In wholehearted agreement with Matt's essay today, I submit my comment from last week's post regarding the "care agenda" and the cost of child care / elder care:
"I think the real societal pressure against having more kids is what is expected to be a “good” parent. The level of parental involvement expected in planning, managing and directing all parts of their child’s life is what makes the parenting role harder today than it was in the past. Kids are resilient. They can be bored sometimes. They can be unstructured. They can just wander around the neighborhood all by themselves sometimes. But those things are indicators of “bad” parenting by today’s standards."
My slogan: Have more kids. Do less parenting. It'll be fine.
Tim Carney has a new book ("Family Unfriendly") and while I think he gets a bit trad-Cath towards the end of it, he does a masterful job making exactly the point you make here in the first third, even focusing explicitly on the scourge of travel sports for quite a while.
I have friends ranging from PMC DINKs to 5+ kid homeschool Catholic families, and I gotta say daytime hangs with the giant Catholic families are fun. I let my kids loose, they get lost in the swarm, and I get to crack beers and eat food for an afternoon. Many kids, basically no parenting. I love my DINK friends too, but it's a bit more arranging of schedules to make it work.
A significant part of the reason we have the kids in Catholic school is to participate in this effect, even if most Catholics (at least around here) have uh, creatively interpreted things in such a way that 2-3 child households are the norm, and only a handful have more. There's a nice community and most importantly you can crack a beer or two and talk with the adults while the kids go crazy with each other in the yard or basement or wherever.
We can't go backwards, and nostalgia isn't the answer, but that doesn't mean that every change is an improvement. As the article states, it's sometimes the case that "everyone’s individual decisions about this stuff ends up impacting the rest of the community" in a negative way. That's a cost of individual freedom -- over time the weight of individual free choices can accumulate in a way that is collectively not optimal and box people in -- and it occasionally requires democratic collective action to re-channel individual free choices in intentional directions that are more collectively satisfying.
It also doesn't mean we can't take lessons from other cultures and adapt some lessons from observing other ways of doing things that seem valuable to our situation. And cultural borrowing or learning can occur in any direction -- learning from other cultures that exist today simultaneously with us, or given that as they often say, "the past is a different country", from the cultures that previously existed in our own cities, towns and rural areas in our own country.
I grew up hearing about the much freer childhood both of my parents had in the 1940s and 50s and have no doubt there was much about that that was better, in terms of giving kids more room to explore and develop their own independence and resilience and less pressure on parents-- my dad in a rural Minnesota farm community, surrounded by a dense clan of cousins, aunts and uncles who there for each other; my mom in a middle class urban city neighborhood where kids ran free. Obviously, there was also a lot not to like about it. Many rural communities were dirt poor and my dad's family didn't even have electricity until he was about 10 - he wired the house together with his brother who was a few years older than him! And the city mom grew up in was racially segregated by law. So again, nostalgia or reactionary thinking isn't the answer. But that doesn't mean those other bygone cultures didn't also have good things we don't have. The challenge is to find ways to take lessons about the good parts, that open our eyes to better possibilities in the present and future, and leave the bad behind.
I grew up in a small Southern town as part of a distinct minority, surrounded by bunches of aunts, uncles and cousins around whom our social life orbited. We were together all the time, for all kinds of family and religious celebrations.
Oh man, I couldn't wait to blow that town when I turned 18. I left and never regretted not living there again.
Sometimes, sadly, it's true that l’enfer, c’est les autres.
Sort of off-topic, but this is why I love the movie Midsommar so much. It encapsulates our simultaneous desires to be individuals, but also subsumed into a greater community.
Well said; not surprising, given your pragmatic Minnesota roots.* Skol Vikes, etc.
This subject is a point of passion for me, and I have to consistently check myself for overweening nostalgia and the urge to go in reverse.
I have to think that the idea here will be to instead look forward, and imagine the world we're creating: children who grow up without agency, with shuttered avenues for creative exploration, and with limited experience handling autonomy and risk will create their own kind of world. Projecting which pros and cons will emerge from this paradigm is worthy of our attention.
I disagree. My friends with no kids have too much nice stuff in their house that I have to worry about my kids breaking and very few things for little ones to do. It's too quiet. When you go over somebody's house and they have a bunch of kids, your kids will just slide into the mix and you just check on them once in awhile.
Yep. My husband is a kindergarten teacher (small class) and we have one kid. He's always commenting that one kid is much more work than a group of them.
Some of my DINK friends are better with kids than others! Even with the ones that are awesome, if it's only my kids around I still have to parent, so it's hard to hang sometimes. With other parents, you can hit a kid critical mass where they amuse themselves and all you have to do is feed them every few hours.
To be clear, few things better than a night out with my DINK friends when I can get shore leave approved by the captain (my wife).
I have more single friends without kids than married friends without kids but in both cases they have always tended to hang out with me and my daughter in a more aunt/uncle way that has been really nice for her. They were also our go to babysitters. It is obviously different now that she is older but it was interesting to see how differently they talked to her than friends with kids. I have had mixed experiences with our few friends who have larger families. Sometimes it is great and does feel like hanging with cousins. Other times it ends up feeling like my kid has to babysit all the other kids because the parents are so excited for adult time that they check and don't notice that their kids are fighting or running with knives etc.
If we hang out with our friends without kids, we either get a sitter or it’s at our place.
I was thinking more about how it’s frequently hard to hang out with our friends with just one kid because we both are very scheduled to keep our respective children entertained.
I was thinking that was part of your point in highlighting how it’s easier to hang out with families with a lot of children who rely on siblings to entertain each other.
I wonder if a piece of the intense-parenting puzzle isn't social and individual guilt-tripping of working women, such that they have to compensate and also be supermom in order to 'justify' a career. The have-it-all principle.
