Fantasy Sports Operators Work in a Field of Their Dreams

So you want to be the next Jerry West, Al Davis or Kevin Malone, running your own sports team, making trades and cutting deals, but you don’t want to haggle with troublesome stadium contractors, city councils or, worse, free agents?

One solution is to join the fantasy sports world, a parallel universe, of sorts, where, if you’re among the lucky few, you can weave fantasy into a very real career option.

Take Steve Goldstein of online sports channel CBS Sportsline in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for example. Goldstein, 30, earned his MBA from Nova Southeastern University in March and joined Sportsline in June. For the last four years he has managed his own fantasy teams. Now he is products and service manager for Sportsline’s fantasy sports division, a position he landed after applying to a want ad in a local newspaper.

“I never thought I’d get paid to go after my passion,” says Goldstein, who supervises a team of six responsible for handling customer support for the fee-based fantasy games and services Sportsline provides.

Competing in fantasy sports is a passion for thousands of people around the world, who play a wide variety of games based on rules originally conceived by a group of baseball fans in the early 1980s. Here’s how it works: Several people get together to form their own league with teams that “compete” against one another using the statistics of real-life professional players.

The thrill comes from simulating ownership of a professional sports team--negotiating trades with fellow team owners, or scouting and drafting the next phenom--all with the goal of taking home the championship at the end of the season.

Baseball and football are the fantasy sports of choice, but fantasy hockey, basketball, soccer, golf and even NASCAR racing are growing in popularity.

Traditionally, team owners get their players in a draft or auction and earn points based on how these players perform in their real-life competitions. Standings are regularly updated and determine the league champion at the end of the season. Until recently, standings were disseminated within each league by either mail or fax once a week. Now, thanks to the Internet, owners can track their team performance daily or even hourly.

“The Web has revolutionized the game,” says Bill Mayer, president and owner of USA Stats, based in Baltimore. “It’s like what the microwave did for cooking.”

The Web has also made it possible for a slew of companies to serve insatiable fantasy team owners, as well as to develop additional fantasy games played only over the Internet.

So far, Sportsline and ESPN.com lead the pack of heavy hitters who have entered the fantasy game, although smaller companies such as USA Stats manage to keep in the running. With the success of such services comes the need for sports-knowledgeable employees to ensure that fantasy team owners receive personal treatment.

*

John Kantorski, 24, manages the USA Stats office, processing all the statistics and major league baseball transactions that affect the fantasy teams whose leagues USA Stats maintains. For instance, if a player goes on the disabled list or gets sent down to the minors, Kantorski makes sure that move gets reflected on a team owner’s roster.

Although USA Stats receives its official statistics from numbers house Stats Inc., Kantorski must be adept at calculating batting and earned-run averages in case an owner disputes a decimal point.

That’s a big job--USA Stats served more than 1,000 leagues in 1998. Luckily, Kantorski is studying to become a high school math teacher at Towson University in the Baltimore area, where he’s in his junior year.

Kantorski works the baseball season (March to September) at USA Stats, earning a steady paycheck of about $1,100 a month for a 30-to-40-hour workweek, along with an opportunity to hone his statistics skills.

“I’ve always loved baseball,” he says, “and this job gives me a chance to get paid to combine my interests.”

Sportsline’s Goldstein says he applies about 70% of what he learned in business school to his current duties, which include assembling budgets, conjuring up new marketing and product strategies, and creating performance incentives for his staff of six.

He estimates that he works 60 hours a week, while taking home an annual paycheck in the $50,000-to-$70,000 range. He describes the benefits as “great,” highlighted by an employee stock purchase plan.

“I’m definitely the envy of the group I graduated with,” he says. “Most of my fellow graduates took more traditional roads of working for a rental car company, or in the insurance industry. But when they found out where I was working, they asked me if I can get them a job here.”

Plenty of Web-based fantasy services are hiring. Such is the case with Roto News, a no-cost fantasy sports information service that also hosts free fantasy leagues. The company--which earns its revenue by selling ads to its Web site--is looking to expand its 10-person staff and recently relocated to Los Angeles from Chicago.

A self-described “sports nut geek,” Jeff Erickson, 28, coordinates all the information on the Roto News Web site, which includes culling pertinent sports news stories from newspapers across the country.

*

As Roto News editor, he also supervises a network of beat writers and comes up with new features to post on the site to help fantasy owners boost their standings. In addition, he manages a project called “My Football Daily” to customize football statistics and is working to promote the new product as football season approaches.

Erickson earned a law degree from Loyola University in Chicago and studied for the bar exam while helping to launch Roto News. He passed the bar but found the lure of co-founding a start-up fantasy service irresistible. Now Erickson indirectly uses his law degree to help spot problems, although he admits the opportunities to do so are rare.

Logging minimum 10-hour workdays, Erickson nevertheless possesses what he describes as a “semblance of control” over his schedule, in that he can also work from home. He earns $40,000 to $50,000 a year, a range he figures is comparable to what he’d be earning as a first-year associate in a law firm.

The benefit package at Roto News is competitive, and Erickson finds the environment ideal. “It’s unusual for me to watch the clock,” he says, “because I’m making a comfortable living in sports, which I love.”

For Steve Byrd, vice president of fantasy sports at Stats Inc. near Chicago, the perks this year included an opportunity to attend opening day at Wrigley Field. Byrd, 36, creates new games and products for Stats Inc., which provides data to major sports outlets and operates its own fantasy service.

As an officer of the company, he earns $70,000 to $80,000 a year and supervises a full-time staff of 20. Although Byrd admits his schedule can be grueling, he manages to keep it all in perspective.

“When it comes down to it, I like hanging around with sports all day,” he says. “I figure I may as well have fun with what I do for a living.”