FAQs: Making a living from sports

Further to my last post when I started discussing the issue of working as a soccer coach with a reader of mine, there has been a lot of misconceptions on this career path. To be fair, this is not a route considered by most people for a variety of reasons: firstly, you have to love sports to want to make it the center of your career and not everyone does. Secondly, there is also the good old fashioned prejudice against anyone who isn't working in a white collar job, sitting behind a desk in an office, using their brains for a living; especially since you don't need a degree to become a sports coach. So in this post, I shall deal with some common questions most people have about going down this career path.

Ever considered making a career from coaching sports?

Q: Do you have to be very good at the sport and have achieved great success before you can teach it?

No, that's not true at all, it is a total misconception. Certainly, you need to be able to be very familiar the sport and have had sufficient experience with it before trying to teach it, but just because you were never a world or national champion doesn't mean that you can't become a coach. It is all about teaching - you can be extremely good at something but simply not have the communication skills to convey the lesson in a way that is effective. I remember a Chinese teacher who was clearly very good at the language, but was hopeless when it came to trying to teach any of us the language. The coach has to be able to get the best out of the student by instructing the student, so it boils down to how these instructions are conveyed rather than whether the coach can demonstrate the skill per se. Good communication skills are thus far more important than the ability to demonstrate - at the end of the day, you are providing a service and the customer needs to be happy with the service provided.

Q: What kind of qualifications do you need to become a sports coach?

Every sport will have its own governing body within your country which determines the kind of qualifications required before you are licensed as a coach - thus the route to becoming qualified will vary from sport to sport, country to country. However, the kind of training required will be quite different from taking a degree at university (which usually takes 3 years). You can become qualified as a junior coach at entry level in a matter of months (even weeks) - there will usually a course which will involve both theory and practical components, along with work experience where you will be attached to a sports club (or school) and mentored. For example, the courses at the Football Association of Singapore are just two weeks long. What coaches tend to do is to take more courses, more often - the courses tend to be shorter and they are usually part time, so the coach can still continue working whilst doing these courses to continually improve themselves. In fact practical work experience counts far more than qualifications in coaching.

What does it take to become a Basketball coach?

Please note that each sports governing body will define what their enrollment criteria are - but typically, they are fairly low at entry level. The Football Association of Singapore only requires coaches to have literacy - which is defined as being able to read or write. I note that they don't even require you to have a pass for 'O' level English, as long as you can prove to them that you can read and write. There is really no other reference to any kind of academic qualification in their enrollment criteria apart from an AFC prerequisite exam, which is about football. Once you have taken the first course, you progress up the various levels of coaching qualifications - the more senior your qualification, the more you are paid. So compared to many of the other professions we have looked at recently, this job does have fairly low barriers to entry, but it is not easy to become an excellent coach - that still takes a lot of hard work.

Q: Wait a minute, does that mean that people who have failed all their exams and go train as sports coaches and make a living as a sports coach? Is it an 'easy option' by that token? 

Not necessarily - many coaches have degrees and have other qualifications not related to the sport they teach, but they are attracted to the sport not because of the low barriers of entry, but because they truly love the sport and enjoy teaching it. For example, in gymnastics, one is not required to have any maths or science qualifications to commence training as a coach, but a good understanding of physics would be extremely useful when it comes to teaching the sport. I am not required to know any foreign languages as a coach, but the fact that I speak so many makes it easier for me to teach gymnasts who may not speak English as a first language. So while other qualifications are useful, they are not compulsory - what we do tend to find is that the better qualified coaches tend to do better as they have a wider pool of knowledge to draw upon when they teach. Thus I don't think that coaching is by any means an 'easy option'.

Coaching is very similar to teaching in many ways.

Q: Is it like becoming a PE teacher? Or is it different? 

No, it is quite different. Firstly, a PE teacher is required to teach a range of different sports in a school environment, whilst a sports coach focuses on just one sport. Secondly, a PE teacher often teaches a whole class, handling fairly large groups of students per class, whilst a sports coach tends to deal with smaller classes, especially at higher level. Thirdly, PE teachers have to deal with both students who are enthusiastic and those who utterly hate PE whilst sports coaches usually have the luxury of having to only deal with kids who chose to do the sport. Lastly, the PE teacher is holding down a full time job (and thus enjoys financial stability) whilst most sports coaches are usually self-employed. Do bear in mind the fact that to become a PE teacher in Singapore for example, there is a lot more training involved whilst there is far less training for those who wish to become a more specialist sports coach.

Q: Wait, you said that coaches are self-employed - what do you mean? Can you explain?