Hoop Dreams was filmed over 30 years ago and documents how a couple black kids in the ghettos of Chicago are literally scouted by elite Catholic HS coaches. Theyre scouted during literal pickup street basketball games on courts with no nets sometimes. Much of it was filmed while the crack wars were still raging and setting record homicide numbers in the US. The kids who got the scholarships to elite catholic schools honestly had more on the line than when they were getting recruited for college. Avoiding the gang infested local public HS had much more of a lasting impact on their life than whether they played college ball at a crappy D3 or a D1.
But regardless the stakes were still extremely high in the 80s whether or not stupid travel leagues conned people into believing they could magically make their mediocre kids. Athletes are both born and made but even the made factors aren't as malleable as ppl think. Our personalities are pretty much set in stone by age 6. We can change and grow but researchers can identify with amazing accuracy the personality traits that kids will have at 18 based on a single day of observing and talking to them in kindergarten.
And that matters bc even putting aside innate physical or mental gifts even the skills that are produced through intense practicing or studying are massively influenced by the psychological profile that is already set by age 6. Unless you want to get outright abusive and insanelt ly controlling you can't force a kid to practice to the extreme level it would take to give a physically ungifted kid a realistic chance getting a college scholarship for sports.
Funny thing is, in terms of crime and whatnot, I think most communities now are safer than when I was growing up (in the 60s-70s), yet parents are terrified to let their elementary-school age kids leave the house alone. When I was that age we all walked to school (and sometimes bitched about having to, but not because we were afraid of being kidnapped).
Not to be the "it's all housing" guy this week, but I suspect that built environment affects things a lot. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s in a subdivision built in the early-to-mid 70s. It was probably one of the earlier truly dendritic/cul-de-sacy neighborhoods in our area and it would've counted as exurban when it was built.
The effect of this is that the streets were wide and encouraged drivers to speed on the street. The larger lot sizes also meant that we had fewer neighbors our age to randomly meet and play with, and also meant that the nearest public park was relatively far away (like a half hour walk at least and involving crossing at least 1 and I think 2 4-lane 45-mph arterials). Contrast this with even early postwar suburbs that tended to have smaller lots (even if they were much bigger than what you'd see in a traditional town/city), narrower streets, more gridlike street networks if not outright grids, and therefore more people and more stuff in walking or biking distance.
The effect of all that is that (1) children growing up in this environment have less *ability* to go and be unstructured because there's less they can physically get to on their own and (2) parents rightly fear their kids getting run over at least as much as they fear other dangers. The latter overall level of fear might or might not still be too high, but the fact of the matter is that big cars (and cars are getting bigger) traveling at high speed are a big danger to kids. I do remember from experience that one main reason I didn't go and play with the neighborhood kids is that for the longest time there just weren't any--except for a brief when I was in 4th and 5th grade when 2-3 new families moved in, everyone within walking distance was either much older than me or much younger. And those families moved out soon after.
Now, how many people does this affect? I don't know. But I can tell you that the overall trend has been towards less-dense, more dendritic street networks, and that the Sun Belt--where the growth has been--has gone in for this style of development more. So whether or not this is the main factor, it can't have helped.
Isn't the benefit of dendritic and cul-de-sac development over grid-structured development that the *volume* of traffic is much lower on the dendrites because there's no through-traffic? AIUI Culs-de-sac are traditionally considered desirable places to have kids playing outside.
The dendritic layout creates a hierarchy of car traffic from the cul de sac to the arterial. The cul de sac itself is safe, but the progressively higher traffic roads towards the subdivision entry are increasingly dangerous and then the collector road servicing the subdivision is an absolute no-go zone. If you are lucky, the subdivision has a small internal park or playground, but the elementary school, other parks, shops, etc. likely require traveling on the collector.
In a streetcar suburb style grid, children can use low-traffic residential streets parallel to the arterials to get anywhere, including school and Main Street shops.
Exactly. And because the houses in dendritic-designed neighborhoods tend to be on such large lots, the number of places to go and people to meet (i.e. kids your age) within walking/biking distance and without crossing or walking down the collector tends to be low. I have cousins who grew up in Atlanta's northern suburbs in a truly dendritic (I checked the map this time), large-lot development built in the 1990s and there was, like, one other kid their age who lived remotely nearby and the only place kinda within walking distance to go was a clubhouse for the subdivision (which was basically always empty, even though we always went in the summer--I know, Atlanta in the summer--and the clubhouse had a pool). Also, this neighborhood had very spotty sidewalk coverage, especially at that time, so you might have to walk on the shoulder of the collector.
I grew up less than 12 miles from where I live now but my more central neighborhood has a walkability score of 89 and there are many kids living within a block of us at almost every age. The neighborhood that I grew up in had a walkability score of 14. I had the same amount of freedom but I didn't use it much since most of my friends houses weren't in easy walking or biking distance without going onto main roads. I did walk by myself to the local pool but that meant walking along a lot of streets without sidewalks and across major roads. My daughter has about 10 kids from her high school who live within two blocks and she can walk to 3 different parks within six blocks from us including one with a swimming beach. She is also less than five blocks from several coffee shops and stores. She just has a lot more to do with her freedom!
Sorry to double-post, but this is a separate point: Much of this is also a function of larger lots/houses, as that reduction in density mechanically makes it harder for kids to find things to do within a radius they can get to on their own. Even bikes don't help that much because especially in elementary and middle school, kids' bikes can't go as fast as adults'. So dendritic street network or no, the newer form of suburbia reduces children's opportunity to be independent.
And while it is true that rural areas have low density (or at least can have it; there is of course the historic pattern of having a dense, walkable village/town where rural folks live and work the surrounding fields) that has historically been tempered with long-standing ties to the area. People moving to a new-build large-lot suburb don't have the deep family, religious, and general community connections to their neighbors that historically prevailed in rural areas in the past.
(Edited to add stuff because I accidentally saved early)
Yes, except that the street width (which encourages speeding) and increasing size of cars over time negates that.
Also, reviewing the map of my neighborhood, it was actually only quasi-dendritic--connected enough to have some through traffic, not connected enough to serve as a useful grid. Worst of both worlds. (What confused me was that there are a few cul-de-sacs (culs-de-sac?) in the area.) I'd say that geometry is probably more common than true dendritic.
