"I get it. My resume is weird."

The TPF Q&A with pro soccer player and AI Strategist Clint Irwin

Like many people, Clint Irwin has a corporate job. Unlike most, he had a 15-year detour as a professional athlete first. Clint spent more than a decade in Major League Soccer, playing goalkeeper for the Colorado Rapids, Toronto FC, and Minnesota United. He won MLS Cup in 2017 and spent more than nine years on the executive board of the Players Union.

At the end of 2024, Clint retired from one career and set out on another. After some consulting and many conversations, he landed at AI transformation company ScrumLaunch where he’s vice president of strategy & implementation.

On a recent Tuesday, we talked about pivoting from the pros, selling yourself when the patterns don’t match, and what locker rooms teach you about AI transformation. Then we both went our separate ways to watch Spain play France. Some things never change.

Clint, in his game uniform.

Three Point Four Media: Pro athlete is a job that requires being present and focused. But you also know it’s going to end at some point and you’ll still be a relatively young person who can have a whole separate career. How did you balance those tensions when you were playing?

Clint Irwin: It started with my parents and their approach to sports, academics, and other interests. It was very important for them and for me to be “well-rounded.” My dad was a promising athlete, and his career ended in high school because of injuries. I had this perspective that sports were great and I could be great at them, but they weren’t going to last forever. Even if you make it professionally and you get to LeBron status where you’re still playing at 40 or Tom Brady at 43, your career is finite. For me, I wanted to craft a life outside of sports, and I was always encouraged to find other things that I was interested in.

In college, I was a student-athlete and tried to balance my academic pursuits with sports. I never felt like I was one or the other. I tried to keep it very balanced. Even as my pro soccer career started, my second year I was for lack of a better term forced to find another job because I wasn’t making enough money. I was playing soccer. I was doing some coaching. I was working at a startup.

From a mental health side of things, to have something that wasn’t sports was important for me. These other interests outside of the game were seemingly completely unrelated, but they helped me keep things in perspective. It can be pretty jarring if your whole identity is tied up into this one thing.

On one hand, professional athletes are some of the most overscheduled people on the planet. On the other, there’s so much downtime where you don’t really have anything to do.

That’s definitely true. When I started my pro career, it was very much “being an athlete is your job” and you didn’t do anything outside of that. But we’ve seen how athletes are becoming investors, influencers, and more. No one is surprised now if you have a photo shoot for two hours after training or if a guy flies from London to Paris to do an advertisement. The expectations are loosened about how “focused” you have to be.

I always thought that was a false dilemma. There are only so many hours that you can actually put into practicing and physically developing yourself before you hit diminishing returns. As long as you keep things in balance, it can be helpful. As long as I’m performing, what’s the problem?

When and why did you decide to get an MBA?

In undergrad, I majored in political science and I minored in philosophy. My initial career track was law school-oriented, but I realized I didn’t want to follow that path. If I wanted to enter the business world, I needed some credentials and experience.

I ultimately decided to do it online through Indiana University. The Major League Soccer Players Association has a partnership with Kelley School of Business. They do a great job integrating athletes in. I think it’s important for athletes to be in those cohorts because we have a unique perspective. It was so interesting to share it with people from Fortune 100 companies, and hear about their experiences at Chevrolet, Eli Lilly, and all over the country.

I did the program at an inflection point where AI is starting to be involved in people’s lives. I could see my classmates using it or leaning on it for discussions and in various assignments. We talked a lot about when it was okay to use and when it wasn’t. Professors had wildly different opinions. I felt like it is going to be everywhere, so we should learn to use it.

I found a tremendous amount of value in the business courses because I hadn’t really done a whole lot of that. I can’t say I’m an expert in managerial accounting, but I’ve been exposed to the practice.

What was your job search like?

I met with more than 100 people in my year of job searching. A lot of people want to talk to an athlete or recently ex-athlete because they want to be able to tell their friends. It’s a good entry point. The challenge is that people can understand my discipline, high performance culture, and the intangible things that athletes bring, but they couldn’t really pinpoint where they would position me in a job. Especially in more corporate roles, they didn’t know how to pattern match my experience to what normally comes across their desks in a resume.

I found the most traction with people who were ex-athletes themselves or who had success hiring athletes. It was a long process. I went about a year without something full time.

I get it. My resume is weird. I played professional soccer for nearly 15 years, and now I’m auditioning for a role where I have no work experience. If you’re a hiring manager, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out, right? I realized pretty quickly that there are some people who are just not going to get this. I could spend a lot of time trying to convince them, but it’s not going to work out. I’m better off spending my time with someone who can be helpful or gets where I am.

We have a similar issue where selling ourselves to potential clients who used to be journalists or have journalism experience is so much easier than people who have never done it. Bill and I think a lot about the language we use. “We’ll create a magazine-style feature” makes no sense to someone who has never done that before. It took us a long time to learn that lesson.

You started working full time at ScrumLaunch in March. What’s your day-to-day look like now?

We are an AI transformation agency. My role is primarily new business development, but I also do some project management. It ends up looking a little bit like management consulting plus an AI solution. I’m the liaison between the business problem that companies are trying to solve and our technical engineers who are using their tools and software to solve the business problem. The job changes week-by-week based on who’s out there on CNBC talking about the AI industry. It’s amazing how quickly these talking points enter into the conversations I’m having and the solutions people are requesting.

I’ve found it’s a lot like my experience in soccer, particularly in locker rooms. I always had to figure out how to connect with a 23-year old rookie from Ghana and also the 32-year old American who’s been in the league for 10 years? You have to be flexible, but you also have to figure out what people care about and what drives them.

You still need that layer of building trust with the decision makers. Whatever business becomes in the future, we are going to need the people who can talk cross-functionally across teams and build consensus and trust between various parties. If you can figure out ways to get humans to work together successfully, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll have a job somewhere.

A locker room does feel like very good practice for that kind of communication.

These problems I’m solving now are the same structural problems that I would be trying to solve in a locker room, right? Engineers are basically soccer players who can’t speak corporate. The corporate arm is the technical director who’s trying to figure out why the players won’t go and clap for the home fans after every game. I’m in the middle, trying to explain both sides to each other.