ST. LOUIS — Sometimes the perception of professional athletes is fast cars and fast lifestyles.
But then there's St. Louis CITY SC's Kyle Hiebert who can often be found playing chess.
"I memorize long digits of pi, I can solve a Rubix cube some of the math games I played in high school I would still enjoy now. You know, I like scrabble. All of these things kind of make me who I am," Hiebert said.
And he's not spending a lot of money on clothes at Sam Cavato either.
"I'm definitely one of the more frugal guys," he said. "Tim Parker, recently, they would rip me about my socks occasionally, have holes in them, and he saw my socks, and he's like, 'This is not going to fly.' He actually took them off my feet and threw them in the trash. I told him I needed them back because I had no other socks to go home.
Hiebert is a 26-year-old defender for CITY SC. He has gone from a CITY 2 player to a starter at times for the best team in the Western Conference.
Almost as impressive is his academic resume.
We are talking about a 4.0 GPA and getting his degree and masters in accounting at Missouri State, and he's putting it to use.
"So last year I was playing with City 2, my first professional year of soccer. I did some taxes in the spring during tax season, and then when our season officially ended in early October, we had a week off and I saw a lot of guys went on vacation and I locked myself in a room for a week and I passed one of the CPA exams," he said. "We ended up training and playing Bayer Leverkusen at home to stay in the first game, and then a week after that I took and passed my second CPA exam and I'm on the road to taking and passing my third as well."
At the South City Family YMCA, Hiebert taught high school kids about his profession.
But those aren't the only people he's helped.
"How I can save a little bit of taxes when I buy a house, when I own a house instead of renting," Eduard Löwen said. "And yeah, just some small details which I wouldn't know, especially in a foreign country."
But Hiebert doesn't want that accounting career, not yet at least.
"Hopefully, I don't need to be a full-time accountant until many years down the road," he said. "Yeah, I love numbers, but let's delay accounting as long as possible."
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