Yes, but Kareem appears to be contrasting this form of development with predecessor grid-based development, arguing that the latter was more kid-friendly.
It’s a collective action problem. Each cul-de-sac means no outsiders drive through *that* street, but also means that residents of this neighborhood and the ones on the far side all do slightly further distances of driving. The few through streets end up with a lot more traffic, and everyone does more driving total than they would on a grid system, so there’s more congestion, unless all the streets are widened, which then encourages faster driving, especially at times when there is no congestion.
My daughter and her friends walked to school without adults and supervising younger siblings from age 8 onward and we live in an area with a lot of visible poverty and some street crime. It was easier to do because it is dense enough that they could meet up with each other on the block and walk the rest of the way there. I sometimes walked with them but mostly to hang out and get some exercise.
I think the best we can do is model the behavior we want - prisoners dilemma be damned. Our daughter is seven. We've decided we won't participate in any sports league that holds Sunday games. Kindof like how we grew up in the 90s. And we won't do any year around sports.
Obviously we'll see how this shakes out; if there's incredible pull (i.e., she becomes ~ obsessed with a sport, and really really wants it) we'll probably bend but as of now, that's what we're doing knowing she might be at a disadvantage later. My wife played D1 tennis and was really pushed as a kid - so this is also a bit of a reaction to her just not wanting that for our kid. TBD.
Great comment. No kids here, and the amount of planning and managing I see all my friends with kids do is shocking compared to the amount of involvement my parents did when I was a kid. I played soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring, and tennis in the summer. I never traveled to a tournament once that required an overnight stay. And this might seem like emotional neglect now, but they missed far more games of mine than they watched in person. The sport was my thing, not a thing they had to be a cheerleader for.
Except for my sister, every single one of my friends with kids does the travel team thing, with weekends and holidays consumed with tournament play. Approximately 0% of them are good enough to play in college.
That's it. If parents didn't feel they had to give up every ounce of their own freedom, and trusted that kids could play and manage without constant oversight, being a parent wouldn't be so overwhelming and expensive. Totally agree with you.
From my own personal experience, having a large family has less to do with the actual realities of parenting (because those come later) and more to do with how much you as a person of child-bearing age personally freak out at the possibility of adding an additional kid to the mix.
Because my wife and I knew several families that had 4, 5, 6+ kids, we didn't freak out when our surprise 3rd kid came. A vasectomy was talked about, but the prospect of 4 kids was not frightening enough to spur me on to get one. Then several years later my wife was surprise pregnant with #4. I booked the vasectomy immediately. It turned out that 4 was our limit.
My point is that the more that each individual person has a hard limit of what number of kids they want to have, the less kids will be born. Vasectomies and tubectomies might be uncomfortable, but well worth it for the peace of mind of solidifying your limit. Birth control is well liked by some women, but many (like my wife) don't like how it makes them feel - and this can result in extra kids (we had originally talked about having just 2).
These decisions are made on the front end, not the back. Most of us have no idea what we are getting ourselves into - my kids are all teens and young adults now. We made these decisions back when we were barely adults.
Thanks, Susan. I invoked the survivorship curve exactly to show what the “more kids/less parenting” motto can lead to. Low parental investment makes sense when you treat the loss of kids (or frog eggs) as an acceptable outcome.
It’s a strategy that also discounts the woman’s investment via pregnancy and childbirth, so it appeals to certain kinds of men. Men who look at kids and say, “easy come, easy go” are not themselves taking the risk of dying in childbirth.
This all is pretty much the same point I made a few weeks ago.
Basically, the take was that it's a combination of our "K-selection" strategy and the emergence of an enormous middle class. Our evolutionary hardwiring as social animals is maladapted to measure success against our neighbors/peers instead of the straight definition of having successfully reproduced at the replacement rate.
Agrarian/pre-industrial societies face a brutal survivorship curve, so K-selection means having a bunch of kids and then investing in the ones who survive childhood. There was little hope of graduating to the next level (nobility/bourgeoisie), so you just focused on getting those survivors to adulthood.
Industrialization changed the definition of success to "a decent factory job", which was better than toiling away on a farm. And modern medicine increased the survivorship rate, so of course absolute births plummeted to just about the replacement rate.
But they also created a large middle class whose next rung to aspire to was college. And now that we have widespread college education and an information-age economy, we have this enormous glut of people, and their definition of success is unreasonably high: the upper middle class. A globalized and social-network-ized media environment puts this lifestyle front and center to an ever-growing middle class.
Currently, the only way to get a kid from the middle to the upper-middle class is a combination of luck and a LOT of investment. An interesting note from sociology studies is that regardless of number of children, couples tend to spend the same overall proportion of income on them; so when MC couples are looking at a fixed budget for investing in their childrens' success, it's obvious that the best way to maximize entry to the UMC is to put all your eggs in one basket.
One final note is that UMC fertility is conspicuously *at or above replacement*! When parents don't have resource constraints on raising more UMC-eligible children, they simply keep rolling the dice on as many children as they want to have. Thus, my suspicion is that if we can unlock UMC-level abundance for the middle class, then they'll go back to having more kids.
Your last point is both one of the more optimistic and one of the more plausible. Only quibble is class status is always relative - once UMC abundance is common, it's not UMC anymore. I am Noah Smith-pilled on the likelihood of a near-in age of abundance, but I still think there's something that needs to happen culturally to get TFR back up. Not that I know what that is.
To build on Noah's article today, I think it's possible that what we're actually seeing with TFR is a dependence on energy abundance. Perhaps when we hit the combustion plateau he describes, it subverted families' expectations of continued relative growth.
RE class status, I think that the critical point about creating "UMC abundance" isn't that it "[won't be] UMC anymore" but that the abundance itself is what matters WRT unlocking TFR.
