When viewed from the seats of the TD Garden, it looks like Sean Morris has a pretty great job. As a member of the Boston Blazers professional indoor lacrosse team, he gets paid to run around with a stick while Guns N’ Roses blares through the loudspeakers.
But at one time, the Marshfield native donned a suit and sold life insurance and investment products in Boston. As an associate salesman for Executive Compensation Group – now known as Charter Oak Financial – he split his time between insurance sales and a roster spot in lacrosse’s professional outdoor league in Chicago, before heading to a team in San Jose and finally landing back in Boston. His lacrosse connections and a University of Massachusetts degree in economics helped land him his insurance gig, although he has since devoted himself to all things lacrosse.
Sean Morris
Title: Attacker, Boston Blazers. Formerly, sales associate at Executive Compensation Group
Age: 27
Experience: Four years’ Professional Lacrosse/18 months life insurance sales
What set of circumstances led to your being both a lacrosse player and an insurance salesman, of all things?
I’d actually gotten drafted out into Chicago [outdoor league] and lived out there in the summertime … Unfortunately, in lacrosse you do need a second job. You can, I guess, do it, but you’re not going to be doing well by any means. So what I was able to do was just start networking and trying to find jobs, and it was going well in Chicago. I was close to taking a job at Bear Stearns actually, so, I was happy I didn’t take that.
But I started to realize that if I could network in Chicago, I might as well try to start doing this back in Boston. So that’s when I started to utilize lacrosse contacts. I joined the UMass Alumni Club, just met a lot of people along the way. … I had job interviews with wealth management firms. Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, commercial real estate, so pretty much everything under the sun. I found the ECG [Executive Compensation Group] through the alumni club … my boss was great, he was a former athlete himself, so he kind of understood the commitment that I needed to put nto both.
I had no idea lacrosse was such a powerful networking tool.
The lacrosse community is a pretty tight-knit community, so if you’ve had success on the field, your name might resonate a bit more. There is a direct pipeline to Wall Street for a lot of lacrosse guys. If you look at the top 10 teams nationally, every year you’ve got Princeton, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Syracuse, Loyola, Notre Dame, Duke, all prestigious schools. You know, growing up, that you’re not going to play big-time lacrosse if you don’t hit the books.
And your boss was an athlete himself?
The entire office was all former division one athletes. Lots of [Boston College] guys, a couple Cornell guys. So it was a small office, it was great. That experience that I had was second to none, just kind of being a junior guy in there and learning from the older guys and helping out. It was definitely a difficult job.
Any big experiences come out of it?
I got to sit down and meet with one of the bigger hedge funds in Boston, when I was 24 years old. Talking to the CEO … I look back on it, and I was kind of naïve at the time, kind of not really understanding the magnitude of that. Along the way, learned a lot of businesses, understood how the financial world works, as well as how you can use insurance products, investment products, all that stuff.
And you worked at the ECG while playing in Chicago’s outdoor league?
I was literally in a suit and tie, going to the airport every Friday, flying out to Chicago. And if it wasn’t Chicago, it was LA, Denver, San Francisco [for games], because I was in the Western Conference.
So I was just literally packing my bag up, throwing my suit in. I was on the road, playing the weekend, fly back Sunday. Can’t tell you how many times on Monday I’d call in and say ‘Sorry, something happened on my flight, I’m going to be a little late this morning,’ or ‘I’m not going to make it at all.’
How long were you with the company?
I was there for about a year and a half, but then [got the opportunity to move out to San Jose and play indoor lacrosse].
At that point, I signed an endorsement deal with STX, the lacrosse equipment manufacturer, so when I was in San Jose, they knew I was going to eventually come back to Boston, and [STX was] really harping on me to take a sales rep job in New England…
So that’s my current position now.
Top Five "off the bench" Morris facts, courtesy of blazerslacrosse.com:
Favorite Movie: Boogie Nights
Favorite TV Show: Zorro
Favorite Food: Fun Dip
Favorite “pump-up” song: “I Want to Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston
Ideal place to live: South Boston
