Like any job, there are ups and downs to working in the sports industry

Terry and me with our son Jared at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida...before the place was torn up by a hurricane.

My son Jared, who works for Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Rays, put it better than I could have when he said, "Everybody wants to work in baseball until they actually work in baseball."

What he meant was that lots of people are anxious to work for a professional baseball team, but when faced with the reality of what that means day to day, it's a career choice some quickly regret.

Jared's words resonated with me because I started my career in sports media as a newspaper journalist here in Northeast Ohio. I was a sports agate clerk/staff writer for The News-Herald, a large suburban daily paper, from 1988 to 1990 while in college, spent nearly a year as a sports writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau in 1991 while still in college, then returned to The News-Herald in late '91 as a full-time sports writer.

I worked for the paper until the fall of 1996, when I switched gears and began writing plan documents for a health insurance firm.

That's a big change, but it was necessitated by two key factors that still loom large for local sports journalists:

(1) Terry and I were starting to have kids, and I needed a larger salary than The News-Herald could provide. Very, very few people in sports media are anywhere near what you might call "rich."

(2) Along those same lines, I worked nights, usually until 1 or 2 in the morning. That is not conducive to a growing family, especially when the kids start playing sports or have evening school events.

The work itself was fun, but it could be tiring. There were many nights when I would cover a game, come back to the office and write my story, then start editing articles and laying out pages for the next day's paper. THEN we had to stick around until the first papers came off the presses to check that no glaring errors had made it through the editing process.

Similarly, during the baseball season, Jared's days are long no matter whether the Rays are home or away. As Senior Coordinator, Baseball Information & Communications, he researches and writes pages and pages of media notes (starting in the morning on game days). After games he's doing more writing, researching and generally helping media do their jobs well.

If you're a sports fan, you might know the Rays are playing this season at George Steinbrenner Field, a minor league baseball facility, since their home park at Tropicana Field is unplayable after being damaged last year by Hurricane Milton.

I texted Jared on the day of the Rays' home opener this season and asked him how it went.

He reported that the bullpen cameras at Steinbrenner Field had been installed incorrectly so that they couldn't tell which relief pitchers were warming up. That's information usually announced right away in the press box.

And speaking of announcing information, I don't think the press box microphones were working, either, so Jared or someone else on the Rays' staff had to yell out relevant information to the assembled media as it became available.

All of this was happening while Jared was trying to do his regular job and also training two new Rays communications staffers. It was a long, exhausting day, I'm sure, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary for people who work in professional sports.

That's just the way the job goes, and if you don't want to do it, they can always find someone who does.

I'm a big fan of the current sports staff at The News-Herald. Among those writers is a guy named Chris Lillstrung, who covers many of the "niche" sports I like to follow closely like soccer, hockey, and track and field.

I'm also Facebook friends with Chris. He often posts about the sacrifices people like him have to make in order to survive in newspaper journalism these days. It's still relatively low paying, and it still involves long evening hours that make it difficult for him to spend time with his daughter.

None of what Chris posts is whining, though. It's just fact.

I pay for a subscription to The News-Herald to read what Chris, John Kampf, Ben Hercik, Jay Kron and other N-H sports scribes write, but my few bucks aren't enough to give these professionals the type of compensation they really deserve.

The economics of the industry are such that they're simply not going to be paid large salaries, and instead they must take some solace in the fact that what they're doing is also providing a valuable community service.

That's heartening to think about, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The point is, any time you think "how cool!" when you hear about a friend's kid working in professional sports, or if you yourself are considering a career in that field, make sure you go into it with your eyes wide open.

It IS cool and personally rewarding, and it can be done, but understand what you're giving up in return.

When it comes to the sports industry, there never has been any such thing as a free lunch.

For a short time, I wrote insurance plan documents. God bless the people who do it.

Whenever you sign up for health coverage through your employer or purchase new life insurance, you receive a thick booklet in the mail called the plan description.

Under almost no circumstances will you or anyone you know ever read one of these documents.

I have never met a non-attorney or someone outside of the insurance industry who has read even two pages of one of these things.

I, however, have read them. Several of them.

This is because, for a seven-month period spanning late 1996 into 1997, I wrote health insurance plan documents for a living.

It was an excruciatingly dull job for me, largely because I had previously been a newspaper sports journalist.

On no one's scale of excitement does "insurance plan document specialist" outpace "sports writer."

In retrospect, though, it was an absolutely vital step in my career path. Terry and I were starting to have kids, and our goal was for her to be able to stay home full time to take care of them.

