He Gives Athletics the Brush Off : Entrepreneur: Former Palos Verdes High and San Luis Obispo running back Seaburn is now a contract painter.

Only two years ago, we were used to seeing Matt Seaburn run with the football.

Now Seaburn, still rosy-cheeked at 20, is running his own business.

Football is no longer a part of his life. A standout running back at Palos Verdes High in 1987 and ‘88, he is now a sophomore in college, operating his own student painting franchise.

Like most of life’s transitions, Seaburn’s shift from football hero to young entrepreneur didn’t happen smoothly.

It came with a crunch.

Seaburn saw his career as a reserve Division II running back come to an end last year when he smashed his collarbone in an ordinary workout at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

The drill pitted Cal Poly’s offensive reserves against the first-team defense. Seaburn took a handoff, broke past the line of scrimmage and was looking for running room.

Instead, he found star linebacker Chris Dunn, who is now playing pro football with the Atlanta Falcons.

Both players lowered their shoulders, but Dunn got a little lower.

“After the impact, I popped right up,” Seaburn said. “You have to impress the coaches, let ‘em know it didn’t hurt you.”

He figured it was just a bruise. But the next day, Seaburn couldn’t lift his arm. After seeing a doctor and the X-rays, Seaburn knew why.

“My collarbone was completely shattered,” he said. “It looked like a tree without any leaves on it.”

By the time he recovered, Seaburn had been lost in the shuffle, overlooked by a Cal Poly coaching staff in transition.

So he quit the team. Football became a thing of the past for Seaburn, a Times South Bay All-Star Team selection in 1988, the Bay League back of the year the same season and a local legend at Palos Verdes High who dated one of the homecoming princesses.

“In those days, I was always in the paper,” Seaburn said. “And then in college, suddenly I was just like any other little freshman. Just like anything else in life, I was going to be a pee-wee until I could move on to something bigger.”

Seaburn, a sophomore finance major, was looking for new horizons this spring when he tossed his name in with 2,000 others to become a manager of Student Painters Inc., an international student-run company that began operations in Canada in 1980 and has spread to six Canadian provinces and 28 U.S. states.

The company put Seaburn through three grueling interview sessions, and when the smoke cleared, he was selected as one of 80 student managers.

“They put you through customer service situations,” Seaburn said. “Mostly they want to see if you’re cool and calm or the stressed-out type.”

During the summer, Seaburn has supervised three painting crews, each consisting of four college students, on dozens of contracting jobs in the Palos Verdes area.

Seaburn is responsible for scheduling his workers, securing paint and supplies, estimating and bidding for contracts--and, of course, hiring and firing the kids who want to paint their way through college.

So far it has been a busy summer. Seaburn has hired more than 30 student painters and fired 18 of them.

First there were the two guys who threw paint at each other on the job.

Then there was the foreign student who got his clothes wet while touching up some trim on a pool, then spent the rest of the afternoon painting exteriors in the nude.

“He was from another country,” Seaburn said. “He just didn’t know any better until I saw what he was doing. You learn what kinds of people you need to hire after things like that.”

Seaburn’s ace employee is Nick White, a Scot with 22 years’ experience in custom interior painting. White is building up enough money to return to Cal State Long Beach for his oceanography degree.

Seaburn is learning the hard way how to deal with bizarre situations.

There was the woman real estate broker who hired Seaburn to paint an empty house on the peninsula for a foreign investor--and then skipped town with the investor’s money.

As a contractor, Seaburn put a mechanic’s lien on the house to recover his painting fees. Then he was barraged with phone calls from real estate agents and lawyers.

Eventually, the investor himself flew in from Asia and paid Seaburn in cash.

“I’ve probably learned more in two months on this job than I did in 16 years of school,” Seaburn said.

After he graduates from college, he wants to get into real estate development.

When he graduated from Palos Verdes two years ago, Seaburn couldn’t think of much else besides football.

He was part of a close-knit offensive unit that toured Europe in rented Volkswagen vans the summer after graduation, along with the offensive coaches and a handful of women from Palos Verdes.

As a junior, Seaburn made his talent known when he filled in for injured running back Austin Peters in a game against North Torrance. He carried 40 times for 198 yards and five touchdowns.

The next year, Seaburn was the varsity starter and led Palos Verdes to the Bay League title in a rout over South Torrance--rolling up 188 yards rushing and 89 yards receiving in that game.

Although football is out of his life now, Seaburn still calls on the memories to help him through sticky situations.

“Football teaches you how to deal with pressure moments,” Seaburn said. “Like when you’re down by six points and there’s a minute left. You know exactly what has to be done, and you do it.

“It’s the same way in life. People will be real nice to you until they have to write you a check. You have to learn to deal with that.”