Category: About Me

Three posts down a few more to go! I originally thought this About Me series would only last 4-5 posts, but as I have dug deeper into my past and what I have wanted to touch on, the posts continue to get broken out more and more.

If you haven’t read already, here are the links to the first 3 articles:

• Article I – Developing The Base For My Money, Mindset, Mission Ideology
• Article II – Developing My Money Mindset
• Article III – Deciding Which University to Attend

Setting the Stage:

I am now a Division I athlete and freshman at SUNY at Buffalo. My path to this point has been interesting with a lot of tough decisions needing to be made. I was now living in a part of the country where I literally knew nobody.

Born and raised in the Dallas area and not knowing anyone in Buffalo warranted the thought of bringing my car with me. This meant if I wanted to have my car with me in Buffalo, I would have to drive it from Dallas. For the geography challenged individuals out there (trust me I am one of them), this drive is a 22-hour journey. The longest by far I have ever driven in a car.

After knocking the drive out in two quick days I was officially moved into my dorm and ready to take on whatever was to come. I was excited to begin this new journey in my life. I felt extremely grateful for having the opportunity of being a D1 athlete as well as declaring to become a Mechanical engineer. I was always a straight A student in high school and knew I wanted to become an engineer but didn’t know exactly which type. The great thing about declaring to be an engineer in school was the courses you take for the first two years are standard for each engineering discipline.

With that, it wasn’t so much important to make a final decision on the type of engineering I decided but was more important that I decided to be an engineer.

Some advice if you are pondering what major to select: If you think you want to be an engineer, start from the first semester of college. If you do not, there is a good chance you will struggle to graduate in four years. The main reason for this being the pre-requisite courses required before jumping into the meat and potatoes of what you will learn.

Keeping the Entrepreneur in Me Alive:

I am all settled in at Buffalo. The experience of being a D1 athlete was turning out to be much more time intensive than I had originally expected. I was getting the opportunity to play with guys who played at the highest levels in their country and it was truly amazing getting a great hit in each day. The other amazing thing about being a D1 athlete, in tennis, was the fact that I was the only American playing on the lineup. My team consisted of guys from Poland, Brazil, Zimbabwe, Russia, Canada, and Spain! Of all the things about being a D1 athlete, I found being able to create a brotherhood with all these amazing people from different cultures to be truly incredible.

Throughout my college tennis career, one thing I wanted to continue doing was making money from my side hustle of stringing rackets (checkout link to this post that talks more about this). The cool thing about playing with guys who were at my skill level and higher was they break strings more often.

More strings being broken = More business for me!

Ah boy was a business boomin! During this time, I would string between 10-15 rackets a week at $10/racket. As a poor starving college student, this was an incredible amount of money to now spend. At this point in my path to Financial Independence, I didn’t know anything about saving and investing! I can only imagine where I would be today if I knew about this in 2014! Can’t dwell on the past though!

Beginning to Have a Change of Heart:

My freshman year of college went well from both an academic and athletic standpoint. I played number two doubles and number 5-6 singles on the team. I don’t remember my exact record, but I think it was probably close to .500.

Playing D1 tennis was a whole different level of commitment than I had originally anticipated. I went from practicing 5 hours per week with one tournament each month to a strict regimen of:

• 1-hour strength and conditioning workout 5 days a week
• 2-hours of practice each afternoon
• And 2-6 matches at a high level most weekends

I went from being a scrawny 6’, 120 lb. athlete to gaining 15 pounds of muscle from the intense training and insane eating habits my trainers had me on. I still remember to this day leaving practice, heading to the dorm cafeteria and eating an entire plate of spaghetti and meatball sauce prior to having my actual meal. If I had to guess, I was consuming over 5,000 calories per day.

The rigor I put my body through was something I didn’t think to be possible. After a year and a half of the grind, I was ready for a change. My love for the game of tennis was quickly fading. During this time I reached out to a few good friends of mine who were all going to school at the University of Arkansas. I mentioned to them I was thinking about leaving Buffalo and heading closer to home. Within a few weeks of letting them know, they had secured a place to live with an extra bedroom for me.

Well, looks like there was going to be a big change in my life! After my sophomore year of college and being a D1 athlete at Buffalo, I decided I was ready to put the rackets up and move back closer to home.

This was another integral decision I made that has impacted a lot of where I am today. At the time the main things that led me to the decision to transfer from Buffalo to Arkansas were:

• Being closer to home and being able to live with close friends. In Buffalo, getting home was a pain in the butt and very expensive.
• I missed warm weather…a good ol’ southern man ain’t meant to live in the northeast in freezing weather!
• I had received everything I could have dreamt of from playing tennis. My college athletic experience was incredible. My body was now telling me it was time to turn to the next chapter in my life.
• Transferring to Arkansas wouldn’t set me back in my degree as I did some extensive research with the university to ensure almost all my credits would transfer.

