Follow your passion for sports into a rewarding career.

By Tony Moton

When former professional football star Junior Seau retired for a second time from the National Football League as one of its most accomplished linebackers, he apparently thought he was done for good.

Perhaps his short-lived reality television show, in which he tackled various sports-related jobs, taught him something: Stick with your passion. The 40-year-old Seau returned to the NFL this fall to play for the New England Patriots.

For job seekers with a passion for sports, how do you follow your passion and get started in this competitive field?

According to professionals and executives who manage web sites highlighting sports careers, job hunters must develop a keen awareness of how to match their skills and work experience with the positions they seek.

"When you talk to highly successful people in sports, they're doing something they are good at and something they love," said Mark Tudi, president of Sports Careers, a Phoenix, Ariz., company that runs three web sites aimed at the sports job market.

"People are so passionate about getting in and getting their foot in the door, but I say you have to get the correct foot in the door," Tudi said.

Sports are big business, and lots of people have dreams of working for the so-called "Big Four" major leagues, Tudi said, referring to professional football (NFL), baseball (MLB), basketball (NBA), and hockey (NHL). But based on the amount of job postings that appear on his company's sites, it seems that positions with minor league franchises, college programs, club teams, and local sports organizations are relatively plentiful.

On his site www.sportscareers.com, Tudi said there are between 1,500-2,000 monthly postings for sports jobs, a high percentage of them in sales and marketing.

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Chris Forrest found his way into sports after he decided that he no longer wanted to work as an operations manager for an e-commerce company. Not knowing where he might eventually end up, he took an internship with a minor league basketball team.

"I just really wanted to get my foot in the door with a sports organization," Forrest said.

Forrest's internship with the Long Beach Jam, now known as the Bakersfield Jam, led to internships with both the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers and the Los Angeles Sparks, the women's pro team in the WNBA. The Sparks job turned into a paid front-office position, and now Forrest is the team's director of marketing.

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When it comes to the business of sports, jobs with teams like the Sparks often are much more available than top-tier positions with major league clubs. Forrest, who has a degree in sports management, said he was able to find his dream job by networking and looking for opportunities that matched his skill set.

"I enjoy the opportunity to come up with new ideas and be creative in my position," Forrest said. "From what I gather, we are given more freedom out of the box than bigger organizations. Some promotions might not fly on the major league or NBA level, but here they might work."

Matt Lucas, president of Seattle's M & L Research, Inc., which runs www.sportscareerfinder.com, said his site is geared toward helping job seekers figure out how to utilize their existing skills for jobs such as a public-relations executive with a minor league baseball team or an agent with a sports management firm. There are 2,437 such listings on his web site's database.

"From the tons of interviews and the talking we've done with people in the industry, they love these jobs," Lucas said. "But it's a complex industry and people don't always know how to break in. There are definitely a lot of those types of jobs, and most people have some kind of job skill that can qualify for a job in the industry. I wouldn't say you'll be a head coach of a pro football team, but for some jobs along the line in that industry, yes."

Chicago's Bernard "Barney" Stanner, president of www.jobsinsports.com, said his site is at an all-time high for the number of job postings made by employers. There are more than 2,500 job openings and 625 internships from a pool of 4,100 sports employers currently in the site's database.

"With sports jobs you get to feel like you are a part of the team," Stanner said. "The promotional director of a baseball team or the game-day intern feels like they are a part of the experience. That's why people are dying to work in sports."

Scott Kravchuk, the assistant director of special operations for Minor League Baseball, oversees www.pbeo.com. The site posts job openings for all Major League Baseball teams and all of their affiliated minor league (farm) clubs, some 200 teams in all. Kravchuk said the interest in sports jobs has never dropped in the six years the site has been running.

"We've got everything from internships to an assistant general manager position in the Australian baseball league," Kravchuk said.

And the economic slowdown, he said, has not curtailed the number of job postings he's seen on the site. In other words, this might be the right time for those with an itch for a sports job to finally scratch it.

"I think if someone has been cut from another job or laid off, they might want to re-evaluate their career and try this," Kravchuk said. "History shows that nothing is recession-proof, but baseball is recession resistant."

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