Sporting Careers

Product Description
Audiences: A text for introductory undergraduate sport management courses. A reference for libraries at universities with sport management programs and leisure studies programs. A supplementary text for graduate students who have no background in sport management. Contemporary Sport Management, Third Edition, provides an excellent overview of the principles and possibilities in this dynamic industry. A top-selling book in its field, this third edition con… More >>

Contemporary Sport Management – 3rd Edition

 

If you have athletic ability and good grades you are a candidate for a sports scholarship. You might be surprised to know that there are 34 sports played at the college level that are scholarship sports. You probably can’t list them all!

Each of these 34 sports have scholarship possibilities, but not all colleges offer or award scholarships in every sport. The institutions themselves decide which sports to sponsor. Additionally, while many college sports programs offer teams for both genders, other sports are only available for men or women. Getting confused? Well, here’s the list:

Archery                        Football                    Skiing, downhill  

Badminton                    Golf                          Squash

Baseball                       Gymnastics               Soccer   

Basketball                    Handball                    Softball

Bowling                        Ice Hockey                Swimming

Cheerleading                Indoor Track               Synchonized Swimming

Cross Country               Lacrosse                   Tennis

Diving                           Riflery                       Track & Field

Equestrian                    Rodeo                        Volleyball

Fencing                        Rowing                      Water Polo

Field Hockey                Rugby                        Wrestling

                                    Skiing, x country         

What is interesting is that many young people grow up thinking that college sports are about basketball or baseball or football. They see these sports on national television and or read about them in newspapers or on sports websites. The truth is there are so many other sports they can play. Some savvy young athletes look at the list and decide to change sports to one they might excel in at the college level.

An example is a high school runner. She was above average in her school and in the league. But, she became interested in pole-vaulting when it was still fairly new for high school females. She was recruited by several college coaches for her pole-vaulting skills, not her running. She went to a great college on a track scholarship in pole-vaulting.

Another young high school athlete was a skilled soccer player. She was highly rated but not one of the top 3 or 4 in her area. She switched to rowing in her junior year and excelled. She also received a scholarship… not in her earlier sport…but in rowing.

Being realistic is beneficial when thinking about playing a college sport. If a student-athlete experiences several sports along the way, including ones that don’t get much attention in the press, but are college sports, nonetheless, he or she might find that fencing or riflery or rowing is a better fit than the media favorites…and they might pay scholarship dollars, too.

 

If you’re lucky, at the end of your internship, you’ll be asked to stay on as a full-time employee (or at least encouraged to apply for a full-time position). The opportunities given to you since you have experience with the company might be great, but at the same time, it can be hard to make that jump from intern to employee. Here are a few tips to help with the transition:

1. Clearly define your job duties before you start, and don’t be afraid to remind others of them.

As an intern, you were likely asked to do lots of menial tasks just to get things done around the office. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you got real job experience as well. When you move into a regular position with a company, it can be hard to get others – and yourself for that matter – to think of you as anything more than an intern. However, if you’re officially the company’s newest stockbroker, you shouldn’t be making coffee or delivering mail. If it isn’t in your job description, politely remind the other employees that they should look to the new intern or the secretary to complete their tasks. Of course, pick you battles. If Donald Trump himself asks you to get him a cup of coffee, I don’t care who you are – you get him that java!

2. Takes things seriously from the start.

Chances are that you always took your internship seriously. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have been offered a full-time job. However, while in the past you might have been able to get away with things (like taking a 20 minute break instead of a 10 minute break or leaving at 3:30 instead of 4:00), that won’t be the case any longer. You’ll be expected to do your job as promised or they’ll fire you. This isn’t putting you at a risk for a bad grade. This is your livelihood!

3. Talk about vacation time, benefits, sick/personal days, and perks.

As an intern, you probably didn’t get anything – you may not have even gotten paid. In some cases, your transition from full-time intern to full-time employee is just a matter of signing a few papers or talking to payroll. Sometimes, employers forget to discuss the nitty gritty, since this seems like information you should already know. Once you’ve been offered the job (and usually before you accept), ask about your vacation time, benefits, and sick/personal days. Know company policies for requesting days off for any reason, and find out who to talk to if you have insurance or retirement plan questions. Also, find out about the other possible perks, which will depend on your specific job. For example, do you get a discount on a product your company makes? Do you get a free parking spot? Does your company have employee tickets to sporting events? No one mentions these things at first unless you ask!

