News

Man inspires NFL players with planners

By JOSH McCANN
Island Packet
Published Friday, August 14, 2009

Phil Schembra learned the value of preparation as an all-state football player on a juggernaut of a New Jersey high school football team during the 1960s.

He hasn’t forgotten it. In the planner on Schembra’s desk, each day is filled with meticulous notes to himself. “Look at my week,” he says, showing the pages to a recent visitor. “See what I mean?”

Schembra, 63, says his early experience on the gridiron helped shape him — the son of a Sicilian immigrant and a self-described C-plus student — into a successful Realtor on Hilton Head Island.

He now shares that experience with high school and professional football players, corporate executives and sales people by producing weekly motivational planners.

From an office next to a grocery store in a Hilton Head strip mall, Schembra sells real estate and runs the Hilton Head Island Performance Group, a 30-year-old business that supplies planners for the NFL Players Association and the NFL’s High School Player Development Program, among other groups.

By the time NFL teams close their training camps for the upcoming season, each player will get one of Schembra’s half-inch-thick, spiral-bound guides to life as a professional athlete.

Schembra said the planners help players improve themselves while taking some of the stress out of their busy lives.

The planners are packed with detailed information about the day-to-day aspects of competing at the sport’s highest level, including collective bargaining, contract holdouts, practice squad rosters, medical treatment and directions to practice facilities.

The pages also share inspirational tips about subjects such as time management, ethics, attitude and image. Schembra describes the association’s planner as the player’s “bible.” “You talk to any player,” he said. “They live with this.”

Schembra and his wife, Carol, started the company in 1979. Their first planner was designed for sales professionals. Now, they also produce planners for executives and the general public.

They began producing planners for the players association 14 years ago, after Phil Schembra gave some of his executive planners to two of the association’s leaders: Richard Berthelsen, the association’s general counsel who bought property on Hilton Head with Schembra’s help in the late 1980s; and the late Gene Upshaw, then its executive director, who got to know Schembra while visiting the island.

Berthelsen said he and Upshaw used the planners themselves for several years before Upshaw suggested an adapted version could help the association’s members to keep track of their rights and important dates in the league calendar.

The Schembras started making planners for high school players two years ago after the NFL called about its development program.

Their planners are also distributed each year at the PGA Tour’s Verizon Heritage golf tournament on Hilton Head.

Sports luminaries such as the late NBA and Olympic basketball coach Chuck Daly, NBA Commissioner David Stern, Washington Nationals president Stan Kasten, Green Bay Packers Hall of Famer Bart Starr and Verizon Heritage director Steve Wilmot praise Schembra and his planners in the company’s promotional materials.

The association planners have grown so popular that they are eagerly anticipated by the players, agents, association staff members and league officials to whom they’re distributed, Berthelsen said.

“It’s gotten to the point where, this time of year, people start calling and saying ‘When’s the planner coming out?’ “ Berthelsen said.