The Solution is Right Here

I was talking with a dear friend of mine who works in major league soccer. She was telling me that teams are spending ridiculous amounts of money to have players tested on the daily. I did what all self-respecting and underworked sports marketers do and Googled it.

Most of the articles are dated but the price tag is in the hundreds of millions of dollars when you count each league. Another friend in the business told me that the team she works for is spending something like $300K per month on tests for their players.

That’s just ridiculous money but nothing new there, just another wrinkle in this crazy Covid driven world.

But as I sat at the traffic light their words forged an idea that would help bring a swift end to the economic hardship that testing creates while also enhancing our government’s response to COVID-19.

What if… we went ahead and started vaccinating players now?

I get that giving Devin Booker a shot before your grandma sounds problematic, but before you scream “CODDLED ATHLETE” and get all riled up, hear me out.

Vaccinating players and a professional sports team would probably displace about 100 vaccines when you include staff. That’s a guess so just let me run with this. If you put forth to the team that we’ll vaccinate your players if you repurpose the testing expenditure to help purchase more vaccines and then make sure they are given to people in underserved areas (Native American reservations for instance) you will have created a win-win for our community.

The donation would have to directly assuage the devastating impact this pandemic has had on people who don’t have the proper resources.

The point is we could do a lot of good across our country by leveraging their needs and repurposing their expenditures to help underserved communities or displaced workers. The number of vaccinations needed is minuscule compared to the good you could do by offsetting their expense.

Just a thought and one I thought I’d share.