4. Get into the habit of showing up early.

You’re probably used to a college schedule where being a bit late to class or skipping class completely isn’t a big deal. Your internship may have also been extremely flexible when it comes to timing. Don’t fall into bad punctuality habits with your regular job, though. You can be fired for showing up late, especially if you do so consistently. At the very least, you’ll be passed up for promotions or offered only very low annual pay increases.

5. Ask questions, but realize that this is no longer an education opportunity.

If you don’t understand how to do something, it is always better to ask a question than to do it the wrong way and have to clean up a mess. However, keep in mind that your job is not a learning experience like your internship was. You’ll be expected to take initiative, and if you can figure out the answer to a problem without asking your boss or a co-worker for help, you should.

It can be intimidating to move from your position as an intern to a full-time position. Don’t underestimate the differences between these two work dynamics. When transitioning to a regular job, be prepared for a few bumps in the road.

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I do not understand where the UIGEA came from.

I get that it is supposed to curb illegal youth gaming (because World of Warcraft is so much better for a 17 year old than poker is.) I get that it is supposed to curb money laundering (because there is obviously nothing illegal going on with the Oil, Coffee and Corn Markets.) I even get that it was supposed to help other gaming industries (because if you play poker online than you obviously would never go to Vegas again.)

But for the life of me, I don’t get where it came from.

It seems too stupid to be true – too transparently skewed to be a real piece of legislation. After all, we’re still arguing about just what the UIGEA covers: poker is bad, but inexplicably, horse racing and fantasy sports are fine. And I’m far from the first person to be interested in the origins of the UIGEA. In fact, journalist Ed Brayton requested formal transcripts of a number of the meetings that led up to the writing of the UIGEA, but he was turned down by the US Government because, and I quote:

Please be advised that the document you seek is being withheld in full pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1), which pertains to information that is properly classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.

So we can’t hear the official version of the UIGEA’s birth because it is a matter of national security.

Instead, why don’t we take a look at the two major exceptions to the UIGEA – horse racing and fantasy sports – let’s take a look [m1] at those that the UIGEA accepts.

Horse Racing:

A lot has been written on the connection between the UIGEA and the horse racing industry, so I’ll be brief – horse racing is OK because the industry bought off a number of politicians. This is a quote from the lobbyist group American Horse Council, itself:

“The provisions protecting horseracing were included in the [UIGEA] package through the support of Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jim Bunning (R-KY), John Kyl (R-AZ) and Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), Mike Oxley (R-OH) and Jim Leach (R-IA),”

That support came on the heels of more than $3 million in donations made to politicians on Capitol Hill.

So it’s far from a mystery as to why horse racing was protected. But the next exception is a little less, shall we say, epistemological in nature.

Fantasy Sports

For people who don’t play fantasy sports, here is how it works. Players draft athletes (NFL players, NBA players, etc, etc.) and go up against other players in their league. The games are decided by counting up the chosen statistics for each team (Touchdowns, receptions, points scored, batting average, etc., etc.) So the more positive statistics each athlete gains in their real game, the more positive statistics the fantasy sports player gains in their fantasy game. Players put money in at the beginning of the season, then, at the end of the season, the winners of each league collect the brunt that money pool as their prize (you have to pay league fees and whatnot, so no one collects all of the money put into the pool by players.) Remember, this is not gambling according to the UIGEA/ US Government.

To give you an idea of how big fantasy sports have become, here are some numbers.

In 2005, the year before the UIGEA came out, 12.6 million people played at least one full season of fantasy sports in the US.

Of those 12.6 million, 92% were male (leaving a healthy one million female players) and 77% were married.

91% of players were Caucasian and 86% owned their own home.