Right now, there are a lot of different product categories where relative status markers create a false impression of underabundance. Lamborghinis may be insanely expensive to make, but it's not all that hard to make Audi-shaped sedans relative to a Ford Focus-shaped one; and yet, most sedans on the market aren't as sexy as the Audi.
However, what we HAVE seen over the last several generations of the Focus (and its predecessor, the Taurus) is that an ugly-ass boxy car got slightly less boxy and eventually ended up mildly sexy, relative to the Audi which just *stayed sexy*. Technology is slowly closing a lot of these kinds of gaps, and perhaps that plateau Noah mentioned has had something to do with the recent slowness.
In the pessimistic view, perhaps we'll just ALWAYS be on a status-marker treadmill that keeps us trapped with low TFR. Even if everyone gets Audis, the Audis will just be considered the new Focus, and everyone will pine after the ultra-rich's Lamborghinis.
But in the optimistic view, even though the status markers matter, objective quality-of-life ALSO matters -- tastes vary, but the Audi is objectively sexier than the Focus, and is objectively a nicer car. Like that study about the "$70k income happiness threshold", there'll be some objective point at which people say "Yeah, sure, this is enough, I'm going to go back to having babies". And so, if we can create enough abundance that the marginal cost difference between an "Audi lifestyle" and a "Focus lifestyle" is minuscule, then people will start living like Audi owners and have kids whenever they feel like it.
IOW, if we can reduce the *absolute* level of investment required to make a "UMC-eligible" kid, by a combination of reducing the cost level of a "UMC lifestyle" and making all the inputs to the UMC kid likewise abundant, then maybe that's the recipe for recovering TFR.
Sorry, I got a bit muddled there and misspoke. I was specifically imagining basically a combined class of the UC ("millionaires and billionaires") down to the segment of the UMC where TFR flips *above* replacement, wherever that actually happens to be.
The important aspect here isn't the specific *point* of the phase change, it's that there clearly does seem to be *A* point in the prosperity regime where a phase change happens. IE, where people are so well-off that they stop giving a shit about whether they're having too many children to sufficiently give them a shot at what I was calling the "Audi lifestyle".
And from there, the question becomes whether the point is objective or relative -- or rather, since we know it's probably a combination of BOTH, to what extent either aspect is true of TFR in the high-prosperity regime. Because the closer we are to "objective", the more hope we can have for a future where we might sprint to that level of abundance and head off the apparent demographic collapse facing us.
And the further we are from that... IE the closer we are to a hedonic treadmill where the newest Audi Lifestyle keeps becoming the next Focus Lifestyle, well, that also informs us about what other kinds of societal changes we might need to focus on instead of an abundance agenda.
Basically, IMO the entire exercise here is to determine whether the abundance agenda could actually solve TFR, or if there's something else we should be focusing on.
The actuarial tables published by the Social Security Administration show this is a false choice. Fewer than 1 in 1000 of 5-15 year olds dies per annum. Even dead best parents enjoy great survival odds for their offspring.
My son is 16, just finishing his sophomore year of HS. He played rec baseball for several years and I was a coach and active participant in running the league for that time. What Matt says about travel teams being about making money is spot on. In my neighborhood league, they even expanded the number of travel teams per age group as demand increased. They just wanted to get more people paying and there were plenty of parents of mediocre players who didn't want to be left out of saying their kid was on a travel team. One thing not mentioned here is that not only do the non-travel teams get worse and less fun for the kids, but they get less fun for the parents too. Kids who are decent at playing tend to have more involved parents. Those more involved parents are more likely to volunteer with coaching and management of the league. When those kids go to travel, you have fewer parents available to help with the other teams and that makes doing it much harder. We even ran into a situation where participation in non travel teams was getting so low we had to band together with other rec leagues for competition and created de facto free travel leagues (!). I'm glad to say I resisted my son's requests and we never joined a travel team. I hope this is another bubble ripe for popping at some point.
Did year round travel baseball from basically 8-16. And all it got me was a blown out elbow and the vague sense that I wasted a decent amount of my childhood doing something that never really paid off.
Of course I made life long friends and learned all the normal lessons of youth sports, but hard to imagine not learning those if I just played locally my entire childhood.
Baseball in particular seems like the worst end of the cost/benefit curve for youth sports. The majority of time is spent actively sitting or standing in one place *by design.*
There's a reason South Park chose baseball for its youth sports lampoon.
The standing around part is not really the issue (if anything it's good to try to get Generation ADHD to focus on something like that), it's more that baseball can be really hard and pitching is an injury factory.
I wish that youth baseball had a rule that you have to rotate pitchers every inning. Gives more kids the chance to pitch, while also significantly decreases the pressure and chance for injury.
Honestly I’d like to see these guidelines be more conservative. 95 pitches for a 13 year old on 4 days rest is very aggressive. IMO velocity training is the bigger danger for injuries than high pitch counts but still being more conservative with pitch counts would surely help.
I earnestly think that being bored is an important life skill that is being lost, or maybe has already been lost. Constant stimulation is not good for us.
It is and like Ben, I played travel baseball. For that reason, I almost don't want my almost 5 year old to take to much to baseball - selfishly I don't want to give up my entire life for travel baseball and I'm not sold it's a good thing for him anyways.
I feel the exact same way about my travel experience. It was great, but me and almost everyone I played with had no beyond-high school playing career. I could have gotten a similarly beneficial experience from rec ball which was far cheaper and didn't involve like 6 hours (!!) in the car a week.
Baseball I think is especially pernicious in that there seems to be at least some evidence that for pitchers its leading to more arm problems. In other words in the past, kids were more likely to be playing a variety of sports whereas today you're more likely to get kids only playing the one sport. But for pitchers that leads to a lot more stress on elbows and arms generally and result is more injury. https://www.jshoulderelbow.org/article/S1058-2746(23)00116-7/fulltext
I just listened to a podcast on this topic last night, and "blown-out elbow" was specifically discussed. As an aging adult with chronic tennis elbow, I'm sorry you had to endure this as a kid!
