There is more to being an athlete than just playing in a game.
Andrew Hawkins, better known as “Hawk,” is a third-generation athlete. He has learned the mistakes made by previous professionals in the space and is using his unique journey to carve a path, not only for himself but for other athletes to come.
Hawk has always approached sports from the business lens and as the co-founder of StatusPro, a sports and technology company combining data and augmented and virtual reality to provide a suite of training and gaming products, he is still using those wits to change the whole landscape of gaming for users across the nation.
Changing The Narrative
“I’m a third-generation athlete. My grandfather was a boxer, and my dad played division one football and signed D1. My older brother played for 10 years in the National Football League. I have cousins [who also] played in the league. And so I’ve seen those horror stories, I’ve seen them up close and personal and I’ve always approached sport like a business,” he said during an episode of Black Tech Green Money. “I’ve seen where a sport could use somebody up and there’s nothing to show for it. And so for me, when I went through my experience, I was like, well, I’m gonna do it this way.”
More Than Just An Athlete
As a barrier-breaker in the sports tech space, Hawk understands the importance of the new direction that athletes are taking by building their own brands early on within their careers.
“Before it was, ‘We want our athletes just to be athletes. We want them to focus on football, focus on basketball, focus on baseball, track boxing, whatever it is,'” he said. “That’s what we thought was the norm and anybody who does anything outside of that was looked at sideways. I think now in this age of more than an athlete, a lot of the work has been done and shown by athletes from being activists to being investors, going back to school, and all of these things. Now, you look at an athlete that only does their sport and wonder like, ‘Yo, what are you waiting on? You better get going. This window is closing.’ I think that kind of maturation of what the norm is for an athlete has shifted a lot of things for the industry.”
Listen To The Full Episode
For a deeper dive on how technology is transforming the world of sports as we know it, the journey to building StatusPro, and more listen to the full Black Tech Green Money episode below.
