How to Make Money with your favourite sport?
There are many opportunities to make money on the side with your favourite sport.
These are the most obvious ways to do it:
The most obvious and easy one is to become a referee for local leagues in your city.
Almost every city in North America has local soccer, football, footy, basketball, hockey, shinny and flag football leagues and they always need referees.
From 2005 to 2010, I was refereeing soccer in Calgary, AB, Canada and was making between 250$ and 300$ per week by refereeing in average 10 hours per week.
All the amateur games are played after 05pm and on weekends, that allows you to referee without interfering with your day job or school.
All you need to do to referee soccer in amateur leagues is to pass a certification ( 2 - day- courses for soccer in Alberta), be available and have the passion and the drive to do it.
You should also be ready to confront the few players and parents who might disagree with your calls and sometimes disrespect you on the field.
When you love the game, refereeing amateur leagues is a lot of fun. You meet so many people who have the same passion as you and you make good money on the side. I am compiling a list of resources and refereeing opportunities available in North America at the bottom of this article in the useful resources section and I'll update it whenever I get new data.
You can make good money by organizing tournaments in your favorite sports. To be successful at that, you need to have a good network of friends who can play and create teams, and you need to have very good organizational and business skills.
To organize a tournament, you must secure and rent a field , hire referees and volunteers and advertise enough to register teams.
You can also contact charities and raise funds for them with the proceeds of the tournament.
You can also earn some cash by working as a technical instructor for youth sport teams. If you are technically good at your sport, you can contact youth teams to provide your services as a technical instructor. You can just supervise kids when they are playing and help them correct their mistakes. You can also teach kids how to dribble, pass the ball, shoot the ball and show them some drills. Most of the time you don't need a certification to do this job unless you want to become a head coach.
There are many amateur teams who need coaches to lead their teams. If you are good enough in your sport and have leadership skills, you can coach local teams and earn some extra cash.
- Create an amateur sport team
You can also invest to create and register a team, find sponsors and try to win tournaments to make some money.
- Create your own amateur sport league.
Just like organizing tournaments, you can also create your own league.
I have created the drop in league ShowUpAndPlay from scratch and went from 0 to more than 3000 active players and counting in 2 cities. It requires patience, very good organizational, leadership and business skills.
- Courtside career in sports
There are many opportunities to make a living with your favorite sport without necessarily being an athlete. You can work as statistician, referee, ball boy, copywriter, radio play by play, sportscaster for professional leagues and have the opportunity to be in the front row with all the top athletes in the world. Check out this article about Glenn Capeloto's book : “You’re In the Front Row: How to Kick Off Your Career in Sports, Even if You’re Not a Star Athlete.”
- Sports Freelance Writing opportunities
You can ear money by writing sports articles as a freelance writer on your own blog or on other sites. Here are some details about that: http://www.freelancewriting.com/articles/sports-freelance-writing.php
Useful resources:
1- Soccer Refereeing opportunities in Canada:
2- Soccer Refereeing opportunities in USA:
3- Your career in sport
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