As someone who grew up where travel sports weren’t much of a Thing I’ve always wondered what the driver is for their adoption. It seems like such a UMC striver thing to do, but UMC strivers as a class presumably make all their money in white collar professions and as a class are aware that aspiring to play Div 1 sports in college (which should not be the end of anyone’s career aspirations) let alone professionally, are not realistic aspirations for a supermajority of individuals.
In that respect the disconnect or missing part of the adoption story seems like the bootstrapping part of this: how is it even individually welfare-enhancing to spend a ton of cash and waste all your weekends for a marginal boost towards an unrealistic aspiration that (assuming it maxes out at college because it usually requires borderline insanity or ludicrously improbable talent to aspire to play professionally) doesn’t even reflect a terminally useful career path?
I’m going to expand my answer in another post but I really think the answer here is college admissions.
Even if you’re a kid has no chance at going to the Olympics, having multiple sports on your college resume is giving you a big leg up in getting into the college you want to go to. And notice I didn’t mention anything about scholarships. This is purely padding the resume stuff.
One of the very correct pushbacks against getting rid of testing and SAT was people pointing out that all you’re going to is make it easier, not harder, for rich kids to game the system. The pushback focused on stuff like college essays but the more likely avenue is stuff like sports participation. I also think this is a case where the revenue generating sports of basketball and football warps this conversation. Those sports have a disproportionate number of black athletes often from disadvantaged backgrounds. I think as a result it creates a perception that sports is leveler, when in fact for the vast majority of sports it’s the opposite.
Yup. It’s also why parents maniacally push their kids in cello and yearbook and pay for the stupid “volunteering” safaris.
Can we just base admissions on scholastic aptitude please? Scores, grades, and any other evidence of intellectual prowess (math team counts). We’ll have fairer admissions and happier kids.
I've known people who graduated from places like Yale and don't like to talk about it specifically because they got in because of sports like tennis and felt they basically jumped the queue academically.
Ramey, Garey, and Valerie A. Ramey. "The Rug Rat Race." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2010, no. 1 (2010): 129-176.
See this article which argues that time spent parenting teens went way up for white college-educated parents in the late 1990s as the large millennial birth cohort was aging into college years and thereby created more competition for admission.
I suspect an additional factor was that after several states banned affirmative action in the late 90s, many state universities switched to 100% holistic admissions (as compared to previously admitting much of the class via GPA+SAT alone) and SCOTUS blessed this change in Grutter. This meant that being "well rounded" went from a particular strategy to a universal one and sports went from "you might get a scholarship" for Gen X to practically an admissions requirement for millennials.
This is just a weird claim that sports help substantially. I was a mediocre high school athlete who played for 3 years, and still went to Stanford because you know I was actually good at school. I think people are kidding themselves if they think “played two varsity sports at a B- level” is a good strategy for getting into their desired college.
You're missing the point. It doesn't help at the "B- level", it helps at the "A+" level.
If Stanford is looking at 2 different A+ students, the one who does two varsity sports will look more well-rounded and highly-motivated than the one who spent all that time in the library.
Fair or not, that's the calculus that a lot of administrators leaned into.
As a former coach I suspect it helps at the B- level as well, particularly at small schools. Lots of marginally academic students get into small schooks that they could not qualify for if they play a major sport (football, basketball, baseball and increasingly soccer).
At the NAIA they can even get some scholarships/grants and in the NCAA I suspect they get a leg up on some financial aid.
Granted, taking up rowing to help with college is definitely an ivy league thing but being good at a popular sport still helps in some instances.
I think the point is that admissions to top level colleges is a very "on the margin" issue. Which means you're correct to note that if you're grades and test scores are mediocre but you play varsity sports, you're probably not getting into Stanford (or Harvard or Yale etc.).
But reality is even if you limit applications to those with GPA of 4.0 or higher and SAT scores in 90% percentile, you're still going to have way more applicants than slots available. Which is where the extra stuff comes in and specifically sports that are really only open to kids with parents of means.
"I think people are kidding themselves if they think 'played two varsity sports at a B- level' is a good strategy for getting into their desired college. "
Maybe. But for a very long time, the high school I attended published where each student attended college. For at least a decade, the only students who attended Princeton had a sports scholarship.
As Colin mentioned, I was fairly close to the student he described academically and I didn’t get into Stanford when I applied around 15 years ago. I’m curious when you went to Stanford.
Applied and was wait listed to Georgetown. I actually ended up eventually getting accepted but only after I had sent my acceptance letter to William & Mary.
Point being I was almost the definition of the marginal "last one in". I basically found out later kind of randomly that if I had played a high school sport, even as a benchwarmer, I would have been accepted first time round without being wait listed at all.
Worth mentioning as I have some personal experience with this.
I think its less about college admissions and more about the people doing this are competitive. I work with a decent number of people who went to state schools and expect their kids to go to their alma mater. They still get into travel sports because they are competitive, want their kids to be competitive, and to win.
I suspect most members of the UMC find it a lot easier to brag to their neighbors about what awesome things their kids are doing than about how much money they're making. The latter is gauche whereas the former supposedly reflects well on you as a parent, not to mention your awesome genes.
For sure. But UMC with kids has got to be 15% of the population with kids tops. This phenomenon goes way further than that. I have some very blue collar extended family (that do make decent money as plumbers) who are deep into the travel leagues with their kids.
Important distinction--sports can be an extracurricular like any other OR if you're really good, can totally change the odds of getting in. And not just basketball and football--we're talking about cross country runners 200 points below the average SAT score at Princeton (or wherever) getting in. The teams aren't entirely made up of people below the normal academic standard but it's common practice at a kind of shocking number of places and sports. Actually kind of hard to say why these schools do it though I guess there was that NYT article about how Wesleyan got a lot of donations when they started winning their conference in football
It’s not difficult to get admitted to college, in general, and I don’t think too many youth sports add to your resume, SAT or not. I just sent off a pair of kids and I don’t know that it was even part of the application, let alone a criterion.
