The Houston Super Bowl Committee wants you.
As Houston prepares to host the Super Bowl next year, the Super Bowl host committee is seeking volunteers to pitch in for the big game.
The committee seeks up to 10,000 volunteers and has begun its online application process.
“Volunteers will play a critical role in the success of Super Bowl LI, here in Houston, in 2017,” host committee president and CEO Sallie Sargent said. “The positive experience our visitors will have will be in large part due to the interaction they have with our volunteers.”
The ideal candidate will have a passion for football, the city of Houston and Southern hospitality, according to the host committee.
During a 10-day period leading up to the Super Bowl, volunteers will be required to work at least three shifts consisting of six to eight hours for staff volunteers and eight to 10 hours for volunteer supervisors.
Key dates are from Jan. 27 to Feb. 5 next year. To volunteer, go here, or send an email to volunteer@housuperbowl.com. AS to whether or not you should do this, I’ll let Dan Solomon weigh in:
Snark aside, it’s both understandable why a person might want to volunteer to help with the Super Bowl—it’s the friggin’ Super Bowl! What a neat thing to be a part of!—but it’s also obvious that this is a rip-off. Extremely profitable entities shouldn’t be recruiting volunteers to do work that they should be paying people for—that’s not just good advice, it’s labor law. Organizations from the NFL to Super Bowl Host Committees to SXSW skirt minimum wage requirements all the time, of course. (This year’s Super Bowl changed its position and agreed to pay a small portion of its volunteers, who were providing manual labor to set up the halftime show, after a news report from ABC.) Still, the idea of volunteering to make even more money for an already extremely profitable organization is a bit more palatable when those who are helping out can actually go to the event. It might not be entirely legal that SXSW volunteers are rewarded with badges, access to screenings/showcases/panels, and maybe the chance to pick Ryan Gosling up at the airport, for example, but you can certainly see the reciprocal nature of the relationship. The 10,000 Houstonians who are going to be doing Lord knows what over the 10-day period that surrounds Super Bowl 51, meanwhile, appear to be getting a uniform.
Still, they’ll probably get away with it—and they’ll probably find the recruits they need too. In San Francisco, where the host committee sought 5,000 volunteers (everything is bigger in Texas), they managed to wrangle two-thirds of the people they needed in just a week. But when people question whether the Super Bowl is really the economic boon to a local economy it’s made out to be, the fact that 10,000 temporary jobs that could get money circulating in the area are instead filled with arm-waving volunteers is probably part of your answer.
So there you have it. Note that volunteers do not get a ticket to the game – seriously, 10,000 Super Bowl tickets is worth more than its weight in gold or crack – so set your expectation levels accordingly.