Ah, here's a piece I wrote earlier about self-employment, have a read here. You are hiring yourself out as a contractor to various different employers - so you don't have one employer but several. They agree to hire you for your coaching services and you are paid for the work you do by the hour. The challenge about this situation is finding enough work to sustain yourself on this basis - for my Singaporean readers, I compare this to tuition and piano teachers. They are usually self-employed. If the more they teach, the more they earn - the less they teach, the less they earn. Such is the nature of coaching work - I know of this tuition teacher who taught three siblings from the same family - one of the kids did badly in an exam;so the mother decided to try a new tuition teacher and suddenly, the tuition teacher lost a big chunk of his earnings from that family. Such are the hazards of becoming self-employed, it comes with the territory.

Q: Okay, I get that but who do you work for as a sports coach, where does the work come from?

Usually, most sports coaches find work through sports clubs - these are venues which are either run by the government or privately providing sports classes. In such an arrangement, the students pay the sports club a fee to attend the class, but the money is then spent on administration, the upkeep of the facilities, investing in new equipment, advertising, paying the various bills and the coaches only see a small portion of the fees that the students pay. These sports club need to make a profit as well, unless they are subsidized by the government. There are schools which do hire high level, experienced sports coaches if their PE teachers cannot teach certain sports or if they want to boost the standard of their team. How much coaches are paid by schools depend really on how much budget the schools have - some schools are richer than others, some are more willing to pass the cost of hiring the coach onto the parents. A school has also got to make difficult decisions like, "do we pay the coach a bit more, or do we invest that money in more sports equipment for the students?" There are also specialist agencies who help find coaches work, but in return they take a cut of your earnings.

Coaches make the most money when they go direct to the client - take a tennis coach for example. He is employed by the tennis club and his students pay $50 per lesson. The coach is paid $40 for teaching the lesson (the club takes a $10 cut - that's how they make money). Among his students are two sisters, so he goes over to the mother of the sisters and says to her, "I have a really good deal for you: I know you are paying $100 for your two girls to come to my class and you have to drive half an hour to get to the tennis club. I know you have a tennis court in the condo you live, why don't I come to your condo and teach you there. You pay me just $95 for the lesson, you don't need to drive your girls to the tennis club anymore and they will get more attention from me. It is a win-win situation." Of course, tennis and swimming coaches can do that (as condos often come with tennis courts and swimming pools) - a gymnastics coach is dependent on the gymnastics club for the facilities and equipment to run a class, so this option of going direct to the client is not open to gymnastics coaches.

Do you know how to make money as well as teach sports?

Q: Can you become rich by teaching sports? Or would you be quite poor? 

Well, it depends on a few factors. If you have an extremely good reputation as a coach, say you have managed to coach a few local champions, then you can basically charge a lot more for your services once there is huge demand for your services and you can go to the highest bidder. So yes, some successful coaches can make a lot of money indeed. But let's get real here - few coaches reach that level of earning, most make enough money by simply chalking up the hours, even if the pay isn't great, it still all adds up to a decent figure. An employer like a sports club or a school has a finite amount of work, so they would usually offer the work to the coaches who have had a good track record. By that token, if you are a bad coach (yes they do exist), then you will struggle to make ends meet when you simply cannot find enough work. By the same token, some tuition teachers in Singapore make loads of money and some cannot find enough work to sustain themselves - the difference is in the quality of their service. You wanna make a living from coaching sports, you had better be an excellent coach. I hate it when people blame the nature of self-employment because I would prefer to blame the individual for being bad at his job!

Q: But what if you cannot find enough work to sustain you as a sports coach?

This is pretty much a worst case scenario - you complete your training as a sports coach and you try to find work, but you are struggling to get more than just a few hours a week. Whilst you have plenty of free time on your hands, you are struggling to pay the bills. Well, there are two responses: firstly, you can try to improve yourself - take more courses to become a better qualified coach in order to better to compete with other coaches for the same work. Speak to employers to find out why they are not offering you more work and see how you can improve yourself - why are the employers choosing over coaches over you? Are there some vital soft skills you are lacking? At some stage, you just have to concede that perhaps you're better off doing something else altogether. This is why I feel that it is important for the coach to take personal responsibility for his mistakes and shortcomings rather than make general statements like "oh it is very hard to make a living as a coach". Furthermore, you need to find your own work to chalk up enough hours and get well paid work through referrals, so a lot of that will depend on your business development skills.

You will have to compete with other coaches for work.