Again I think we need to distinguish between all schools and elite schools. As Matt notes repeatedly (and correctly) most people who attend colleges are not attending the highly selective schools.
But I think the point is there is enough upper middle class and upper class parents who are desperate to get their kids into elite schools that it ends up having knock on effects in other walks of life. And one of those knock on effects is how youth sports operate.
I think one thing Matt is getting at is the people and kids probably most harmed by this "pay for play" system are the kids least likely to go to college at all.
Because it is not about the unrealistic expectation of a college scholarship. That's a misconception.
It is about:
- striver parents wanting their kid to have a chance to play high school sports, which probably carries some amount of boost/ prestige to the kid at that time, at least in American cultural folklore
- competitive parents who want their kid to play higher competition, tougher games with other similarly motivated kids and coaches rather than the sort of lackadaisacal local rec league where some portion of the kids are unskilled / forced to be there despite hating sports
- conformist parents who are pushed into it so that their kid isn't "the only one not on a team" who do then end up creating their semblance of community and interaction via the team and parents
I did the competitive travel soccer thing and my mom did not approve. My Dad took me through it (assistant coach for a while, took me to all the games) because I was super competitive and I loved it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed a rec league because I would have been so much better than everyone else. They didn’t let me go to an additional training program on top that a lot of girls did aimed at getting scholarships bc they actually didn’t want me to get a scholarship- my dad was a college athlete, and as he says ‘they own you’
yep - a collective action problem. I do think the biggest problem though is when you end up with multiple layers of travel teams and even the kids who are good play travel instead of just the few kids who are outstanding
It's hard to get a scholarship for sports that many kids play. It's easier to get one if you choose a less popular sport like tennis.
But what you are saying about making varsity teams is true. In a big school it's hard to make the varsity team at all let alone get significant playing time. This is actually why many parents choose private or parochial schools--less competition in sports. Of course this costs a ton of money too..
Consider also that apart from actually getting a scholarship, colleges do select for kids who excel in extracurriculars and having lots of varsity letters helps your application.
It also gives you as a parent status among other parents as having a kid on varsity squad.
Tennis scholarships are pretty hard, given the fact that teams are just smaller and it requires years of hard work and lots of lots of money to be good enough.
Rowing is something that has a decent amount of roster spots, isn't super expensive, and you only really need to do for maybe 5-6 years to be good enough (it really just depends on build).
At my daughter's public high school there were about 10 students with commitments to play college sports. One was the start of my daughter's water polo team, one was a shotput thrower, one cross country, three were ultimate frisbee players and the rest were all rowers. This is likely because Seattle has a lot more rowers and ultimate frisbee players than most towns. But I was surprised how many rowers we had for a fairly low income public high school. I was also shocked that playing college ultimate frisbee was a thing!
Parent status and/or parents living vicariously is definitely a thing. (FWIW, also, it's really hard to get a D1 scholarship in tennis due to international recruiting. You'd be better off with a true esoteric sport like crew or diving or something, probably.)
I honestly don't think the PMC parents who are the main drivers of the status competition know anything else other than to be extremely purposeful about piling up the skills, the credentials, the resumes, the profiles that supposedly set them apart in the market. This was the strategy they followed in their own lives and careers so they know no different than to get their kids into the same treadmill early in life.
If everyone else is shelling out big money to purchase an advantage for the other kids, what will they do with their own?
I played in travel leagues in a suburb the 1990s when they were first becoming a thing. The cultural class divide back then was that the working class were more sports-focused than the UMC. The one way UMC values were expressed was putting your kids in soccer (which the children of high-achieving immigrants played) vs. hockey/baseball, which tended to be more culturally working class. If anything, the working class was a lot more focused on college sports since the UMC didn't really have a local college sports fandom.
Got it. I was using PMC as this professionalization of youth sports leagues is a distinctive quirk of how managerial professionals have learned to approach life.
My experience both growing up and seeing this as an adult is that it’s much more of a phenomenon among well off but not well educated parents. For many people in that group doing something that specifically isn’t education focused is the point.
That being said iirc certain sports are played because they do make it easier to get into an elite private school eg lacrosse.
The reintroduction of test scores into college admissions (SATs, ACTs) may help this a bit by reducing the weight of sports and other extracurriculars in admissions decisions.
The admissions scandals of a few years ago involved fake sports participation in part because elite schools shifted from grades and test scores to a variety of metrics that were even easier to buy and fake.
ETA: the admissions-driven pressure to have some sports on your application is not limited to cases involving Harvard and fencing. Lots of parents want their kid to go to a *better* school, at whatever level of better that is. And if they consult the high school counselors, they will hear that listing sports activity increases their kids chance of getting into a better school.
I wish that were true, but I doubt it is. The travel sports thing has become so big that I don't think many people even consciously connect it with college any more. Most familes participating have no elite college goals
Uffda. I know the baseball draft goes like 37 rounds or something, but I would think the success rate of DII draftees at converting baseball into a gainful career is... not high.
That is unusual, especially in elementary and middle school, but baseball might be different. It is not at all popular where I live. I am more familiar with soccer, hockey, swimming.
The problem is, I think the instinct for seeking well-rounded applicants is fundamentally a good one.
Of course, "I spend every waking hour in travel sports" is not well-rounded. As an admissions officer, I don't know how you incentivize "you dabbled in sports enough to challenge yourself in something you're not naturally talented in, and enough to develop good habits, but you didn't let it monopolize your life either".
Why, though? Why should piano playing and oil painting prowess make someone a better chemical engineering student? Why should those things be relevant to one’s opportunity to pursue chemical engineering at the college of their choice?
Well roundedness is important to general life success and fulfillment. It’s just not clear to me why a college should care. I would love to see colleges step back from serving as nannies. At 18, you’re responsible for your own personal development. The school is responsible for teaching you academic material and giving you opportunities to apply it.
No matter how into chemistry a high school kid is, they will run into novel chemistry-related challenges as a chemical engineering student. Having a more diverse set of life experiences is going to be associated with a demonstrated propensity for successfully tackling those challenges.
