Jay Williams: Pros and Cons of Staying In School
May 1, 2006 by Angelo Fernandez
Filed under NBA Basketball
Former Duke star and Chicago Bulls guard Jay Williams reflects on his motorcycle accident right after his rookie season and how staying in school has helped him here. Story
The reality of professional sports is that it is a venue for fame and fortune for those people who have come from poor families. It’s common place to hear about the humble beginnings of young athletes who got into NBA or any other league or sport. We usually hear about being raised into a huge family by a single mother who took many jobs in a day just to make ends meet. First and foremost I want to praise them for the wonderful job! The opportunity to play in the NBA, earning millions of dollars is just a dream come true for such families so the making the jump from high school or mid-college is such a temptation.
But in a corporate world so competitive that having a Masters Degree is becoming more and more important for people, not having a college degree can and most probably will hurt you in the long run. To a lot of NBA players, basketball fame and fortune makes them feel on top of the world. Many don’t realize that such fame and fortune is fleeting. What happens to your life after you retire from sports? As the great Earl Monroe puts it,
Sport is the only profession know of that when you retire you have to go to work.
An NBA player’s career would probably last 10 years, assuming you’re good enough and you remain healthy. Many reach more than 10 but the reality is that there are many players out there whose playing careers don’t even last five years. An even greater number struggle to stay with a team for more than one year. This makes these people explore other options such as playing in Europe or in development teams. Some even play in the Philippine Basketball Association as imports. My point is that professional sports is not the long term answer to being successful in life.
So as Jay Williams has shared with us, if you can afford to stay in college and earn that degree then do so, If you need to play professionally for financial reasons then go. But it’s important to get that degree sometime. Be like Jerry Stackhouse and Antawn Jamison who eventually earned their degree after leaving college early for the NBA.
There can be NO substitute for a good solid college education, if and when possible. Of course, I can hear the college drop-outs who became billionaires snickering in the background….but how many are they who made it that far? When one has nothing but basketball skills to fall back on, some general knowledge can help….unless one ends up as a commentator.