The only way this was going to happen was for me to switch professions and work my way toward a job that (a) paid more, and (b) had regular 9-to-5 hours instead of the strange night-owl schedule of the sports writer.

So I answered an ad in the paper (this is how we used to get jobs, kids) and went to work for a third-party insurance plan administrator writing these documents. I didn't especially enjoy the job, but I learned a lot.

It also gave me enough exposure to health care that I was able to get my next job, which was serving as managing editor of Urology Times magazine. While obviously not sports, it was a position in which I could again put my journalism training to some use.

From UT I moved on to the Cleveland Clinic, my first job as a public relations professional. From there, I went in succession to a PR agency, a community foundation, a large nonprofit, and now Vitamix.

There's probably no way that particular chain of events comes to pass without my time writing those endless insurance documents. People who make a living writing them have my undying admiration.

If there's a moral to this story for those just starting in their careers, it is probably this: Every job is likely to benefit you in some way. Stick it out for at least a little while and use it as a springboard toward your ultimate goal.

Even if that goal is writing thick legal documents that no one is ever likely to read.

This is not the post where I inspire you to achieve your life goals

Actually it's not really a depressing post today as far as you're concerned. But it sort of is for me.

Here's my problem:

After graduating from John Carroll University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in English and history, I stopped going to school. My dad told me I should stick it out and get a Master's degree, but I was tired of working full time AND attending college full time, which I had spent the previous couple of years doing.

So I decided a B.A. was good enough and I stopped there. At the time I was a sports writer at The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, and my career path was pretty well laid out for me: Work my way up the journalistic ladder and eventually become a beat writer covering a Cleveland professional sports team.

It was that simple. That was my goal, and one certainly didn't need a Master's degree to get there.

So like I said, I stopped the whole school thing. And I kept on sports writing for four more years, at which point I realized three things:

• Sports happen at night, and it's difficult to raise a family and participate in kids' activities when you have to be at work every evening.
• You're never exactly going to be independently wealthy as a sports writer.
• Eventually the industry was going to change, and there was no guarantee of long-term job security in sports writing (20 years later, it turns out I was actually right about this one)

So I moved away from sports writing and got into technical writing, then trade journalism, and eventually marketing and public relations.

And now, two decades down the line, I desperately wish I had a Master's degree.

Specifically, I'd like a Master's of Business Administration (MBA) to help make up for the fact that I never studied business in any formal way.

And because obtaining a graduate degree would be extremely personally satisfying to me.

Happily, my employer has an excellent tuition reimbursement plan. Probably the best one I've come across. I almost wouldn't have to pay a dime for an MBA.

But what my employer can't give me, what I can't even give myself, is time.

And time, you see, is the problem here.

I'm barely two months into my job, but already I can see that it's always going to be fairly time-consuming. I enjoy and appreciate the position, don't get me wrong. But things aren't ever really going to calm down when it comes to the day-to-day chaos.

Even if you only take one MBA course per semester, you still need considerable time to attend class, study, get through your reading and homework, work on group projects, etc.

In addition to having a crazy job, I also have a wife and five kids. They deserve a significant amount of my time and attention, and I want to give it to them.

The math just doesn't work out.

If I'm getting anything close to the proper amount of sleep, exercising, doing my job well, and staying closely connected with my family, that pretty well accounts for a 24-hour day right there.

Unless we figure out a way to move to 28-hour days, I'm in trouble here.

Yet many people at work are encouraging me to go for it and get after that MBA. Which is nice, but none of them has offered me that gift of time. Nor do many really seem to understand the stage of life I'm in.

So it appears I'm stuck.

The obvious solution - the only solution, I suppose - is to set this particular goal aside and come back to it someday when the kids are older.

And I may just go that route. But I could really use the knowledge and experience you gain in an MBA program in the next few years. It will still be personally satisfying if I get the degree in my 50s, but I feel like it won't help me as much professionally if I wait that long.

So....yeah.

At this point I invite you to do one of three things:

(a) Tell me to suck it up and quit whining about my first-world problems, something with which I can't disagree.

(b) Tell me how you personally overcame similar obstacles and got a degree or achieved some other life goal, thus inspiring me to get out there and reach for the stars or whatever.

(c) Ignore this post completely and move on with your day, which honestly is probably the approach I would take if I were you.

Because, really, who has the time for that?

(NOTE: Since I wrote this, I came across an excellent post from my friend, former colleague and blogger extraordinaire Tara Pringle Jefferson with practical tips on balancing work, school and family. So it CAN be done. Hopefully one doesn't need to be as awesome as Tara to pull it off, though...)