Ultra-narrow-focus one-trackers are, in my anecdotal experience, prone to brittleness, insular failure, and burnout.
>> Having a more diverse set of life experiences is going to be associated with a demonstrated propensity for successfully tackling those challenges.
I doubt it. It’s the kid with the scientific aptitude who’d succeed best. Combined with correct academic habits, of course, which could be assessed by a competent admissions process.
The evidence is on Sharty's side in this. I no longer have jstor access, but this page links to several of the relevant studies, and breaks down their implications:
P.S. I think it’s ultimately a problem if k-12 education. Bright kids are forced to think for themselves and work hard in school way to rarely so you have to use very poor proxies like how they meet the challenges of an athletic competition.
Obviously if you had to pick a single predictor of college success, you would use K-12 educational success, but I think this is a false dilemma. Conditioned on already using K-12 educational success (and other academic-adjacent measurements like the SAT), I just disagree with your assessment that athletic hard work (c.f., athletic success) is a low-value predictor.
It wouldn't surprise me if many admissions officers unconsciously resent the nerdy STEM students and prefer the more "well-rounded" types because the latter remind them more of themselves.
Colleges are probably looking for the most impressive future graduates, who are not just super talented in engineering but have a thriving hobby of painting they showcase in galleries, or whatever.
Well, isn't part of the idea that colleges want students who are well-placed for general life success and fulfillment? That makes them look better and it also benefits other students to be on campus with such students.
Thank you. Precisely. Only academics should matter. College is supposed to be an institution of higher learning. Everything else is or ought to be ancillary.
But the boundaries just aren't that clear. Even elite universities and liberal arts colleges have serious art, music, and dance programs. Additionally, they would usually like to have a functional school papers, field completely-staffed student governments, etc., have academic elements.
An art program should examine the candidate's art portfolio, a music program should hear them perform, a dance program should watch them perform etc. Academic programs similarly should assess their academics. You don't recruit nba players holistically. Students of history or chemistry are no different. Assess them based on the relevant knowledge and skiils. How well you can throw and catch a ball (or how far you can jump etc.) has nothing to do with your ability to solve equations or read and analyze texts. It's not rocket science (but the same principle applies when it is!).
Expect just about every university outside the states doesn’t participate in the classist nonsense that’s non-academic admissions criteria, and hasn’t for generations (if ever). I don’t know what “itt tech” means, but I know what universities are about, and it’s called academics.
I don’t think that’s right. College is a time of personal development, with academics being the focal aspect of that, but not the only aspect. In any case, I would rather attend, and would rather my kids attend, and would rather teach at, a place where the people are good at school but have other interests too, rather than a place where the people are laser focused on academics and studying and don’t have outside interests.
Oxford and Cambridge have lots of strong student traditions, including athletic ones. As far as I know all of these are considered hobbies.* Their admissions are 100% academic merit, and to my knowledge the school doesn’t helicopter student life either. I am all for genuine school tradition and school spirit and student having a full life, running their own clubs and organizations and competing in sports against each other and rival schools. Selecting them to produce this artificially in a way micromanaged by an ever growing admin class isn’t the way to go. Concentrate bright young people in one place and challenge them academically. They’ll do the rest best if the old profs stay out of all non academic matters (and the old admins interfere to the bare minimum).
Huh? There is a difference between a few students who get athletic scholarships to play a specific sport and the vast majority who are the rest. If you have a good SAT and apply to Bama you will most likely get in. That is not the case for Harvard.
It wouldn't have to be every school or state in America to make a difference.
I'm not sure these big public schools really use them as much anyway. When you have 20,000 undergrads your athletes are a pretty small portion of your enrollment.
Good colleges don’t care whether you played travel sports. My college counselors knew this, and told me as much. For kids at elite high schools or in elite milieus (like the one I grew up in), travel sports was the one thing I did in high school that wasn’t a means to getting into college. Without it, my high school life would’ve been MORE focused on college and the admissions rate race. This is backwards.
I'm curious what your school's counselors thought was important if you were competing with many other 4.0 students from across the country in admissions. They may have (potentially correctly) assumed that a 4.0 from your school carried more weight than a 4.0 from a less elite public school.
They stressed having good admissions essays, and doing interesting extracurriculars (travel sports isn’t interesting). And having incredible grades and test scores. As you say, they correctly assessed that I was only ever competing with other prep school kids. They also followed a rigid internal ranking system. I wasn’t to apply early to Harvard or Yale where I wouldn’t get in (but 10 of my classmates with better grades would) and throw away my chance of getting into a school like Dartmouth early when it was harder to get in regular. So that’s what I did.
Anything that made you “stand out” is what they would tell us. It was always vague. I was on the school improv troupe (LA is a weird place) and I did a good amount of community service. I also played classical guitar. Varsity and travel soccer were my boring extracurriculars. I get tired just thinking back to high school.
No. Travel sports was well out of control before schools started their experiment of dropping admissions tests. A few realities at play:
1) Even with tests, kids with perfect grades and scores get rejected.
2) Sports are a status thing among parents and possibly to a lesser extent the kids. My kid doesn’t really do sports. But all other parents seem to be able to talk about is their kids’ sports exploits.
The financialization of every once good thing in American cannot fail. It can only be failed.
Joking aside, it does seem like this sometimes. More and more aspects of society these days appear to be an intense dance between status spending (on the one hand) and the efforts of firms only too happy to supply the market for status spending. Look at what people spend on health clubs, exercise gear and the like. Hiking is no longer a nice way to get exercise while you see the outdoors—it's a reason to spend $350 on hiking boots. And don't get me started on golf. And definitely don't get me started on cycling. One of my brothers (the childless one who does triathlons) dropped eight grand on a racing bike. He's a middle aged tech executive, not an Olympic hopeful.
I'm deeply neoliberal to the core, but I'll admit to also having a socialist inner voice that sometimes whispers "Government could be expanded by a lot because, let's face it, PMC Americans actually have more money than they know what to do with."
