Understanding of the career opportunities in Sports Management Essay Example for Free

Understanding of the career opportunities in Sports Management Essay The field of sport and exercise persists to expand rapidly. This is proofed by the fact that sport is now regarded as a multi-billion dollar industry. As the sport practices increased expansion, many career opportunities are becoming obtainable for students skilled in sport and exercise linked majors. Sport management, as a career is broad-based enough to symbolize a diversity of sport-related areas including, but not limited to, leisure and sport facilities; hotels and resorts; public and private aquatic, golf, and/or racquet clubs; health and fitness programming found in corporations, hospitals, private agencies and clubs, and public settings; commodities; youth, interscholastic, intercollegiate, and professional sports; community recreation; collegiate leisure sports; armed services recreational sports; and nonprofit youth agency amusement and sport programs. Further, the sport management curriculums are flexible enough to convene the demands of student career concerns in such areas as sport leisure and recreation, sport and athletics, sporting goods industry, hostelries as well as travel, nonprofit agencies, and health and fitness management. In defining sport management Stier stated, Today sport management is in reality a multifaceted domain offering a multitude of opportunities for employment and self-fulfillment in a wide range of sport and sport related activities, both in the public and private sectors, as well as in the profit and not-for-profit arenas (Stier, 1999, p. 3). The umbrella of physical education is no longer, and never was, broad-based enough to cover the ever-expanding field of sport management and the other fields that have developed. Numerous organizational options are accessible for sport management programs. The least intimidating option is to remain within the department of physical education and seek an independent status with a separate budget and curricular freedom. A subsequent option is to seek departmental status, which would need a major financial commitment by the college/university throughout a time when dollars are short. Yet another alternative is to fold the sport management curriculum into the department of recreation management or recreation and leisure studies, forming a new, extended department of leisure and sport management. A degree in Sport Management facilitates students’ admission into recreation field. It serves numerous of the same clients and teaches related theory in the management area. The programs gives a distinct required core and a diversity of specializations such as recreation management, sport management, collegiate recreational sport management, aquatic management, health and fitness management, golf facilities management, recreation therapy, coaching education, and others (Kravitz, L. 2001). Sport management undergraduate and graduate programs inflate and prosper under the umbrella of recreation and sport management. Numerous opportunities available for growth of recreation and sport management programs in areas such as management, psychology, leadership, coaching etc. Career opportunity in the field of sports management role can differ extremely depending upon the setting, although the definite task of the manager will be to take general management functions and execute them in a sports setting. All management functions can pertain in different situations at different times, the actually skilful manager will discern when each applies and will use that progression properly. It is necessary for sports managers to comprehend that they are managing in a sports situation, and that they must be applying the correct business principles and practices as appropriate and pertinent to that situation, as colleagues will be doing in other industrial state. There has been some interruption in service industries usually in distinguishing that they have to apply management principles, as do product-based industries. There has been an additional gap in sport apprehending that it is in fact a service industry, but now it is hoped these thought processes and then good practices will instigate to be applied. Sports managers need background knowledge in the development of management, but they will more particularly need knowledge of sport and the people involved in it. To be really effective they will have to a have a feeling for the business of sport, as well as management skills. Basically, sports management is all concerning managing: †¢ The workplace †¢ The people †¢ Day-to-day operations †¢ The facility †¢ The activity †¢ The development process †¢ Partnership working. It has been accepted in a number of settings that there are five general approaches to management. The classical approach deals with the content, suggestive that there is core knowledge that every manager should possess. This comprises the functions of planning, organizing and controlling. The behavioral approach regards as the role of the individual within the management process and recognizes that each individual has needs, wants and desires. It considers that individuals are diverse and need to be properly treated. Management science sets out to use mathematical approaches in management to recuperate efficiency; it relays to operational problems and ways of solving these. The systems approach is based on conniving a specific system of management made up of a diversity of parts which should be brought together to function as an entire to congregate the organizations objectives. The contingency approach works on the supposition that there is no single best means to manage. The manager should be able to manage in diverse situations and distinguish that organizations can diverge in the best way. Though, there are always a diversity of theories and ideas while managing in any given situation, and they must be applied at the suitable time and in the proper manner. To have Sports management as career a manger should always be responsive of trends in sports and the resultant effects on participation. Change can be quick, e. g. the start of numerous people retiring early; or expected, e. g. the reduction in numbers of young people. In some such instance, sports management should react or, better still, anticipate. The profession of sports management desires people who have come from a realistic background with additional training, as well as those who could be professed as academics who have come from an educational background. In numerous situations the difference might be seen as more to do with attitudes than with explicit skill-based training most industrial settings, and sport and recreation is no different, would favor an open-minded wider-thinking person whatever their surroundings, so this is perceived to be one of the benefits of a more academic learning. â€Å"Education is leading human souls to what is best†¦the training which makes men happy in themselves also makes them more serviceable to others†. John Ruskin http://www. infed. org/christianyouthwork/spark_of_the_divine. htm Fundamentally it is much more significant for people to have the keenness and sympathy for sport and its participants than any written qualification, but it is significant that they have the capability to think widely enough to believe everything that may intrude on the operation of sport in their country as well as their explicit situation in a club or national body. The girth of education, perhaps from an extent or some other general management qualification, might well be useful for someone in sports administration if it is joined with commitment and eagerness for the activity of sport, the feature that distinguishes it from other management situations. Interpersonal skills and significance in sport are, though, more significant than any qualification or educational backdrop. The requirement for training is pertinent regardless of whether a person already possesses a condition, a degree or even a postgraduate award. Training can offer specific skills, knowledge and proficiency that will not come from degree-level courses and will be necessary for sports managers in the work situation. For instance, a degree in sports management is never going to train one specifically how to hold volunteers in some of the situations that can come up in the everyday sports arena. particular consideration has to be given to the physical constraints that face people working in sport and how they are going to manage with them this is usually best attained through a progressive and well-established training programme.