This part of my life was another crazy rollercoaster. I couldn’t be more grateful and thankful for all the incredible people I met in Buffalo and all the amazing experiences I was fortunate enough to have. On to the next chapter of my life finishing up my degree at the University of Arkansas!

Key Takeaways:

• The topic of whether you should go to college is one I wouldn’t have thought about touching on a while back. In the day and age we live in, I do think it is a valid point to discuss. I personally believe if there is a certain type of career you wish to pursue that requires a college degree, go for it. If the career you wish to have after college doesn’t require a college degree, I would highly recommend thinking twice about how much the expense is and what value you expect it to bring to your life.
• There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t give up to go back and have the D1 athletic experience all over again. I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity I had and to have met all the amazing people I did along the way.
• No matter how busy you are, you can always find time for a side hustle! My racket stringing “business” was booming during one of the busiest times of my life. It was definitely nice to have some side income coming in while I was going to school and had a full-time job in being a student athlete.

The first two About Me posts have covered the entirety of my childhood. If you want to learn more about how I started to develop my money, mindset and mission ideologies from a young age, checkout this link to my first About Me post. In my second About Me post, I talked a lot about how I developed my entrepreneurial mindset by monetizing a unique skill and ability I learned at a young age. You can read about this by following this hyperlink.

Setting the Stage:

Now it is time to begin discussing my late teenage years and some of the most difficult decisions I had to make in my life.

At this point in my life, I am 17 years old going into my senior year of high school. I have continued playing tennis throughout high school and I reached a top 10 junior ranking in the state of Texas. Texas is known for having some of the best junior tennis in the country (including Florida and California), and being a top junior, I was being recruited by Division 1 tennis programs to play for their schools. I always knew I wanted to compete at a high level in anything I did so the thought of becoming a D1 athlete was extremely appealing.

As my senior year began, I would get calls and letters from D1 coaches every week. After speaking with different schools, I had narrowed it down to the top 5 schools I wanted to take official visits to. An official visit is a free visit to a university where they will immerse you in the college experience with student athletes on the team. It is an incredible experience I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to go through. The 5 schools I decided to take official visits to were: University of South Carolina, Sothern Methodist University (SMU), SUNY at Buffalo, Louisiana Lafayette, and Lamar University.

When doing my college search, there were 4 main things I was looking for:

1. A highly rated engineering program
2. Could immediately play in the lineup for the team
3. Could receive an athletic and academic scholarship to the university
4. A fun college town experience

How I Made My Final College Decision

Deciding on where to attend college was extremely difficult, especially for a 17-year-old who hadn’t experienced traveling or being away from home much at all. I had an incredible time during the official visits to each university. Once all my visits were complete, it was time to make a final decision. Knowing what I know now, I wish I had understood what a decision matrix was and how that could have helped me make an unbiased decision. If you want to learn more about what it is, follow this link. I don’t think this would have changed my final decision, but it would have been something interesting to look back on now.

After much conversation and debate with my parents, I decided to attend SUNY at Buffalo. Here are the main reasons I decided to attend SUNY at Buffalo over the other schools I went to visit:

1. Buffalo had a solid engineering school, and knowing I had no aspirations of becoming a professional tennis player, the degree I would receive would be extremely important in setting myself up for future success
2. The tennis program was an up and coming program. They had a brand-new head coach who was a top 10 D1 singles player from the University of Alabama. All the players on the team loved his passion and how he coached the team. In just one year, the coach had been able to turn the team around from being the worst in the MAC conference to sharing the MAC Championship with Western Michigan. I would have the opportunity to immediately come in and make an impact on the program.
3. I was being offered $15,500 worth of athletic and academic scholarships. This would put my total out of pocket cost at $7,000/year. I was in an extremely fortunate situation where my parents saved up $28,000 to be used for college tuition. If I were to complete my degree in four years, I would be coming out of school with no debt. This would be huge!
4. Buffalo was a big city with a lot of things to do. I was ready to try something completely new that would put me outside of my comfort zone. I would be far from all family and friends and could meet a ton of new people.
5. Looking back on the decision I made to attend SUNY at Buffalo, I am grateful for the opportunities it brought. This is not the end of my college decisions I had to make (as you will find out from a later post), but I do have some key takeaways from going through the process.

Key Takeaways:

• Use a Decisions Matrix when going through to make difficult choices in life. To do this, detail out what decision you are trying to make, what the key factors are, and what the weight of each factor is. Then go through and give a ranking for each decision to then calculate an unbiased decision. Checkout this link that walks through a little more detail.
• When thinking about which university you want to attend, try and look at it from a completely unbiased point of view. If I had a biased point of view prior to making my final decision, I don’t think I would have ever decided to attend Buffalo. I mean, why the heck would a kid from the south ever want to go up and deal with the cold weather up in Buffalo!
• Talk with friends and family to fully flesh out your thought process on how you view each school. Every school you are choosing from will have its pros and cons. Having key people in your life you can talk through your thoughts with will help lead you in the right direction.

