Passion Doesn't Pay

Do what you love they said.  You will be much happier they said.

Very few people get to make a living as an athlete, and strangely enough it is very costly to aspire to be one as well.  That is what Johnny Manziel learned recently as he was penalized by the NCAA for "inadvertently" breaking one of their rules from uncountable list of idiocy.

I'm not sure what is more absurd, that he was penalized, or that is was only for the first half of a game.  But the penalty itself is very indicative of why the system of amateur athletics in the US is so messed up, specifically under the rule of the NCAA.  Even though this doesn't have much relevance to beach volleyball as it was recently just anointed as college sport for women, it has become such a hot button issue that I can't help but shed some more perspective on it.

Before I go any further, you should definitely check out Patrick Hruby's article on this matter and the Jonathon Benjamin story on which the article is centralized on.  I'll try to not reiterate too many things that he has already said because he pretty much hit the nail on the head with that one, but I think there is a bigger component of exploitation that doesn't get much talk.

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Alex Rodriguez has grossed over 324 million dollars in his career...yea...just let that sink in a little.

Regardless of how much we yell at our TV's in passion, sports may be a lifestyle or a culture to us fans and players, but at the end of the day it a business, and it is only one of many within the entertainment industry that compete against one another for our eyes and ears to exclusively give out attention and money to them.

The athletes then are not providing a service or delivering a product, they are the business itself but they don't get to profit off it unless the company that employs them profits.  But in the world of beach volleyball, the companies like the AVP, NVL, and FIVB don't thrive unless the players do as well.

The other side of the business is advertisement, sponsors, and endorsement deals.  This is what fuels the prize money (because ticket prices and merchandise are virtually out of the equation), and to attract more lucrative and lure more companies, those same partners need more of a reason and incentive to invest knowing that their brand will get proper exposure.  The only place they can get that is through the sport and the athletes themselves.

So you should see that when the pros are able to make themselves more viable as assets, that can make appearances, be heard and seen as athletes, that have the ability to promote products and services, then tours will have money being thrown at them.  But if I were a potential client, I wouldn't want to endorse a tour that has the majority of its athletes waiting tables, working odd jobs, or even worse, working for a competing company.  What kind of exposure is that?  You gotta spend money to make money,  but let's leave the spending to the tours and not the players.

A Cut Above The Rest

For the second consecutive tournament the men's final featured Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson squaring off against Sean Rosenthal and Phil Dalhausser, and just like in Cincinnati, Gibb and Patterson took down the 'W' in Atlantic City.  To be honest I wasn't expecting Gibb and Patterson to have this much success this year, for one being a new partnership, and two, having a duo of two bigs playing together (although this is now the 2nd year of Casey playing as a "small").  Still I don't know where to put this hot streak in perspective.  

I don't want to say that low level teams aren't good, or that the top level teams aren't working very hard to get to where they are, but it is clear that there are two different classes of athletes playing in these tournaments.

For all other sports there is a "separation of the classes", a definitive line that states that you are either a part of the elite group of people that are head and shoulders above the rest, or you are just among the commoners working to get close to that line.  Football and basketball has the NCAA,  baseball has the farm system of A, AA, and AAA ball, hockey has the AHL, and even golf has a junior program and pro card that separates the already have's from the want to's.  Beach volleyball, for better of for worse just mixes everyone together and as you can tell there are the familiar faces rising to the top.

After spending 3 years under the tutelage
of Brett Favre, Aaron Rogers is a top 5 QB who
led the league in QB rating last year at 108.0

At what point do you even consider yourself a "professional" in beach volleyball?  Is it when you qualify for a tournament, make the money rounds, or break $20,000 in a year?  For the sport there is a cyclical problem facing many of its aspiring athletes.  In order for them to get better they need more time and money to dedicate themselves to their training but in order to get extra time and money they need to place higher in tournaments.  So as athletes that are working at least one other job they are in fact probably closer to being low-earning amateurs, than "part-time pros".

This is more than just the creme of the crop rising to the top.  This is like putting the creme of the crop in a centrifuge and selecting the most enriched type.  The low-level players are bogged down other jobs, and trying to land sponsors to just make it to the events, while the top-level pros get to train, condition, and practice exclusively for their sport.  Even though every top-level pro has ground it out through qualifiers at some point in their career, there is a better way to develop players.  In NCAA Football, teams have the right to red shirt a player which allows them to be on the team and practice without using up a year of eligibility.  I think that USAV needs to adopt some type of amateur system that allows players to develop effectively by focusing just on the sport and not on the finances and the travel, then as the creme of that crop rises, hopefully we will get to see some new faces on the podium every other tournament instead of every 5 years.