Hi Jason!
After a great season with your ASA team, you have announced your end of career. So, a simple but important question, how do you feel?
Hi Arthur!
For the moment, everything is fine. We’ve just come out of the playoffs and finished the season so I feel like I’m still in the groove. I don’t really feel the lack of competition but I think it will be weird when I start again in August with my friends, especially because I will miss the “high level”.
Before leaving this “high level” behind you, what is your assessment of this last year?
Today, I have some regrets after the end of our season.
Being one match away from playing in the finals was really annoying! But honestly, when you look at the beginning of this season, it’s hard to have many regrets. I’m not sure most people would have put a coin on us in February if we had told them we would be in the play-off semi-finals, one game away from beating Antibes and playing in the final.
Honestly, when you see where we’ve come from, it’s really a great run and I would have been annoyed if we’d gone down so I’m glad it’s over.
A season full of surprises which comes on top of your very good sporting career. I imagine that you have 1000 memories in mind but could you share with us one that stands out for you?
There are indeed a lot of good memories!
I already loved my first three years at the INSEP and with the French youth teams. Real moments of sharing with friends and it’s quite complicated to find this kind of atmosphere once you become a professional.
I think it’s those years and my first French team campaigns that I’ll always remember.
After those, I went on to two years in Strasbourg where it was more complicated. The team had just won the French championship and it was immediately harder to find a place.
But of course, I will remember the different ascents I made, from N2 to N1 with Lorient and N1 to Pro B with Souffel.
When you win, it’s always good years!
And what about the future? Do you plan to continue playing? Are you looking for a new professional project?
Already, as far as basketball is concerned, I have decided to sign up with an N2 club in the region. With my wife, we had decided to stay in the area so we’ll say that it helped in my decision and then I’m going to join some friends with whom I played in Souffel!
As for the rest, I have studied for almost all my career and I have taken a diploma for 6 years to become a chartered accountant. I have the DSCG or higher diploma in accounting and management and I would like to start my end-of-study internship in December to become a chartered accountant.
Sporting projects and a post-career already well-defined!
Concerning more specifically your post-career, can you explain to us how you came to do a DSCG?
My training in accounting came about by chance. I always studied during my sports career.
I started after the baccalaureate by doing a STAPS degree in Strasbourg which I validated in 4 years, I think.
During the last year of my degree, I happened to have accounting and that immediately interested me a lot.
I think I’ve always really liked numbers and so I started to find out what I could do. So, I registered for the DCG (Accounting diploma) and as it was possible to have it financed by the clubs, I was able to do all this by correspondence and without having to finance these diplomas with my own funds.
I passed my DCG for the first 3 years and then went on to do the DSCG master’s degree, which I also passed in 3 years.
I validated it in 2018, which allowed me to take a break until the end of my career.
You talk about distance learning, so in complete autonomy. Did you find it complicated to train during your career?
Honestly, it was. That’s what I always say to people who ask me.
We are lucky to have a job that leaves us a lot of free time, so it’s quite feasible. It’s mainly a question of organization.
At the time I didn’t have children so it was easier to do it and my first daughter was born in 2018 so it was perfect timing.
Finally, even when you train twice, you have time in your day! So sure, if you wake up 5 minutes before training and sleep for 3 hours in the afternoon, it’s going to be complicated!
But if you organize yourself well and you can do your training from home, it’s really possible to do it serenely.
Today, we have tools that allow us to do crazy things in terms of distance learning and all this did not exist 20 years ago.
For us professional sportsmen, being able to follow a distance training course is just incredible. You can play in Italy or Spain and follow a training course in France. These are things we would never have thought of!
Otherwise, we would have quickly left alone or with our family and spent our life in front of Netflix and it’s really not the same thing.
And then, you really shouldn’t take it lightly because the end of your career comes quickly! Maybe 35 or 40 years for those who last the longest and that’s still young in an active life. Apart from those who have been able to earn 400,000 euros per year and build up a large capital, the others must really think about it otherwise it might seem strange.
In the end, you easily found your way.
It’s true that we can see players fumbling around, having difficulty finding a project or studying “by default”.
Would you have any advice to give to a player who is thinking about a career change?
The hardest thing is really to find what you want to do, especially when you’re really into basketball. It’s really complicated to think about a new life project!
I think that, even if some players do studis by default, it will always be useful in one way or another.
I’ve always studied and even though I ended up doing something else, it was very beneficial for me to do it. It helped me to keep the pace.
So my advice would be that sometimes it’s better to do something than nothing at all, especially when you have free time, even if you’re not 100% sure that it’s something that will interest you. As I said, I did STAPS because I was a high-level sportsman and I knew that I wasn’t going to work in that field later on, but it opened me up to new studies and it kept me on track and pushed me to do things, to stay active!
Frankly, if you ask young people aged 18 or more who are players, 90% of them will be unable to tell you what they want to do and especially what they will be doing in 40 years later. If they can do that, they will really have an exceptional career plan and that’s really very rare.
The hardest thing is to involve yourself in a new project. That’s why you always must do something and try, even if it means making mistakes. You can always make mistakes, it’s always better than doing nothing!
It’s easy to put yourself 100% into the sport and think that everything will be fine. But we mustn’t forget that this is not the case for everyone and that not all players have the career they want.
There are so many parameters that come into play! If it was just work, everyone would make it. It would be enough to spend 12 hours a day in the gym to make a career. Of course, not everyone can do it, but you must plan for the unexpected.
Even those who have been able to make a living from basketball and have a career must think about the aftermath.
We are lucky to live from our passion and not to work from 8am to 6pm.
If you look at the time between rest and training, you can easily free up between 8 and 10 hours in your day. It would be a real shame not to put them to good use!
Thank you for this exchange, Jason.
The SNB congratulates you on your career and wishes you every success in your internship and your new career as a chartered accountant.
We look forward to seeing you on and off the field!