Stephanie Vigil still loves the game of pickleball. It’s that passion that led her, briefly, into a new career designing and selling apparel for the fast-growing sport.  

However, while the former KHQ-TV anchor was smart to tap into a pandemic-era pickleball craze, she quickly realized there was a difference between having a passion for a sport and hauling boxes of merchandise from one tournament to another.  

The venture lasted eight months, and Vigil found herself at a crossroads. A month shy of her 57th birthday, she pivoted once again, this time enrolling in auctioneering school in Montana.

Now, at 58, Vigil is self-employed and works part-time as a benefit auctioneer under VGL Auctions, drawing on her decades of experience talking to large audiences to fundraise at benefit galas for nonprofit organizations across the country. 

“I thought pickleball was the door that opened up,” says Vigil. “But truly, the path that I want to walk is the one of auctioneering because I think it has more purpose and brings more purpose to my life.” 

As an auctioneer and professional "ring man," which assist auctioneers, Vigil has helped fundraise for organizations that address homelessness, cancer, education, and youth programs, among others. Fundraising typically occurs in the spring and autumn months, creating a three-month-on, three-months-off schedule of sorts for auctioneers, Vigil says.

With summer and winter months off, Vigil has become an avid traveler. In the coming weeks, she’ll be spending nearly two months traveling across Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. After the fall benefit season, she plans to travel to Australia and New Zealand and to dive the Great Barrier Reef. 

Speaking of her newfound career, Vigil says, “It has been an eye-opener. I didn’t know when I left (KHQ) that I would become an auctioneer. If someone told me that and that I would travel all over the country, I wouldn’t have believed it. But now that I’m here, I can’t see anything else. I really love this, and I can do it until I’m 75, 80 years old.”

New careers

The Journal last caught up with Vigil in 2023. She had recently announced her departure from anchoring the nightly news, a role she held for 25 years with KHQ, and transitioned to launching her own pickleball apparel company, VGL Gear, a tradename for PKL LLC. VGL Gear was a play on her last name, as well as an acronym for “very good life,” a nod to the lifestyle she was hoping to cultivate.

Anchoring the news during the pandemic was an emotionally exhausting task that seemed to blur time together, Vigil says. She delivered constantly changing daily updates on the coronavirus to the protests that erupted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. In the fall of 2022, she flew down to San Diego to visit with her two grown sons and discovered pickleball and a slower pace of life.

Upon returning to Spokane, she dived back into anchoring the news, this time to report on the murders of four University of Idaho students. The event proved to be a tipping point in her career that led her to reckon with what she wanted to do next in her life. 

“It was just a time to truly be real with myself and look in the mirror and ask myself, what is it that’s going to bring you peace and love and passion for your life moving forward?” Vigil says. “Most people are getting ready to retire. I didn’t want to retire. I just wanted to find a new passion.” 

Within six months, she had quit her journalism career and launched VGL Gear. But the venture faced a few challenges and drawbacks, she says. Large sports companies like Nike Inc. and adidas AG had also homed in on the rise of pickleball; competing with the likes of these global companies was something she quickly realized would be difficult for a solo outfit like hers to go up against.

Without a brick-and-mortar shop, she relied on pop-ups at pickleball tournaments. Ultimately, it was a drain on her savings, and in opposition to one of her main goals: to work less so she can have more time to spend time with family and friends, travel, read, and relax. 

Vigil knew she had hit a wall and needed to pivot again. Throughout her career in journalism, she had often emceed at events alongside auctioneers and often even joked she wanted to be one when she “grew up." 

Now, as she was deciding again on what next step to take, she took stock of what mattered the most to her, helping others and having freedom, and began to research a possible new path. In January 2024, she enrolled at the Western College of Auctioneering in Bozeman, Montana, where she was trained by a respected mentor who helped her launch her new path. 

“I’m not going to tell you that there weren’t moments that I was worried,” Vigil says. “It’s a hard pivot. And I didn’t go from one to the other. I went from an unknown to an unknown. I truly feel like I was guided and watched over.”

To her surprise, working only six months a year as an auctioneer pays just as much and potentially more than a news anchor, she says. An auctioneer with her experience is paid between $5,000 and $7,000 per event, while more seasoned auctioneers, like her mentor, draw in about $10,000 to $15,000 per event. 

Vigil is now based out of San Diego, just a short drive away from her two sons. Most of her belongings are in storage, and she’s living the life of a couch surfer, she says. She also travels often to Florida, where her boyfriend, former Eastern Washington University head basketball coach and Gonzaga University assistant  coach Ray Giacoletti now resides. She and Giacoletti have been friends for 25 years, she says, and now, they both enjoy visiting each other and traveling the world together. 

Spokane is still a second home for Vigil. She will be traveling here this month to accompany her mother to a wedding, as well as visit with family and friends. She will also return in the fall to host auctions for several Spokane-based organizations, including Cancer Can’t, Northeast Youth Center, Shalom Ministries, and Elevations Spokane children’s therapy foundation. 

In the end, Vigil says she’s happy to have taken a risk. She also acknowledges it’s a risk she is fortunate to be able to afford. However, she had money put aside and the drive to jump into something different, even at 56 years old with decades in a single career. 

“What I got out of it was invaluable,” she says. “And the lessons that I learned along the way, even when I was feeling scared, I’m super happy I got to learn how that emotion felt again because it makes me more compassionate toward others.”