The gig economy in youth sports is alive and well.
Even with all of my years of education, I always had a summer job to supplement my teaching pay. I sometimes had a second job during the school year, too, such as doing night work at a local business. Our family needed additional income to keep food on the table and pay for all the other things that a family needs.
Back then, we called those extra jobs ‘gigs,’ and I was ‘gigging.’ It means that I was involved in ad hoc, for-pay endeavors that were neither full-time efforts nor jobs that included fringe benefits. I earned extra bucks to supplement what I made from my ‘day job’ (teaching).
Today, though, gigging can be more than doing an odd job here and there to supplement one’s income. There’s a gig economy in American today. Many people piece together a variety of otherwise discrete endeavors to create a full-time income flow. The gig economy exists in athletics, too.
Courtesy: Los Angeles Times
Not long ago, an acquaintance told me that she and her spouse were running youth sports tournaments this summer. She went on to say that two tournaments had been canceled because of a COVID-19-related ‘no can do’ executive order issued by a state governor. So the couple moved those tournaments to another state. “You have to make choices,” she said. “Both tournaments were well attended, and we took all possible precautions.”
What she and her husband did was perfectly legal, of course. And parents were free to send their children, too. Was the risk worth taking in the face of a pandemic? She told me that she has yet to hear of any COVID-19 infections.
What I’ve just described also applies these days to club sports–an endeavor that has become more popular than ever with the cancelation and possible cancelation of fall high school sports.
An athletic director friend of mine told me that he had an exchange recently with a young man (a 10th Grader) who decided that he would not be trying out for the school’s team. Instead, he chose to play for a club travel team. Why? The young man said that he was getting far more exposure that way than he would have gotten playing for his school team. When my friend asked how much it cost to participate in that club, the answer was, “Oh, about $4,000.”
What struck me about that story is that it turns conventional thinking upside-down. ‘Exposure’ can’t be understood these days only in terms of ‘exposure to competition and college coaches.’ This young man (with a parental ok) is also intentionally exposing himself to the considerable risk of becoming infected with COVID-19.
Besides, when I was a youth, playing for my school team mattered. It gave me an identity, and it was also a way to express school and community pride. Playing was an honor.
But there’s another chapter to this story, and it connects to what I wrote earlier in this column about the gig economy. Club sports are gigs for adults who seek to capitalize on a financial opportunity. Think about it: club travel squad for $4000 v. playing for your high school for little or no extra cost.
I know, I know: all of what I’ve just written is the reality of our times, and I need to accept it as the way things are. Well, how about an alternative response? Not a chance!
