Paying to Play

AS LINUS ONCE pointed out, Charlie Brown could turn a wonderful thing like Christmas into a problem.

Well, America’s post-industrial economy, in which the children of middle-class families frantically compete for slices of a shrinking pie, has done Charlie Brown one better: Our culture has managed to turn children’s sports into a problem. More and more, the fun and games of bygone days are being displaced by a network of pay-to-play competitive club sports organizations—gated communities of the youth sports world that are marketed to middle-class parents as the only route to coveted college athletic scholarships.

Two sets of statistics tell the story. As of 2010, according to the Columbus Dispatch, youth sports organizations took in at least $5 billion per year. In addition, according to a 2013 National Association of Sports Commissions study reported in the Dallas Morning News, the travel industry associated with youth sports is worth another $7 billion a year. And all that money is being spent on fewer kids. According to the Wall Street Journal, participation of kids age 6 to 17 in the most popular U.S. team sports fell by about 4 percent between 2008 and 2012 while the population of 6-to-17-year-olds fell by only 0.6 percent.

Competitive youth sports is becoming an elite phenomenon. Kids whose families can afford it spend the year migrating from tournaments to training camps. Meanwhile, the majority of kids just give up and stay home to play video games.

My first exposure to the world of club sports came a few years ago when our family adopted a 10-year-old boy from Ethiopia. Our new son had been playing soccer all his life—barefoot, on the streets, with a homemade ball fashioned from rags and twine. He seemed to have a knack for the game, so we wanted to at least give him a chance to play on a real team. At first he played in the local parks-and-recreation league. Then, one spring, we moved him up to the county-sponsored “travel” team. After that, we asked the coach whether he thought our son had the stuff to go somewhere with soccer, perhaps to someday even play at the college level? “It’s possible,” the coach said. “But if that’s what he wants, he’ll have to play year-round.”

That’s when I learned that parents were paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars in club fees and travel expenses to have their kids compete only with others who are similarly dedicated. We didn’t go there—we don’t have the money or the time. But I suddenly understood why the best players on our boys’ Little League or school sports teams, for instance, were also playing for some other team to which they gave priority.

According to a Dallas Morning News series on club sports, some competitive clubs are even starting to prohibit their members from playing on their school teams. They can do this because, in all sports except U.S. football, college recruiters often don’t bother with school teams. Instead, they do all their recruiting at club tournaments where the kids have been intensively coached since the age of 8 or 10.

College is the goal here. These are not low-income kids or parents, nurturing hoop dreams of NBA riches. The goal is twofold: demonstrating a level of achievement and commitment that will make a college application stand out from the pack and getting some athletic scholarship money to round out the financial aid package.

That may seem like a terrible way for a kid to spend his or her childhood, and it is. But it’s also hard not to sympathize with the parents who know how hard it will be for the next generation to remain middle class in an economy of declining wages and stagnant social mobility.