BitLife Pro Sports Update Guide: Everything You Need to Know About BitLife Version 1.42 aka The Pro Sports Update

In two years’ time, Candywriter has become a household name for mobile gamers, thanks to the enduring success of their life simulator game, BitLife. Through those two years, the game has gotten dozens of “substantial” updates as it’s gotten tons of new features that allow for many more ways for you to live your best — or worst — virtual life while controlling a virtual character, or Bitizen.

As Candywriter explains in the description, this new update happens to be the 42nd in the game’s history, and if you’re a baseball fan, you’ll know that 42 is the legendary Jackie Robinson’s number. In honor of the pioneering African American MLB star, Candywriter has just released the Pro Sports Update, and this will allow you to play (at least?) one out of five professional sports and choose from hundreds of different teams from leagues around the world.

You can choose to be drafted out of college or high school, request a tryout if you don’t get drafted or signed by another team, undergo therapy or surgery to heal up from your injuries, and deal with coaches, fans, and autograph seekers. You’ll also be asked to make big decisions about various sports-related things during your career. So strap on and keep on reading this new BitLife guide, as we tell you everything you need to know about the Pro Sports Update.

An Overview Of The Pro Sports Update

Finally, you can put your athletic prowess to good use in this new update — no longer are those sports careers in high school and college only there to help you improve your basic stats before you completely forget about them when you get a conventional 9-to-5 job. As we mentioned above, a lot of fans clamored for the Pro Sports Update for quite a while, and we shall get it out of the way immediately — this is yet another way for you to amass a huge in-game fortune aside from the usual celebrity careers of becoming a famous Actor, Singer, Writer, or whatnot.

Of course, you can choose not to turn pro and get drafted, but logically speaking, why would you turn down millions for a run-of-the-mill office job? (Unless you’ve got good Looks and decide you’re better off becoming a rock star or movie star instead.)

So far, there are five sports in which you can become a virtual superstar in the Pro Sports Update — basketball, American football, baseball, hockey, and soccer. The leagues are based on real-life sports leagues, as you can join virtual equivalents of the NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, English Premier League and Women’s Super League, Spanish La Liga, Italian Serie A, German Bundesliga, and U.S.-based National Women’s Soccer League.

Interestingly, the game’s NFL, NHL, and MLB equivalents appear open to female Bitizens, although we’ve noticed that football doesn’t appear among the available school activities for female characters, while hockey and baseball are replaced by field hockey and softball.

Be that as it may, not all professional sports are represented in BitLife’s Pro Sports Update. You cannot become a golf or tennis pro, and your martial arts training, if applicable, cannot be parlayed into a career as an MMA fighter. Personally, we’d also like to see the option to enter the world of professional wrestling. However, the update has already added quite a lot as it is, so we’ll just have to hope that more sports get included soon — it would certainly be fun to cut a promo on a fictionalized Conor McGregor or Roman Reigns and call them a jackwagon or cockalorum, among other trademark BitLife insults.

Getting Drafted – Improving Your Prospect Status And More

Depending on your best sport, you can either get drafted or signed straight out of high school or after college — although the real-life NBA no longer allows players to get drafted straight out of high school, the BitLife Basketball Association (the men’s league) still drafts top high schoolers, while the game’s soccer leagues allow for high school graduates to be signed by teams in England, Italy, Spain, or Germany. You can also get drafted straight out of high school in BitLife’s equivalent of the NHL.

As for professional football, the game’s NFL equivalent only drafts players out of college. Regardless of the sport, though, it appears you cannot be drafted in the middle of your collegiate career, though you can drop out of college and request a tryout with the team and league of your choice.

In order to improve your chances of getting drafted, you will need to practice regularly using the Practice Harder option while playing school sports — make sure to do this at least once a year so that your Performance bar is all filled up by the time you’re in your senior year of high school and college! You should also regularly visit the gym or, if you’re younger than 18, ask your parents if you can take martial arts lessons. (This, of course, is no longer free once you’re an adult!) That’s going to fill up your Athleticism bar, provided you make annual visits to the gym and/or take at least one martial arts lesson per year.

Depending on your Performance, Athleticism, and Health stats, you may or may not get drafted or signed, and if you do get drafted, those attributes will determine which round you get picked in. We’ll get to what happens after you get drafted in our very next tip, but if you don’t get selected in the draft or don’t get any offers to sign as a free agent, you can always opt to try out for any one of the teams in the league of your choice — or should we say, the league whose sport you excelled in during your school days. That’s also the only instance in the game in which you can choose your position, though we’ll be elaborating on that in a bit.