Let me give you an example: I know of this coach - let's call him Harry (not his real name, obviously). He got sacked from a school recently because he kept breaking their rules - quite specifically, he kept using his mobile phone during the lesson (answering phone calls, sending texts). The headmaster had warned him, "put your phone away, turn it off, teachers must not use their mobile phones during the lesson!" Harry would pretend to put the phone away, but then take it out when he thought no one was watching (he got caught a few times despite repeated warnings). I thought that was unforgivable - if there was an emergency (eg. if you had a sick parent in hospital), then you may be able to justify using your phone during a lesson - but it was clear that Harry had no intention of respecting the school's rules, so he got the sack. They now use a coach who agrees to turn off his phone before the lesson begins. So in the case of Harry, who do you blame - the school or Harry? How would you react if Harry said, "it is so hard to find work as a coach." I totally blame Harry, I don't blame the industry or the employer.

Q: Do all coaches more or less follow the same career path?

Not at all, even if they all start off the same way by getting the same basic training. After that, there are a wide variety of options. Most coaches will find one area they specialize in and stick to that - people take part in sports at different levels. The most common motivation for people to do sports is to get some exercise, rather than try to win an Olympic gold medal. So even those who do sports purely for health reasons require some coaching and there is money to be made from people like that. Many of us are health conscious these days and exercise for our health. In fact, the number of coaches employed at very high level sports are in the minority compared to the vast numbers who cater for clients who are just looking to get some exercise without caring too much about how good they are! Even if you totally suck at the sport you are trying to do, you would still reap the health benefits of having done some form of exercise. 

There are also coaches who deal with sports for disabled people - I hope that the popularity of the Paralympics has raised the profile of disabled sports. I know this coach called Lorraine who deals with children with special needs. Well did it occur to you that disabled children also need to do exercise for health reasons? Lorraine's background is in fact in nursing where she has worked with children with special needs: severely autistic children and mentally disabled children who are not able to take part in a regular sports class with other children because they need 1-on-1 attention from a coach with special training like Lorraine. A regular coach will not be able to coach with the kind of challenges that Lorraine faces in her kind of coaching - Lorraine is excellent at what she does and is paid a premium for her specialist coaching work. What Lorraine does is quite different from a coach who takes his athletes to the Olympics - but I stress that both coaches are providing a valuable service and are very respected by the sporting community.

Q: What are the qualities that make a good, successful sports coach?

Well, you need to be passionate about your sport first and foremost. You also need to posses the same qualities as a good teacher: so that means being an effective communicator, you need to learn how to convey instructors through a variety of means to suit the different learning styles of your students. You need to be good with people: this means having a range of qualities from being patient with slow learners to knowing how to get the best out of very talented students. You should be knowledgeable about the sport because you want to be able to give intelligent answers when your students (or their parents) ask you any questions about the sport. There is also a certain element of knowing how to offer good customer services: no matter how difficult or challenging the student may be, you need to remember that they are paying for your services (be it directly or indirectly) and you still need to remain professional in your conduct even if you are very frustrated. So patience is a very important virtue indeed for coaches.  You also need to learn how to maintain good relations with your clients and colleagues as you need to rely on word of mouth to get more work.

Do you want to coach the next Olympic champion?

Q: Can you work as a coach part time rather than full time? 

Yes, absolutely. Coaches are self-employed, so they can fit it around whatever lifestyles they have - some are university students who need time to study, so they can only work part time. Others are young parents who have childcare issues; there are so many reasons why someone would prefer to work part time rather than full time because of their personal circumstances. Some coaches work part time as they may already have a full-time job.

Q:What is the best part about being a coach and the worst part? 

Well, the best part is that you're able to do a job you enjoy, you've managed to create a career out of doing the sport you truly love. That ought to bring you a lot of joy, something we should not take for granted. I have seen so many middle aged adults trapped in jobs they hate but quitting is not an option because they have to pay for their children's expensive education. I hate the way that society can be so materialistic sometimes - they don't care if you are happy doing what you do, as long as you make money, as if money is the only thing that can make anyone happy. The worst part has got to be the uncertainty you face as a self-employed person: you will lack financial stability, you will earn more some months and less during other months. Also, if you are following the money, you may end up teaching kids with money but no talent - I can't imagine that to be particularly rewarding, unless you're truly motivated by earning money. And then some coaches complain of stagnation - they get bored after doing the same job year after year.

Do you want a job that will make you happy?

So there you go, there's probably plenty more questions I could answer, but I am going to turn it over to you now and see if there's anything I have covered, please ask away. I hope you have found this useful, many thanks for reading.