“We teach athletes, ‘You’re not just a professional athlete; you’re the CEO of your own enterprise,’” said Hawkins, who stresses the importance of providing financial training and discipline to athletes in their rookie year, so they can approach wealth building and preservation before bad habits get the better of them.

Many of the athletes "simply don’t have exposure to money management. They may have been poor, never driven a nice car, eaten in a nice restaurant or lived in a lavish home before. And here they are at 17, 18 or 19 with millions of dollars for the first time, but no training to deal with it,” he said.

To establish trust and minimize any conflicts of interest, Edyoucore offers no money management or financial product sales.

“General managers hire us to teach a variety of our programs. We may teach six different classes for a team's rookies each season. We also make sure to give athletes time to schedule one-on-one meetings with us,” Hawkins said.

“We aren’t coming in in pinstripe suits. We meet players where they are,” he added.

The firm’s classes have catchy titles like “Ballin’ on a Budget,” “Rookie to CEO" and “What the FICO?” The firm's comprehensive investing course seeks to educate players on the importance of long-term investing, market fundamentals and prudent investment vehicles.

“Many times athletes have no idea what they’re invested in or what their ownership stake is,” Hawkins said.

The “Family and Friends” class is designed to give players the training and tools they need to deal effectively with family financial demands in the face of their newfound wealth. Such pressures can distract them from their best performance and drain their nest eggs. To help them avoid pitfalls, Edyoucore teaches them to set critical boundaries, said Hawkins, who noted that when the average person takes a job at Microsoft, they don't automatically start buying family members houses and cars.

Another course, “Drafting and Managing a Winning Advisory Team,” is designed to to teach players how to perform due diligence on their financial advisors, CPAs, tax attorneys and managers.

“We take them through a fairly extensive list of questions they need to ask and teach them fee structures and how to select and manage a winning management team,” Hawkins said.