Some years back I went to a Kelby seminar at the convention center in Charlotte. At a break I found out that folks around me had sons playing high school football. They all either had a 7D or hoped to buy one soon. One guy sold photos to other parents and did pretty well with it for a hobby, plus he was shooting his own son anyway.
At the other end of the scale, I have a friend who shoots college sports professionally. He has contracts with various schools in the area and sells photos from his web site. His photos also appear in newspapers and on their web sites. He said that cancellation of spring sports had cost him $50k in income up to that point. Fall sports don't sound promising. His work is excellent. He shoots Nikons, so I don't know the models, but I would assume something top end. He obviously has some really long lenses. He has flash guns stationed in the rafters of the basketball arena here. He says that is how he gets such good color balance, yet I never notice the flashes going off during games. The arena has installed new lights that look better on TV, so he might not need the flash as much. With the old lights when I shot video it had a bit of sickly green cast to it. I was shooting pick-up games, so the camera was seeing all the empty red seats, and AWB shifted toward cyan, I guess. I did try one night using a white card to set a custom balance, but it didn't help much. I'm not great working with color grading in FCP X. Last year I was in Denmark when the games were played, and of course they didn't happen this year. So I've not tried shooting under the new lights. I'm not sure whether they would use them during pick-up games anyway, maybe just for real games for TV. If life is closer to normal next year, maybe I'll find out, or I'll feel let out of a cage and leave for Norway or somewhere else cool that I haven't been to.