59% made more than $50,000 annually and each player spent an average of $493.60 on Fantasy Sports that year to represent a $4 Billion Industry.

And maybe the most important number, 85% of Fantasy Sports players played fantasy football.

So people who play fantasy sports are generally white, generally wealthy and generally into football.

Ah, the NFL – the biggest sports league in America. From the unquantifiable monetary influx that the Super Bowl represents every year to the only year round single-sport show on ESPN (NFL Live) the NFL is king in the USA – and fantasy sports is no exception.

When it comes to fantasy sports, the NFL occupies an even more lucrative position than the other major sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL, PGA and NASCAR.) While just about every fantasy sports league is owned operated by an independent third party, the NFL has its own fantasy league.

In fact, the NFL even collects royalties to the tune of more than $200 million in 2005 from those same independent companies for using NFL players’ names. No other league has this deal and the only reason that the NFL does is due to its notoriously weak Players’ Union which has relegated almost all control of players’ playing careers (and likenesses) to the NFL front office. At any rate, the NFL makes a lot of real money on fantasy football, not to mention the invisible benefits of attracting additional viewership of games by fantasy football players (thereby increasing ratings, thereby increasing ad prices, thereby increasing revenues.)

Enter Bill Frist. In 2006, Senator Bill Frist was the Senate Majority Leader and the major reason that the UIGEA got pushed through Congress while other less important bills (like health care reform) remained on the old Congressional back burner. But the UIGEA almost did not make it through so easily: that was accomplished under the guidance of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and former Commissioner Paul Tagliabue.

Frist’s first plan to get the UIGEA through was to attach it to a bi-partisan troop funding bill designed to up the equipment levels of deployed US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. What does making the processing of bets made in online gaming rooms illegal (which is what the UIGEA does) have to do with funding troops? Nothing, and respected Virginian Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner voiced his “strong objection” to the inclusion of such a bill to both Frist himself and the Senate as a whole.

Meanwhile, the NFL had caught wind of the possible regulations and had hired Marty Gold (former counsel to none other than Bill Frist himself) to lobby Congress on their behalf. As an interesting side note, ever wonder why the NFL isn’t under the same type of scrutiny on the steroids issue as Major League Baseball is? After all, the top defensive player in the NFL (Shawn Merriman) was fined and suspended for steroid use while the major MLB culprit (Barry Bonds) has never been found guilty of taking anything. Not to mention the fact that NFL players are OBVIOUSLY on steroids (people don’t get that size and stay that strong and that fast naturally, it is just not in God’s plan.) I wonder if the $700,000 bill that Gold sent to the NFL for “services rendered on Capitol Hill in 2005” had anything to do with it?

Anyways, Gold (who has disavowed all knowledge of this) allegedly reported the situation to Goodell. Goodell then wrote a letter to Warner (a former Navy man and Marine himself) urging him to include the “achievement” that was the UIGEA in the aforementioned soldier funding bill. Warner refused again, but what we are interested in is Goodell’s “unsolicited” letter concerning internet gambling regulations. As it turns out, some time in between Warner’s two refusals, an interesting addendum was made to the UIGEA. That addition was the exclusion of fantasy sports as a form of “illegal internet gambling.”

Eventually, the UIGEA found its way to the back end of the Safe Port Act, which was designed to create a division of the Homeland Security Office to watch after sea ports. The UIGEA made it onto this bill without a vote by any negotiators at the very end of a long Congressional session. While the Bill’s author, House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Pete King (R-NY) was not a proponent of the UIGEA, he needed the votes of Sen. Frist and the other Senators he would bring with him to pass through the piece of Homeland Security legislation. King said of the UIGEA:

“I’m not going to stop a bill because of Internet gambling… That was their final offer of the day.”

While I still don’t get why it was so important for Frist and friends to stop Internet gambling (maybe it really is a moral objection) it is pretty apparent how it got passed through Congress. And it is exceptionally apparent why horseracing and Fantasy Sports were declared exceptions to the law. As a rule, whenever you want to unearth cause on Capitol Hill, all you have to do is follow the money trail.