At the end of the day, BitLife is not a sports game — it is a life simulator where being a professional athlete is the latest career you can start after finishing high school or college. It also bears mentioning that none of the characters, may it be your own Bitizen or the NPCs — have heights or weights. That means you cannot choose your position when playing school sports or be assigned one based on your height or weight, and you cannot choose it either when being drafted. Regardless whether you choose to play professional basketball, football, baseball, or soccer, your pro position is mostly random, though the operative word here is “mostly.”

Related: BitLife Politics Update Guide: How to Win Every Election and Become President

That means there are some things that could determine what position you play as a pro. For example, if you have high Smarts, that increases your chances of getting drafted as a basketball Point Guard, a baseball Catcher, a football Quarterback, or a soccer Goalkeeper. Players at these positions mainly serve as on-court or on-field leaders, and it stands to reason that they have should a high in-game IQ, which is why Smarts are so important in the context of the Pro Sports Update.

Strangely, having extremely high Looks has resulted in a higher chance of being drafted as a Defensive Lineman in football, based on our tests — perhaps the game equates high Looks with a jacked physique. But if you don’t like the position you were assigned, you can always quit the game before signing your first pro contract and restart it.

Managing Your Professional Sports Career – How To Improve Your Attributes

Once you’ve been drafted, it will now be your responsibility to have as long and productive a career as possible in your chosen sport — will you be the next LeBron James or the next Kwame Brown? Will you be the next Tom Brady to surprise everyone as a late-round selection or the next Robert Griffin III to see his career as a former top-3 pick flop due to injuries?

It’s all up to you, though one thing that isn’t up to you, aside from your pro position, is your attributes as a pro athlete. Your attributes will depend on your sport and position, but to cite an example, pro basketball players in BitLife are Defending, Dribbling, Passing, Rebounding, Shooting, tricks, and Celebrations — that’s right, the game will rate you based on how well you pump up the fans after converting on a big play, and that applies to all sports, and not just basketball! You will also be rated based on your Fitness, though you’ll need to visit two separate menus in order to improve your main player attributes and your Fitness.

In order to improve all your attributes except Fitness, you’ll need to go to the Practice tab and choose one attribute to work on. Unlike other sub-menus in BitLife, you can actually choose various attributes and improve them after one session, though you won’t get better results by working on an attribute more than once per year.

In other words, you can work on your Rebounding, Defense, and Tricks once each before hitting the Age button and see improvements for all three attributes. That doesn’t apply, however, to Fitness, where you can choose to work on your Balance, Cardio, Flexibility, and Strength — none of these have individual bars, and working on more than one of them in a given year won’t result in a bigger Fitness boost.

Related: BitLife Royal Update Guide: Everything You Need to Know About the Royal Update

After choosing which attributes to focus on and doing the usual things you need to do before tapping on Age, you can hit that button and view your numbers for the season. Depending on your attributes, you may put up anywhere from benchwarmer-caliber numbers to superstar statistics, and since your attributes will usually be low in most areas as a rookie, don’t be frustrated if you’re playing like an average, garden-variety reserve. But you’ll also need to address various situations that may crop up before or after hitting on Age.

The Various Decisions Every BitLife Pro Athlete Should Make

As professional sports is an all-new career in the BitLife universe, with it comes a ton of decisions and scenarios that might come along during your career. The very first decision you’ll need to make, of course, is whether you’re going to accept your first contract offer, negotiate for a higher salary, or outright reject it.

Regardless whether you’re signing your rookie contract or any other contract that may follow, you’re better off accepting the deal straight away, because if the other team gets fed up with how negotiations are going, or if you turn the contract down, you’re going to end up a free agent. Take note that BitLife sports free agency isn’t as lucrative or as (seemingly) easy to navigate as it is in the real world.

Once your career formally begins, you’re going to notice several scenarios pop up, and injury situations are probably among the most common of these. Take note that you can suffer an injury during practice or training sessions, and you can suffer them during games, as you’ll see sometimes when you tap on the Age button to complete one year of your life/one season in the pros.

Times like these, you will normally be asked whether you want to visit your team physician or play through the pain, among other options — the former is always a safe choice, while the latter could do a number on your attributes and your average stats for the season! You may end up missing significant time if you play through the pain or ignore your injury, so make sure to visit your physician or undergo surgery if needed and not leave things up to chance, even if playing through an injury could result in greater Respect.

Other decisions in the game will also factor into how much Respect you’ll have at the end of a season — it will appear as the top-most attribute when the game gives you your season recap. Another popular scenario that appears quite often is the one where you’ll have to deal with a heckler in the audience.

Alternately, you may have to deal with disparaging coaches who criticize your play, or opponents who let loose with some pretty nasty trash talk. in all these scenarios, you will get choices that would allow you to attack the other person or insult/trash-talk them, or maybe flip the bird or yell out an obscenity. Using the Attack option will negatively impact your Respect, and if that isn’t bad enough, you may also end up in trouble with the law!

