These days, former LSU and NFL quarterback Matt Flynn’s routine looks a lot different from his days on the gridiron.
“I thought football had crazy hours. You’d wake up early, and work all day, and leave late at night,” Flynn says. “But I never knew how exhausted I could be with three kids under 5 and running my own company.”
Following his days at LSU and a seven-year career in the NFL, the Texas native returned to his adopted home of Baton Rouge to launch MyHy, a high-quality hydration beverage.
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Flynn is best known for quarterbacking LSU’s 2007 BCS championship team, but it’s a less-known career footnote that drove him to create MyHy. On the field, Flynn constantly struggled to stay hydrated, battling routine cramps, headaches and dizziness, despite consuming water and sports drinks like his teammates.
It didn’t hamper his success, but it planted a seed for the need for a high-quality hydration product, Flynn says.
As his NFL career wound down, Flynn began conducting his own research, using special equipment to collect and analyze sweat samples on scores of volunteers of all ages he recruited himself. 
He hired experts to help him identify the right components to create an all-natural, low-sugar liquid concentrate hydration product that can be added to a bottle of water. Flynn wanted to avoid creating a bottled sports beverage, and, as an athlete, he never enjoyed powder concentrates.
In 2017, MyHy was officially born. It’s sold as liquid packets and in an ice pop form.
Flynn admits that early on in business, he felt like a fish out of water.
“I was Googling the most basic stuff and asking a lot of dumb questions,” he says. “The mindset of an athlete is that you expect yourself to be good at something, but I was really bad at certain things, like cold calling.”
But Flynn was passionate about the science behind his product, so much so that he decided to invest in a local production facility to make it himself. And while MyHy includes athletes as its customers, Flynn is actually aiming the brand squarely at a different target market: “hard hat” employees who endure scalding temperatures on the job. Utility and plant workers, firefighters, first responders and military troops are all on Flynn’s radar. Many are already using his product.
Flynn recently established online sales on his website, and is currently retailing the product in Baton Rouge at Rouses Supermarkets and Calandro’s.
He is hoping to triple MyHy’s annual sales this year, and to do so, he’ll rely on the same mindset that drove his career on the field.
“It sounds cliché, but it’s really about outworking your opponent,” Flynn says. “I know that I might not see results immediately, but if I can work harder than my competition, what I do today is going to eventually bear fruit.” drinkmyhy.com
The food entrepreneurs
Sean Cangelosi
After graduating from Louisiana Tech in 2000, the former Bulldogs football player jumped into the food business franchise game with a Smoothie King in Ruston. That led to a handful of other Smoothie King opportunities in the Baton Rouge area—and some out-of-the-box thinking, including the brand’s first on-campus location at LSU’s Student Union and the first 24-hour hospital location at Our Lady of the Lake.
Shaquille O’Neal
It makes sense that Shaq would head to
Baton Rouge to expand his new Big Chicken franchise. Started in 2018 in Las Vegas and followed just two years later by a second location in Glendale, California, the NBA legend and former LSU star’s chicken sandwich restaurant is now eyeing a Capital City spot. When
Hollywood Casino expands its on-land footprint downtown later this year, expect to find the third Big Chicken location, serving up crispy chicken, shakes and more.
Mike Anderson
These days, you’re likely to think of the popular seafood restaurant when you hear the name “Mike Anderson.” But the restaurant’s namesake has a storied past at LSU, where he was an All-American linebacker on the football team in 1970. He opened the restaurant just five years later on Highland Road. It eventually moved to its current digs on West Lee Drive and added a second location in Gonzales.
Brandon Landry
We’re all familiar with the story: Two basketball players walk on to the LSU team in the mid-’90s but spend the bulk of the season concocting business ideas on the bench. Thus, Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux was born in 2003 just south of campus, and Landry and partner Jack Warner began their successful business careers. In 2014, Warner took a buyout, and Landry began strategizing how to push the brand further. Today, Walk-On’s has 19 locations around Louisiana and nearly 30 more across the southeast.
Jack Warner
Often considered the behind-the-scenes guy of the Walk-On’s duo, Warner retained a minority interest in the restaurant company after the 2014 split. The former LSU basketball player is now planning a revamp of his Schlittz & Giggles pizza concept, which has locations on Third Street and in the Perkins Road overpass area.
Cameron Jackson
While Jackson might still be in his mid-20s, he’s already making waves as a small business leader. The former football player for Coastal Carolina University wasn’t sure where life would take him after college, but a trip to Jamaica and the sight of makeshift roadside grills in shipping containers gave him an idea. He opened Millennial Park in July 2020 on Florida Street, dubbed Louisiana’s first shipping container park. It houses food vendor Jive Turkey, a storefront for Sweet Jones Farms, and plenty of community-focused events. Up next for the park: a bar and daiquiri shop in the near future.
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Jarvis Green
The former New England Patriots defensive lineman and LSU alum went into the seafood industry after retiring from the NFL in 2010. That brought him home to the Baton Rouge area, where he launched Oceans97 and its retail line of canned shrimp patés in 2015. It’s now sold in stores nationwide, and Green divides his time between offices in the Capital City and Boston planning his next lines of seafood products.
This article was originally published in the May 2021 issue of 225 magazine.