What Do Some Basketball Players Do After Retirement? Rejoin The NBA

When Cherokee Parks stepped away from basketball, the first time around, his relationship with the game had gone sour. It was 2003. And Parks, a former NCAA champion with Duke University, was into his 10th year in the NBA.

He decided a decade was enough.

"I stopped playing because I was miserable," Parks tells LinkedIn. "Just at the time, my feeling was basketball was the root of my misery."

After returning home from a flight with the Golden State Warriors, Parks decided to stop playing in the NBA. Full stop.

But what was once a sour relationship is now a happy reunion, in part thanks to Parks' new job. In October, the 46-year-old former player officially began working at the NBA's headquarters in Manhattan, where he joins the league’s department of player development.

“They work on training development, support enrichment, services and resources,” Parks says about the department. “They focus on making good decisions, career development, business of basketball, being responsible, maximizing your career, healthy relationships, education and assistance. These are all things that I’m into.”

His reintroduction to the NBA comes by way of the league's Basketball Operations Associate Program, which helps former NBA and WNBA players move into roles within the league and its teams. The program lasts for a year and focuses on league operations, front office competencies and business acumen, a league representative tells LinkedIn.

Parks is one of four former athletes to have taken part of the 2017-18 iteration of the program, and the three others have similarly taken on roles throughout the league. But Parks’ story in particular serves an example of how athletes navigate from one career to the next, what their options are when they decide to do so, and where it can go right, or wrong.

(Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)

Most Americans are projected to stop working in their mid-60s, per Gallup. By contrast, Parks, much like many other athletes, played his last NBA game in his 30s, at an age where one could reasonably expect to have more tomorrows than yesterdays.

The early retirement raises the question: What do you do next?

"I didn't have an exit strategy," Parks admits. "I just stepped away."

It's not uncommon for athletes to turn to running a business. Former NFL player Shawn Springs, for example, founded a company that focuses on impact technology just a few years after his last game for the New England Patriots.

Parks also took the entrepreneurial route. "But there's a big difference between having a successful idea and making an idea a success," he says he learned. Parks' idea? "The Brigg," a live music venue he opened in Huntington Beach, Calif. a year after stepping off the basketball court.

The venue, which mostly featured punk rock bands, gave the former NBA player a chance to work in his hometown. He wouldn't be working there for long, though.

"I had a vision for it. Everything came out exactly how I wanted it. It had the music I wanted in there, everything. But when it came down to it, I did not know how to run a business…. It wasn't enjoyable, so I got out of it."

Parks knows what he would have done differently. He'd make the establishment a bar first and music venue second, for starters. But he only realized that much later on, which is one of the key lessons he now shares with current NBA players.

"That's one of the things that we talk about with some of the guys: 'Get your feet wet while you're doing some other things.' Try out some new things.... That's the time to be opening doors and trying out new things," Parks says.

(Photo by Al Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Parks didn't enjoy his first crack at entrepreneurship. But he did rediscover his passion for basketball, despite his exhaustion from his decade in the NBA.

Eight years after leaving the league, Parks returned to professional basketball, this time in France. But his playing days would end for a second time when he was diagnosed with a condition that would require open heart surgery in 2013.

After undergoing rehab at Duke University for a couple of years, the end of his recovery marked the beginning of a second transition from basketball, this one seemingly more successful than the first.

Kobe Bryant and LeBron James have media ventures. Others — like Kevin Durant, Baron David and Andre Iguodala — have gravitated toward tech. But Parks’ journey back to the NBA shows that the league is trying to create space for a second act for its veterans, under its own roof.

Parks first got involved with programs led by one of his former teams, the Los Angeles Clippers, with the help of the organization's vice president of community relations, Denise Booth.

"She has always done a great job of staying connected to alumni.... When I got back to California from North Carolina, she just, anything and everything that I could be involved in with the team, she would just hit me up."

(Photo by Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images)

Then came a player development meeting at the Clippers' practice facility, where Parks met the league's director of player development, Alexys Feaster, who informed him about the NBA's "career crossover" programs.

By Christmas time 2016, Parks had been communicating with former Clippers' teammate Corey Maggette about the benefits of the NBA's Basketball Operations Associate Program. He would soon find himself a part of the the 2017-18 iteration of the program. 

And now that his journey through the program is over, his focus turns to paying it forward and educating other players about the development resources that helped him make his own career transition.

“To actually get to educate players and talk about these things while I’m actually looking to be involved with these focal points myself? I mean, come on,” Parks says. “That’s incredible.”