Parents Spare No Expense in Children's Sports

When Tommy Zarzecki Jr. considers the money he spends on his 13-year-old son's hockey habit, he can't help but question his own sanity. In the space of a single conversation, he refers to himself as "nuts," "out of my friggin' skull" and "completely...delusional."

But if he's crazy, so are the other hockey parents in Jefferson Township, N.J. Everyone there knows that promising puck chasers have to join a competitive travel team ($3,500 a season), attend practice and games four to five times a week at a rink 45 minutes away ($150 a week for gas), and play a 55-game schedule with matches in Boston, Baltimore and Pennsylvania.

Then there's the gear: $200 hockey sticks are standard, as are $400 skates with Kevlar-composite blades. And that's just hockey. Zarzecki's son also plays baseball, which means additional travel-team fees, more out-of-state trips and $70 lessons with a private batting coach. All told, Zarzecki estimates he blew $10,000 last year on his son's jock life. "You need another job to pay for your kid's sport," he says.

Zarzecki is not actually delusional. The chatty 49-year-old adman turned cigar-company blogger (long story) played hockey back in the Dark Ages; he remembers loving the game even with cheap wooden sticks and lousy pads. He also knows something's askew when parents get all wound up over an adolescent game. But he can't help it. When he sees his son dominate the ice, he says, the euphoria kicks in — and questions of money and logic go out the window. Besides, he says, "your kid won't be as good if you don't pay for all the extras."

As any parent who's been around the peewee athletic circuit can tell you, the wide world of kids sports is something to behold these days. All around the country perfectly normal 10-year-olds now enjoy the attention of their own coaches, nutritionists and personal trainers. Baseball camp now means hopping a plane to distant locales like Puerto Rico or Australia. Suiting up for hockey might include a $3,000 goalie uniform with custom-molded padding.

How far will it go? In one of the most publicized — and excessive — examples, Dallas billionaire Kenny Troutt built a million-dollar gym in his home for his preteen sons' basketball teams and carts all the kids to tournaments in a private jet, accompanied by a full-time nutritionist and travel planner. And the trend has even filtered down to sidewalk sports. In Mason, Ohio, one group of high schoolers is raising $39,000 to fly all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, for a championship competition...in jump rope.

The movement has not reached every ball field in America. Plenty of parents, concerned about the effects of heavy competition on an eight-year-old, are content to let their kids play casually in the local recreation league. But just try to resist the trend. Joe Hughes, a Cedar Grove, N.J., youth-fitness instructor who specializes in preseason conditioning ("I teach kids how to run"), says that thanks to the intensely supervised training many kids get from an early age, the average 12-year-old is much stronger, faster and more skilled than his 1980s counterpart.

Which means that the youngster who skips private T-ball coaching today will have a tough time making the travel team tomorrow, never mind a slot on the high school varsity squad. Little wonder a parent like software consultant David Hinson just shrugs when he looks at the $2,500 bill for his eight-year-old son's hockey habit. "It's a different world," says the Nashville dad. "You just have to adjust to the new reality of how much things cost."

Of course, parents have been overspending on their kids' athletic careers since Zeus bought thunderbolts for little Hercules. But these days there's a whole new industry urging them on, with a slew of sports companies profiting — from the Nikes and Spaldings of the world to mom-and-pop purveyors of shin guards and batting tees. Not that there are more kids out there on the field of play. (Remember our national obesity crisis?)

That number is actually flat or dropping, says Thomas Doyle, VP of information and research at the National Sporting Goods Association. But those who do participate are forking out far more for fancy gear and specialized training. California-based sporting-goods manufacturer Easton Sports, for one, reports that sales of its high-end youth-baseball bats ($150 and up) have increased fourfold over the past decade. Velocity SportsPerformance, a national franchise providing private fitness for kids, has expanded from five franchises to 65 in the past five years alone. And My Sports Dreams, a Bedford Hills, N.Y., outfit that helps young athletes raise money to support their travel-team activities, says its business has doubled every year since 2004. "We feel we have a tiger by the tail," says cofounder Jordan Kern.

For many parents the single biggest expense is the travel team, which promises to expose their budding all-star to tougher competition, superior coaching and the attention of college recruiters — not to mention interminable car rides and the vagaries of vending-machine food. But youth travel teams, once reserved for a region's elite athletes, have steadily expanded to include average players, who now zigzag the country to battle the similarly undistinguished competition; USSSA Baseball says its team roster has grown from 1,000 a year in 1997 to 40,000 today, while some 450,000 kids now cross state lines for soccer tournaments.

"Now everyone can play," says Bruce Doig, director of the Beverly, Mass., recreation department, "as long as they pay the fee." (Fees range from several hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the length of the season, distances traveled, and whether or not the team has attracted sponsors to help defray the cost.) Like many small towns, Beverly has seen an explosion in the number of travel teams since 2004; as a result, Doig says, rec-league participation is dwindling by 5 percent a year.

