Major-league sports is such a tough gig! It’s glamorous, and often fun, but it’s a really, really hard way to make a living and live anything like a normal life.
A young person I know very well has been extremely successful at getting traction with a career in management for a team in a major professional league. She was basically a government major at a brand-name LAC, by the way, with a decent resume for sports journalism. She wouldn’t have touched “sports management” with a 10-foot pole. She had targeted this field from a very early age, and hustled and worked every possible connection like a dog.
In order to get where she is – which is pretty prominent in her sport, and a decent salary – she had to undergo some long, scary periods of unemployment, and even longer periods of employment at such low pay she could have qualified for food stamps.
She has little or no control over where she lives. There are a specific number of teams in her sport, plus the league itself (much less desirable, except as a launching pad, which she’s past), and she pretty much has to work for one of them. There are tons of office politics (on which the local papers report extensively, driving everyone nuts). The issues with being the only woman in the organization at her level are legion. She has absolutely no job security beyond the upcoming season (maybe). Once, she had a two-year contract, which sort of gave her two years of job security. But the owner made it clear he hated that, he systematically did not comply with the contract, and the contract severely limited her ability to pursue other options. So on balance the limited job security came at a very high price.
Her working hours in-season are ridiculous – often 14 hours/day, six or seven days/week, with a lot of travel – and the off-season is full of events and deadlines. She’s planning a wedding, and there’s about a one-month window where there’s a chance she could take two full weeks off work in a row. Of course, she doesn’t know she’ll be working for the same team by then. She hopes if she needs to get a new job the new employer would accommodate her wedding plans. (She hopes if she needs to get a new job she would find one before her wedding, but it’s quite possible she wouldn’t.)
You can imagine what this means for her boyfriend/fiancee, of course. They’ve been a couple since college, over a decade, but more often long-distance than not. He has a normal job and career, in which moving to a different city every few years isn’t a good option. Many of the cities where she might get a job are places that would be terrible for him. They are only able to live together now because he’s willing to put up with a ridiculous commute. I met a similar young couple at a party recently. They moved here 18 months ago for the husband’s mid-level management job with a local team. It took the wife a year to find a job she cared about, but at less than half the pay she had before they moved.