Granted, the cops will be easier to bribe now that you’re a Famous Athlete and the judges will be very, very forgiving as opposed to if you were an average Joe facing similar assault (or even murder) charges. But that’s still going to impact your popularity with the fans and your teammates/coaches, which is what Respect is all about in this game. That said, it’s always best to ignore the insults or, if the option appears, to simply walk away if you’ve got nothing good to say in return.

Then you’ve got the other random scenarios you may encounter — should you join your teammates in the wild orgy they’re planning (and that includes invites to the Mile High Club), or should you stay faithful to your spouse? Are you going to report your teammate’s alcohol problem to your coach, talk to them about it, ignore the problem, or join them in drinking? Should you put your face on a billboard, create your own website, appear on Dancing with the Stars as a celebrity contestant, or get your face on that cereal box? We’re only naming a select few, but choose wisely if you want to improve your Respect!

Respect And Greatness Beget Fame, Commercials, Books, And Photoshoots Get You Money

While we’re still on the topic of Respect, we should also let you know that this stat, combined with your Greatness, has more of an impact on your Fame as a Famous Athlete than the usual avenues, meaning your book deals, TV commercials, magazine photoshoots, talk show appearances, and social media posts and product endorsements. The Greatness bar can be found on your main athlete menu, and this goes up or down depending on your attributes as a player as well as the Respect you earn or lose by doing good or bad things on and off the court. And while you don’t get any other tangible rewards for winning a championship, that, too, also helps improve the stat. Notice that as your Greatness and Respect improve, so will your fame.

Related: BitLife Social Media Update Guide: How to Become Internet Famous Through the All-New Social Media Update

So where does that leave the aforementioned TV ads and other ways to make money as a celebrity? You can still star in them, you can appear in sexy photo-ops, you can write autobiographies, and you can endorse everything from sportswear to scorpion lollipops in the various in-game social media platforms. But as long as you’re a pro athlete signed to a team, these will only be good for money-making purposes — no matter how well you perform in the ad/photoshoot or how many social media fans you gain or lose or whether your book gets good or bad reviews, your Fame will remain static in such a situation.

Getting Traded – When To Request One And Why You Might Get Moved

Assuming you do as we advised in the aforementioned tips, practice and train regularly, stay out of trouble on and off the court, and undergo therapy or surgery whenever you get injured, you can easily have a two-decade career and keep posting big numbers until the very end of it, and likely stay with the same team for most, if not all of your lengthy career. However, there may be situations where it may be better to ask for a trade.

In most cases, we wouldn’t even bother with using the Trade function in your athlete menu, but if you feel you’re not putting up good enough stats to quickly improve your Greatness, you can ask for one and get traded to a random team — it will then be up to you whether you wish to accept the offer or not. At times, you may have no choice but to hit OK to make the trade go through! There may also be times when your team won’t be able to find any interested trade partners, thus leaving you stuck with your current club and affecting your Respect — except in rare cases where they’re truly undervalued or misused by their team, nobody gets popularity points for demanding a trade in the real world!

Now there may be times when your team may trade you without you even asking. This would usually happen if you’ve proven to be too much trouble, typically as a result of frequent on-court issues, off-court legal problems, or if you chose to do a Latrell Sprewell and attacked your coach for one reason or another. If anything, this means a fresh start, though your Greatness will certainly be affected by the fact your team had given up on you.

End Of The Line – Is There Life After Pro Sports In BitLife?

Once you reach your early 40s and get released by your team, it will become very hard to catch on with another team, even if you choose the last position you played. Even if your core attributes won’t seriously decline like your Fitness might, teams will be hesitant to sign someone whose best days are presumably past them, even if the numbers suggest otherwise. And you can forget about catching on in another sport — Tim Tebow was already stretching it by switching from football to baseball in his late 20s, so why give another sport a try once you’re at an age where most athletes have hung up their sneakers, cleats, or skates? That brings us to the question we posed above — is there a future for you in pro sports once you’ve reached sports retirement age?

Unfortunately, the game does not give you an option to venture out into other sports-related jobs once your playing career is over — you cannot do a Jason Kidd and transition into coaching following your legendary career, neither can you be like Michael Jordan or John Elway and become the owner or general manager of a professional sports team. Likewise, you cannot boost your Fame stat by getting inducted into your sport’s Hall of Fame!

We’re certainly hoping all these things get added soon, but in the meantime, you’re going to need to get a “real job” after retirement. Provided you had a good to great career and didn’t blow your entire fortune on houses, cars, or even aircrafts and boats during your professional career, you and your virtual family should be set for life once you retire from sports. However, you can always get a non-sports-related job if you fancy it, and you can keep appearing in commercials, photoshoots, and the like if the offers come along — just don’t expect that to sustain your Fame for more than a decade!