It makes sense: What junior jock wants to play at the dingy old YMCA one town over when he can miss a day of school and watch movies in the back of the car on his way to a tournament in a fancy new facility? Indeed, the travel movement has spawned its own distinct culture. Team parents are modern-day Deadheads, hauling their kids from state to state in their SUVs. Armed with Gatorade and PowerBars, they gather at weeklong tournaments in far-flung locales where they fill up hotel rooms and converge on restaurants in groups of 40. It's a huge tourist trade, and hundreds of towns now bid as much as $300,000 for the right to host kiddie competitions, says Don Schumacher, executive director of the National Association of Sports Commissions. In Cooperstown, N.Y., home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, savvy entrepreneurs built massive youth-tournament facilities like Cooperstown Dreams Park, which charges young athletes up to $850 to play baseball, sleep in a camp and be "inducted into the prestigious American Youth Baseball Hall of Fame, where they will be enshrined." All told, kiddie travel ball brings tens of millions a year to Cooperstown, says Chamber of Commerce Director John Bullis. Perhaps the nation's biggest youth-sports attraction is Walt Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex, a 220-acre facility in Orlando that draws 1.5 million athletes to 180 events a year. It's a blast for kids but a massive wallet hit for parents forced to purchase Disney theme-park tickets and a Disney hotel stay as part of the tournament package.

When they aren't whipping out their plastic to cover travel costs, parents are ponying up for the latest and greatest equipment that might give their kid an edge, from the $360 lacrosse stick to a $1,000 suit of hockey armor. (And that's not even counting a team's fashionable "off-field" necessities, like matching warm-up suits, caps and equipment bags.) Competitive youth sports is the lone bright spot in an otherwise flat market for sporting goods, and manufacturers have responded by introducing new technologies at a faster rate.

"It's been the growth area for us," says Rick Redman, a spokesperson for Louisville Slugger, which sets up inflatable batting cages at youth tournaments so kids can try the year's new models — like the $299 Exogrid, made with one of the company's exclusive alloys and a carbon composite sleeve for "greater handle stiffness."

Of course, experts say that expensive gear is wasted on all but the most talented kids. It can even hurt the performance of mediocre athletes, since it allows less margin for error, says Pat Quinn, director of national gear chain Play It Again Sports. A stiffer, more expensive hockey stick, for example, will give standout players greater power and control, but beginners will likely find it unforgiving and harder to manage.

And if $200 sneakers don't turn Mikey into the next Michael Jordan, maybe he just needs special help. The number of personal trainers catering to children has doubled in recent years, estimates the American College of Sports Medicine, and a growing number of coaches are offering specialized one-on-one instruction in everything from blocking to free throws. The reason: More kids are committing to a single sport from a young age and using the off-season to perfect their game.

When Julie Marini's daughter Tiffany decided to focus on field hockey, for example, the sport became a year-round pursuit for the whole family. After serving as captain of her Pennsauken, N.J., high school team in the fall, Tiffany wanted to play the indoor winter leagues and attend spring weekend clinics with a private team. During the summer she went to a series of one-week field-hockey camps hosted by various local colleges, where she rubbed shoulders with NCAA coaches. She also enjoyed semiprivate training sessions four times weekly at Velocity Sports Performance, the training gym where kids as young as eight come in for private consultations, complete with high-tech tools like stop-action video analysis.

For the Marinis the extra help paid off: Tiffany got a partial scholarship to play field hockey at a Division I school this fall. But she's one of the lucky few. Many parents fall into the trap of thinking an investment in their kid's jock skills today means a free ride to college tomorrow. (The fact is, just 2 percent of high school athletes will land an athletic scholarship, and the average award is just $10,000 — less than the cost of a few years of clinics, camps and team travel.) And while field hockey provided Tiffany with tuition help, Julie says it's a shame her daughter never enjoyed the pleasures of unsupervised free time. But really, who would she have spent it with? There are no kids to play with in the neighborhood, says Julie, since "everyone is busy with some activity."

Naturally, everyone speculates about what this sports mania is doing to the kids. Florida basketball coach Jordan Adair says that when he sees fourth-graders donning expensive uniforms and sleeping in fancy hotels, he can only think: Where do they go from here?

"It's setting them up for a letdown," he says. In truth the adultification of youth sports is just part of a larger trend. If a kid's not coached to perfection by a soccer pro, she's probably slaving over algorithms at math camp or getting chess lessons from a former Soviet Union grand master. Rick McBride, a DeBary, Fla., baseball coach who's watched the changing scene for two decades with varying degrees of amusement and amazement, says he can't help but wonder what these hypertrained, super-supervised kids will do when they grow up. "Will they be better corporate employees? Probably so," he muses. "But is that what we want?"

There's already a backlash, even beyond the usual fretting by experts about the physical and emotional stress placed on kids playing high-stakes sports. One of the fastest-growing franchises in the nation is i9 Sports, a 115-location outfit that organizes low-cost, casual leagues emphasizing fair play and fun. Parents must sign a pledge prohibiting "sideline negativity and disruption." And founder Frank Fiume trains his franchisees to screen out parents who call about taking their kid's game to the next level. "That's when you say, 'He's a nut job,'" says Fiume. Then there's Playful Cities USA, a growing coalition of 31 towns like Atlanta and San Francisco dedicated to creating parks and playgrounds where kids can just hang out and do whatever it is kids do these days when adults aren't breathing down their necks.

But the heavy breathing continues — even during an economic downturn, when, experts say, adults often find comfort in the world of children's games. Tommy Zarzecki, for one, is planning to buy his son a new $300 baseball bat — and it looks like they're well on their way to another $10,000 year. "I think I'm just so used to it," says Zarzecki. "It would break my kid's heart if I said we couldn't afford to play this year, but it would break my heart a lot more. Isn't that weird?"