Coaching a sports team or athletes can be a demanding task, sometimes when the team performs poorly the coach can get some poor feedback from the fans, parents and other family members. Whilst these aspects of the job tend to only really face the higher level coaches at professional level there are still times where coaching can seem like a thankless task.

But this is a part of the challenge of the job, something that serves to motivate and inspire the coach to drive their athletes to succeed. Of course being a coach can be incredibly rewarding as they are in effect a teacher, and much like a school teacher the role of the coach is to teach the sportsmen and women the sport and to help them become better and to win. When this happens it can be incredibly rewarding and not only for the athletes themselves but you as a coach and in some cases it can promote your worth as a great coach which could see you progress on to new challenges at a higher level.

A bit part of coaching is dealing with defeats and how you can rejuvenate a likely downhearted team or individual. Obviously a major part of losing is to analyse where you have gone wrong or how the other competitors beat you, by learning this and dedicating time and effort to improving for the next time. As many people will feel let down or disheartened after a loss you need to inspire them and this can be done by any number of ways from telling them of the positive aspects or reminding them of their goals and targets that they can still achieve.

One part of coaching that many people are unaware of is what pressures there are on the coach themselves. As a coach you’ll often have to lead by example and show your athletes how it’s done. This can lead to injuries which can happen to their athletes as well, so you may be put out of action for prolonged periods of time. This is why many teams have assistant coaches and other members of staff to act in your absence, having at least one assistant is important if you want to be able to provide regularand consistent training and coaching to your athletes.

There are many demands placed on the sports coach who at all times displays a dedication to the game and the team.

Sports Coach Insurance is vital for your coaching career, whether you are in need of football coach insurance, cricket, tennis or any other sport, make sure you are protected against theft or damage to equipment as well as liability and personal injuries.

Golf is not just another hobby these days; it’s become a profession, a sport, and a lifestyle. Those that enjoy the game of golf find themselves wanting to spend more and more time on the game and are willing to spend the money to get results. This is why more people are becoming golf professionals as their career. Why not combine what they love with what they do for a living?

Being a golf professional takes more than just a love of the game, however. When you want to make it your career, you need a thorough understanding of how the game has emerged through history as well as where it’s heading into the future. You will want to learn about the various techniques of play and how they’ve changed in the past decades; you’ll want to know about the various equipment innovations that have made golf a technological game as much as a mental game and you’ll want to find out the best methods of teaching someone to play.

Teaching someone to love the game of golf is another career goal for the golf professional. When you’re able to communicate the intricacies of the sport to your client, you will be able to give them the power to want to make the adjustments in their game. You will want to learn about the various teaching methods that you can employ and what will work best for various levels of players. You’ll also want to learn how to help clients raise their games to the next level, when you notice that they are ready to do so.

Golf is more than just a sport that you play as well. As a part of a growing industry, golf professionals need to understand the financial sides of the sport. You will need to learn how to manage clientele, how to manage a golf related business, how to interact within various golfing facilities, and more. A golf professional will also find it important to know about equipment and how to deal with equipment manufacturers, tournament coordination, traveling from locale to locale, creating a marketing strategy, as well as how to use print and media publishing to their advantage.

Becoming a golf professional will also allow you to recognize the value of golfing trends and equipment, or the lack thereof. Having this new knowledge allows you to pass along valuable tips to your clients as well as let them in on the devices and equipment that might not be the best investment. You will also be able to monitor market trends to see what golfers are looking for in their games as well as what they might need from a golf pro through professional newsletters and magazines.

A career as a golf professional is as rewarding as it is challenging. With the opportunity to nurture a client from the beginning stages to more advanced levels, you can watch someone blossom into a talent and perhaps even into a professional career. You will also have the chance to play the sport that you love every day of your life, because you need to keep your skills honed as well.

There are many establishments that are training golf professionals for a career in the golf industry. These may include lengthy training sessions or weekly training sessions, depending on the location and the skills that are being taught. But even before you head to school, you need to head out for another round of golf with your friends, because practice is what makes you as close to perfect as can be.

Product Description
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