Dive Brief:
- The University of Texas at Austin is spending $300,000 on the first three years of a new program aimed at building character in high-school athletes and money-management skills in college athletes.
- The Center for Sports Leadership and Innovation will be headed by Daron Roberts, an NFL assistant coach and former student-government president at Texas, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
- One goal of the center will be developing a training and certification program to help high school coaches intervene with players who show troubling behavior, including violence.
Dive Insight:
The center will also start a pilot program for high school football and girls basketball programs. On the financial education side, the center will create a program for the university’s own student-athletes, to include financial professionals and former athletes teaching about managing loans, credit-card debt, and other issues. Another pilot program, to start in the fall of 2015, will include lessons from “anticipated legal rulings” on college athlete financial compensation, according to the university — an apparent reference to a federal judge’s ruling, which has been appealed, that the NCAA had unlawfully prevented college athletes from earning money from the use of their names and images.