We’re back! Happy New Year to you all.
Clearly last year was a weird one but nevertheless, we managed to do something useful at LAPS.
Our live events schedule was blown up so we pivoted to running our webinar series to help athletes work on their careers and personal profiles from home.
We also welcomed 3 new team members who are now all in the swing of things and we finished the year strongly. We interviewed them online and have not yet had the pleasure of meeting them in person but we were all impressed with their composure under fire on MS Teams.
The year closed out with our team Secret Santa where Kieran was the big winner, receiving multiple gifts. The fallout for this is ongoing, tech CEOs have been contacted and the inquest continues. Whatever happens, we’ll get to the bottom of it.
This week we have our fearless founders Rob and Robbie, who have a few goals for LAPS this year.
Rob
While we did well to pivot to online, I’m really looking forward to getting some live events going again. We ran a great Member Meetup in London early last year and in an ideal world, I’d like to see them happening monthly around the UK. We also had our Ahead of the Game event series interrupted by events so I’m hoping to get these rescheduled and back on the calendar.
We’ve recruited 3 new people to the LAPS team back in September and I haven’t met them yet. It’s a great excuse for a road trip to Scotland to meet Kieran and James and hopefully tie that in with a visit to the famous Gayfield stadium to watch James play for the mighty Arbroath FC. I might even take my badminton racquet and try to buy a point off Kieran – he’s probably gotten rusty since retiring and I’m back from my broken ankle suffered playing cricket!
Aside from looking forward to meeting real people, we’re going to continue to help athletes find great new careers. Our new team members are taking a more hands-on approach to connecting athletes with job roles and we’re improving our platform all the time to make sure that all the ways athletes could get into work are represented and provided for.
Robbie
I’d like to shoot for 5000 members by 2022. While many of our members are current athletes, we’d also like to connect with former athletes who are now in the workforce, whether that’s to help them with their current career or if they fancy helping current athletes navigate the journey that they know so well.
2021 could be considered as the launch of our placement service due to the ongoing situation. Now that people are looking to the future and our team are fully in the saddle, I’m expecting plenty of placement opportunities for athletes to take advantage of.
We’ve also been forging closer relationships between player unions and governing bodies. We all have athlete welfare in common so it just makes sense! We ran a first online meetup to touch base and see what there is to learn from the USA approach to athlete transition which was fantastic. We’ll be doing more.
My biggest hope and dream is to run a LAPS Golf Day this summer. Ryder Cup style. Sport vs Business. Of course, there would also be a member competition with a big 1st prize!
—-
We’re all excited about the year ahead. As ever, if you want to speak to us about Life After Professional Sport, please get in touch.