pro-ams, raising the bar
While not exactly a new concept, I stumbled across the term Pro-Am the other day and the corresponding downloadable book/whitepaper entitled "The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society". Roughly defined as people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards, Pro-Ams are the people I've spent a great deal of my free time with during the past 5 years. They are the volunteers and athletes that make up the BC cycling community, volunteering within the Provincial Sports Organizations (PSO's) like Cycling BC or through the club structure that Cycling BC supports: Team Escape Velocity or the volunteer-run / one-of-only-three-in-North-America indoor velodrome in Burnaby. Many of the people I know apply near professional dedication, techniques, and methods to their hobby. So much so that calling it a hobby doesn't seem to do it justice.
From wikipedia's entry on Pro-Ams:
I think I fall into this category. Great, yet another demographic group which can be now used to market Pro-Am products to me! Foiled again!
Do you know any Pro-Ams? Are you one yourself? What drives people to this level of performance in their leisure? Is it really leisure anymore or is it something else?
From wikipedia's entry on Pro-Ams:
Their leisure is not passive but active and participatory. Their contribution involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, and is often built up over a long career which involved sacrifices and frustrations.
I think I fall into this category. Great, yet another demographic group which can be now used to market Pro-Am products to me! Foiled again!
Do you know any Pro-Ams? Are you one yourself? What drives people to this level of performance in their leisure? Is it really leisure anymore or is it something else?
3 Comments:
In both cycling and other pro-am fields, I think the real magic has been improved tools.
In the last decade or two, heart rate monitors have gone from elite-athlete tool to $100 toy, logging HRMs are available for twice that, and if you can afford an HDTV, you can afford a logging power meter, a device which didn't exist outside of medical labs 20 years ago.
That's not to mention the quality of training knowledge out there.
It's even more notable in fields like photography and music, where the bar to entry keeps dropping. You know what the biggest effect of digital cameras was? Amateur photographers can now acquire as many images as pro photographers always did without onerous costs. That means the amateurs can come much closer to the experience levels of a pro in a reasonable time.
Good tools: I think that's a lot of the new "amateur professionalism."
By
Ryan, at 7:20 am
Very interesting article Gord - glad you brought it to attention; being one caught between the Baby Boomer and Gen-X generation I'm often confused as to my identity - this certainly fits!
The net certainly has been a contributor to the development of the "pro-am"; both as a purveyor of information in educating "pro-ams" and as medium for publishing the pro-ams results and output whether it is publishing photographs or cycling results ...
by the way Gord, the white paper link is broken - one too many "http's" ...
John T.
By
Anonymous, at 8:56 am
I always thought pro-ams were the min-tournaments that took place a day or two before the tournament itself, with the basic scenario being the "pro" (e.g. Tiger) playing with an "am", rather instead of some amateur hack like myself, the am is some sort of famous dude like Bill Murray. So it's a bit of a spectacle, nothing really to do with bringing amateurs to hang out with the pros, rather to let celeb wanna-be golfers play with real golfers.
Ben
By
Anonymous, at 4:23 pm
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