Time for Part II of my about me posts. In this post I am going to catch-up right where I left off after my freshman year in high school. If you haven’t had a chance to read Part I, click the link here to read!

Freshman year ended up going extremely well for me. Not only from an athletic perspective, but also from an academic perspective. Math was always my subject while I would continuously struggle with English and Social Studies. Something about numbers and solving difficult problems was extremely intriguing to me.

Being a competitive tennis player brings an expense most might not think of. Have you ever seen a professional tennis player pop a string on their racket? Probably not too often. The main reason professional players don’t break strings often is the fact they have freshly strung rackets for each match. Ever wonder why they pull out a racket from their bag and it comes in a plastic wrapping? Well, this is because they have 5-10 different rackets in their bag that are all strung to different tensions. Based off conditions or how the individual is feeling, they will use a different tension on their racket.

Historically, I didn’t pop strings that often, but as I became bigger and stronger (now 5’ 11” and 120 lbs watch out! haha) there was more of a need for me to have my rackets restrung every week. At your typical country club this would cost $25 per racket plus any cost of the string you wanted to purchase (typically an additional $10-20). As my parents were very frugal and didn’t like to spend money, they started to quickly figure out this would not be affordable in the long term. So, what did they decide to do? Instead of paying someone else to string our rackets, they told my brother and I they would buy us a racket stringing machine if and only if we agreed to string our own rackets.

For those of you that have no idea what a stringing machine looks like, here is a picture for reference 😊

Being a naïve young teenager, I did not like this idea at all. Why would I want to learn how to string tennis rackets when I could have my parents pay for someone else to do it? Oh man did my money mindset have to make a big shift. Looking back, I should have easily been able to understand what my parents were trying to do. Save Money so we could Live Better (Walmart, plug).

The beginning of the Mindset shift:

My brother and I finally agreed to the deal. Sure enough, one week later we had the above stringing machine in the middle of our game room with my brother’s high school tennis coach teaching us how to string our own rackets. The stringing machine my parents purchased came with 2 different reals of strings (each real string will get you roughly 20 rackets). Huge win already!

The process of stringing a tennis racket when you are first learning how can take upwards of an hour and a half. My brother and I learning how to string were no exception to this. As I went to school the next couple of weeks, I began telling my teammates about my parents buying my brother and I a stringing machine. Unexpectedly, my friends started to become more and more interested in how my stringing abilities were coming along and whether I could tell a difference between a racket I strung versus one strung by a country club pro. Within two months I had mastered the art of stringing a tennis racket to the same standards you would expect from a professional from a country club.

I now had this unique skill and ability that very few had. So, what did I decide to do? $$$$$$$ Time to monetize my unique ability. At word of a friend breaking a string at practice, I would ask them if I could string their racket. The first question they asked back, “How much do you want?” Ummmm, well I hadn’t thought this through that much. Knowing the cost of getting a racket strung by a country club of $25 (plus money for the string, $10-20 more), I froze and told a friend $15 plus they provide the string. I could tell they were contemplating whether I was worth the risk. So, I decided to sweeten the deal a little more. I would add free string, so their total cost would be $15. My friend immediately accepted the deal, I mean how could you resist such an amazing offer 😉

Time to Get to Work!

Oh boy. What had I just done?!?! Did I really get a friend to agree to allow me to string their racket for money? How was I going to get my homework done for tomorrow and be able to deliver the racket in the morning?! I had never had a job before and the thought of earning money for using a unique ability I had was intriguing. I took my friends racket, strung it that night, and returned it to them the next morning. In exchange they paid me $15. An hour and a half’s worth of work and I made $15. $10/hr, not bad at all! Did I just start a business at 15!?!?

Woah…my first ever transaction. Word started getting around to everyone on the team. Before I knew it, I had 5 different teammates giving me their rackets to string. As I started to string more and more rackets, I naturally got faster at stringing. What used to take me 90 minutes started taking me 60, then 50, then 40, 30, 20, and finally 15. Holy crap. What had I started. I could now charge $15 and I would be able to string 4 rackets in an hour. Sign me up! I was now making $60/hr stringing rackets. Yes, I was directly exchanging my time for money, but I was a 15-year-old teenager making $60/hr. All I saw was money coming in. The ability to make money at a young age started getting somewhat addictive.

Before I knew it, everyone in my town knew I provided great quality, fast turnaround, and a great customer experience. The entrepreneurial money mindset was born!

Key Takeaways:

• You are never too young to develop unique skills in which you can monetize
• Have a game plan before you put your services out on the market! I was a naïve 15-year-old who had no concept of starting a side hustle business. I had not thought of pricing, ability to scale, and how to market. All things I wish I would have known more about now looking back.
• Exchanging your time for money at an early age isn’t a bad thing (in my opinion). I know this might be a little controversial, but I think the biggest thing this venture taught me was how to have a great work ethic and be diligent with my time. It isn’t easy spending 1-2 hours each night stringing rackets when you have other responsibilities like homework, sports, and hanging out with friends.