part, so to see the words didn’t fall on deaf ears and it resonated and they paid attention for an hour and a half after a long day and they care and they’re asking ‘What can I do to make a difference?’ … that’s pretty awesome.”

Again, Moglia was happy to see the players’ interest as well. After all, that’s the whole point.

“I was pleased that our guys were engaged enough,” he would say later. “For them to ask the questions that they did, it touched them somehow.”

This story was originally published August 22, 2015 at 7:24 PM with the headline "CCU’s Moglia teaching ‘Life After Football’."