Don't try to be a pro athlete

EDIT: The following is a blog post I wrote over a year ago but never published… I absolutely don’t mean it to be malicious or overly negative. I just believe that making a good living playing sports is an incredibly difficult thing to do. I also believe that our society holds a distorted, overly romantic view of professional athletics and as a result too many children grow up with role models like Michael Vick. Why don’t we encourage children to look up to someone like Steve Wozniak? Anyway just recently I heard that an old baseball teammate Tripper Johnson is playing football for the Huskies. This reminded me of an old draft blog post… Here it is:

I was back at work today after my trip to the east coast and I didn’t really feel like doing anything productive. I’m not sure how I got started but I found myself googling for bits of info on pro athletes that I know/knew. The results were far from inspiring. Marques Tuiasosopo is a third string quarterback with the New York Jets. Zach Tuiasosopo has been on a few practice squads and is now with the Tampa Bay Bucs. Fortunately, their dad Manu placed a lot of emphasis on academics and they both have degrees from UW. Most of the star baseball players I knew skipped college. I played select baseball with 4 players that were drafted and signed after high school and none of them has had success beyond high A. (Pro baseball primarily consists of rookie leagues, low A, high A, AA, AAA and the majors.) Probably the best all around baseball player I knew was Tripper Johnson. He played for Newport High and was generally regarded as one of the best KingCo hitters ever. He was drafted in the first round out of high school by the Baltimore Orioles and supposedly signed a contract with a $1.5 million signing bonus. I was pretty surprised to find that he is still playing high A ball after 8 seasons as a pro. In terms of rewards A ball is pretty far from the major leagues with an average salary of about $1200/month, though apparently you get $20/day for meals when you’re on the road. This just goes to show how tough it is to make it big in professional sports.

Note to self: save this for when my kids say they want to skip college to be pro athletes.


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