Laying a corporate pathway, giving athletes a second career

While you read this, six athletes—a footballer, steeplechaser, swimmer, badminton player and chess whiz—are exploring an Indian fintech giant, a landscape rarely visited by their tribe. They are outside familiar sporting boundaries but marking a most significant transition of their lives—and possibly the lives of many more like them in the future.

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The athletes are part of the first group in six-months training, starting August, across various segments of Pine Labs, a financial tech company operating in India and southeast Asia. The athletes in its offices across six Indian cities are the first batch out of Second Innings, a programme created to help top national-level senior and juniors negotiate the end of their competitive careers. Second Innings launched in January and involves two well-known Indian athletes, familiar with the bewilderment that follows retirement.

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Former tennis internationals Aarthi Ponappa Natekar and Gaurav Natekar are the sporting engine of Second Innings, their side of the project to find the athletes that fit the programme. Aarthi fine-tuned the application, interview and selection process, Gaurav has spread the word around the sporting community with the aim of inviting interest and changing perceptions. Already, their firm Natekar Sports and Fitness (NSF) has called for applications for the second batch that could be inducted by December.

The idea is simple, powerful and shape-shifting—giving Indian athletes post-retirement career options in the corporate world they have not imagined before. The secure ‘sports quota’ government job has long been the biggest draw for the Indian athlete. Those jobs are dwindling, employee demands increasing and once careers end—due to age, injury, financial constraints—athletes find themselves staring at limited options: coaching, academies or administration. Aarthi remembers retiring. “There was so much more you wanted to do, you knew you had the capability to be able to contribute to the mainstream work place.”

It all began post the Tokyo Olympics when Pine Labs CEO and sport nut Ambrish Rau reached out to Gaurav wanting to contribute in Indian sport, but outside the glory story. They looked into what was far more common across Indian sport—post-career confusion and the nagging worry of ‘what next’ whether inside or outside PSU employment with the world saying, “no experience, don’t apply.”

Swimmer Anshul Kothari, finalist in the Indian 4x100m relay team at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, one of the Second Innings six, describes it best. “To an athlete, it almost feels like it is a crime that you didn’t start working at 21 or 23. Because you chose to chase your dream and spent a few years chasing that… You almost felt like there was nobody to look after athletes.”

Second Innings put its hand up, to fill in the gap between good intention and real action by creating training and job opportunities for athletes. Arjun Patnaik, head of Pine Labs pricing and commercial finance and now community initiatives says the programme is “a chance to build a career in the tech start up ecosystem which is growing by leaps and bounds today.”

Their first ‘cohort’—the group of six—are to be what techies call a “proof of concept” exercise; a real life test of the NSF’s selection process and Pine Labs’ own training programme created from scratch, “tailor-made for the cohort.” The minimum qualifications for Second Innings are a high school (XII grade) degree and consistent performance at the national level for two or three years.

Aarthi said the criteria had to be fine-tuned, for example to include juniors as well because “in sports like athletics and football, juniors is still 21” and the programme is only looking for athletes at the end or close to the end of their careers. The first six months is a flexible orientation of the athlete to Pine Labs and vice versa. It involves them experiencing and understanding the range of departments they could be working in—marketing, finance, sales, operations, human resources and completing a project to give them some idea of the best fit.

As to what’s in it for Pine Labs, Patnaik says, “we are not doing this for publicity. This is not charity and this is not CSR. This is not frivolous work, this is core work. We feel athletes bring in something unique which will make them stand apart from the regular employee base that we dig into.”

Asked what that is, the Natekars and Patnaik reel off a list: resilience, dealing with pressure “from a young age – it could be financial, result-related, taking decisions under pressure and taking responsibility for them”, the ability to channelise fears and push on, (Aarthi), knowing how to lose, coping with failure and getting up the next day to try again (Patnaik), punctuality, discipline, trusting your instincts, managing people “from the age of 11 or 12” (Gaurav).

Pooja Kanth, 30, is a former Asian level chess player, coach and mother to a three-year-old who has had to balance her competitive career with university engineering exams and later coached online round-the-clock (age 4 to 14, she reckons close to 2,000-3,000 children) to make a living. “You’re teaching kids for seven to eight hours but not doing anything for yourself… the Second Innings programme has been so great, we are made to feel part of the company, you are adding to our knowledge and skills, you are discovering the latest practices of the corporate world that can work for you.”

At the sporting level, the Natekars know that they will have to continue hammering away at stereotypes across Indian homes where security of a government job can be made to override passion, ambition and risk-taking. Gaurav’s dream is that five years from now, “there are 10 parents who know that even if you play internationally and don’t get a PSU job, there are companies like Pine Labs where you can actually get a proper job in a established corporate and better your life.”

After two or three cohorts through the Pine Labs system, Rau’s eventual idea, Patnaik says, “is to take this programme to the broader start up community, to show that this works… it is to ensure more athletes apply and “make sure we can recruit a larger number of people.”

By re-writing some old rules of an old game, it is possible to change the game itself.

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