Making a Career in Sports
Jessica Sweet explains the best options for making a career in sports without playing sports.
If you are someone who is hating the fact that all spectator sports events have been temporarily cancelled, and your lockdown days are being spent mostly in a haze of FIFA 20, Cricket 19, and AO Tennis 2, you are wasting your time! Instead of playing video games all the time, you should be looking at opportunities that will let you join your favourite sport, even if you are not athletic enough to join it as a professional player.
Making a Career in Sports is not Just Limited to the Athletic People Among Us
There are three types of people who are interested in professional sports:
- The people who play it
- The fans
- The pros who are involved in the commercial, journalistic and managerial side of sports
Very few people have the talent to make it as a professional sportsman/sportswoman, and there is no money in being just a fan! The third option is what we will be discussing below, so let us now take a look at the most prospective of those opportunities and how to get there.
Sports Journalism
Sports journalism will take you on a different path from the other two we will be covering, but it will also give you more freedom that comes with being a part of the press. Whether you are hosting TV shows, writing newspaper/eNews articles, or catching moments in a match between legendary tennis rivals that will be remembered for a long time to come, becoming a sports journalist will let you keep your eyes on multiple sports and not just one. You can also choose to specialise in writing columns about a specific sport if you wish and get the opportunity to do so. Criticism and praise are tools of the trade for a journalist, and some sports journalists have tremendous power in this regard.
Help with Your Unique Requirements
Whether it be your age, gender, or physical ability, we are all different. This means that what may work for you may not work for another. With each person having different requirements, a fitness coach can step in to help you determine what types of exercises are right for you. For example, if you have an old injury that you are worried about flaring up, a fitness coach can teach you specific techniques and skills to minimise the chances. Also, if you have not done any exercise to build your muscles since an injury, you will need to learn different exercises at first to help you on your fitness journey.
Athletic Trainer
An athletic trainer is a person in charge of keeping their players from sustaining sports injuries to their muscles and bones. They help players get conditioned in advance so that their bodies can take the kind of punishment necessary to play the specific role that they are supposed to in that particular game. They shape natural athletes into the best physical versions of themselves.
They are also responsible for providing the primary care necessary to minimise the damage, if and when an injury does occur. Sports injuries are inevitable by default though, so by working with a doctor, the athletic trainer will devise rehabilitation plans for the injured athletes individually so that they can heal faster, better, and completely. Do keep in mind that this is not the most well-paid job if you are only working at the school or college level, but if you can join a professional team, however, that can be quite lucrative.
Coaching
Many believe that unless you were a pro athlete yourself at some point, you could not be a good coach. That point is proven to be invalid by tremendously successful football coaches such as Arrigo Sacchi, Carlos Parreira, and Liverpool’s own, the legendary Gerard Houllier. None of them ever played a day of pro football and managed to help their respective teams succeed a lot better than ex-player coaches who were hired before them.
If you feel that you too understand the beautiful game well enough to coach, UCFB has a select few undergraduate and postgraduate courses in coaching that you should look at. For example, the UCFB offers an MSc course in Football Coaching and Analysis which trains its students to augment classic football coaching with modern analytics to bring out the best from every team they work with. In addition to UCFB, University Compare also has other universities with similar offerings listed on their website for students to compare their options easily.
As you will be spending money, time, and effort in completing whichever sports-oriented education qualification you choose to pursue, University Compare makes sure that students get a fair chance at looking through and comparing all their options before choosing the right undergrad or postgrad degree course that will help them build the career they want.
Just in case you can get past two defenders in close quarters and shoot a drive fast enough to beat the goalie from outside the box, you might have a career ahead of you in football. For most people though, average or even above average talent is not enough to land them a place in professional football, tennis, or any other pro sport.
If you are one of the billions who love sports but do not have the athletic talent to make it up top, now you know how to be a part of your favourite sport without actually having to play the game itself. Some of them pay generously and depend on how good you turn out to be at your job. You might soon begin to bring in big money, especially if you manage to be a successful football coach in any of the pro leagues!
Page Reference
If you quote information from this page in your work, then the reference for this page is:
- SWEET, J. (2020) Making a Career in Sports [WWW] Available from: https://www.brianmac.co.uk/articles/article561.htm [Accessed
About the Author
Jessica Sweet is a 26-year-old writer and fitness fanatic who loves to combine her two passions into insightful articles for those in need of help.