My other brother has a son who is a hockey player and, well, this is in a rather hockey-obsessed part of suburban Boston. So he built a hockey rink in his back yard.
It's funny, because you can sort of extend this to sporting events themselves. Because the phenomenon of extremely rich people getting box seats or sitting courtside is actually more recent than we think (Showtime Lakes I think is a big change in the culture here).
But for decades, attending baseball or football games in America or attending soccer games in places like England was considered a very working class way of spending your leisure time. Indeed, in England, there was a definite sense where if you were "middle class" you dare not say you're a fan of "the footy" let alone go to the game. It's striking to back to the 80s and see how Thatcher and advisors close to Thatcher talked about soccer and hear the absolute disdain in their voice*. Now granted, this was in part due to the very real hooliganism problem that existed. But it very clearly went beyond that to a kind of ugly class based disgust for anyone who goes to games.
Now? To bring back to America. My friend's dad was able to in 1969 on the day of the game go to Shea stadium, buy a ticket and attend a World Series game. He was a teenager at the time. Read that again. There's absolutely no scenario where that is happening today.
I really don't want to go full on "back in the good ole days" here. There is A LOT about the fan experience is wildly better than it used to be (see above regarding England and hooliganism. Going to a match involved the very real possibility of getting serious injured or even killed). But there is something really wrong to me about the fact we've made attending sporting events a pretty financially exclusive pursuit.
*If you read about the Hillsboroguh disaster, it's amazing how much class disdain and specific disdain for people who come from the city of Liverpool helped create the disaster in the first place, led to a very real cover up and led to some astonishingly awful news coverage that has warped popular conception of that event to this day. Look up The Sun newspaper and Hillsborough. You think Murdoch media is bad here, it's is miles worse in the UK.
I mean, there are more people and they’re richer, but there’s still only one World Series and sports fields aren’t getting any larger. Attendance at sub-professional apex sports like AAA ball and non-Div I college games is still dirt cheap.
Even accounting for the fact that World Series is the pinnacle sporting event, that is an incredible increase in price from 1969. Part of the story here is we are a richer country today which means more people have the financial means to attend this event. In addition, more people have cars which means you're expanding the pool of people who can physically attend the event. Lastly, plane tickets have famously dropped making it easier to fly in from out of town.
But even with all that, we're still talking about some pretty pricey tickets. No way you can charge that amount unless there has been a cultural change around going to sporting events. I think at this point, we can call box seats for the biggest sporting events possibly the ultimate example of "Veblen" goods.
Probably worth noting that box seats are ~ only purchased by businesses and they're only sold through season and / or stadium all packages (e.g., the mercedez benz box seats cover Falcons games but also every event the stadium hosts). I think it's the opposite of a "veblen" good in that those packages have ROIs associated with them and are negotiated pretty intensely.
Interesting set of statistics! Although for Veblen goods exemplars I'd guess that handbags beat box seats by a country mile. (Also, basically anything of or relating to high end watches.)
Ed.: on reflection, I think I'd need a clearer set of metrics t make that assessment because you specified the "biggest sporting events," where stuff really has gone absolutely nuts.
Right and to piggyback off of "David in Chicago" he's right to note that box seats for regular season games are often purchased by companies. So yes, if you factor in that the purchase of box seats for those games are really about sales and not really different from eating out at an expensive steakhouse in order to finalize a deal.
The VVIP section was in part about the booze issue; officially Qatar bans alcohol but if you're important enough or rich enough you can get it easily. But it also seems very clear to me that it was in large measure status; a way to show you're elite even among the elite. One of the details in this story that was hilarious is this "There is also, according to someone who has been in it, a suite at Al Bayt that, for some reason, boasts a retractable bed and a bathroom equipped with a shower." The qualifier "for some reason" is perfect because the writer is very clearly pointing out how utterly unnecessary this should be. What possible circumstance are you taking a shower at World Cup game (Qatar is famously quite hot, but these are climate controlled suites. If you can afford this, you're arriving in a fancy limo and have some climate controlled entrance). Like paying extra to have a shower in your suite is just pure "look at how rich I am" showing off.
Britain - I won't get into America, because I don't understand American class dynamics - used to have a really strong class divide in sports. Football (soccer) and rugby league were only for the working class; cricket had a class divide in where you sat (the pavilion was only for members, which were middle-class; the open seating was for the working class). Rugby union was middle-class (except in Cornwall and Wales). Horse racing included upper-class as well as middle and working, with various class-segregation on the seating and also in which events they went to. The truly upper-class sport is polo.
These divides are breaking down: a lot more middle-class people watch football which has pushed prices up at the top-level and pushed many working-class fans to lower level teams or to watching on TV. A lot of the former class-segregation at events that had it is just ticket-price segregation now - the only real exceptions are membership of some cricket clubs (especially the Marylebone Cricket Club) and the Royal Enclosures at some horse-racing, where people who are nouvelle riche and don't ape upper-class manners will be excluded regardless of how much money they have.
This is just a function of population growth (200m in 1969 vs. 333m today) and GDP growth. Both good things. It's the same with everyone bitching about skiing. Yes, I loved skiing for $50 a day and zero lines in the 90s but inflation adjusted that's still $125 in today's money and I'm paying $175 at the same mountains for WAY more terrain, 10x better lifts, and better grooming. All you got to do is manage the lines. Which can be done.
Marlins had the second worst attendance in all of baseball in 2023. The only team worse was Oakland and there are some very specific reasons related to the owners trying to move the team that is impacting things with the A's. https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance/_/year/2023/sort/allAvg
Regarding the Yankees. Yes, it is strictly true you can get tickets for $25. But take a look; those are standing room only seats. There are actually tickets for $35 for a Blue Jays game two weeks from that date, but again we're talking some of the very worst seats in the entire stadium. We're also talking about regular season baseball in July; 162 games and in middle of the hottest part of the year when people are most likely to be vacationing.
If you're point is that it is technically possible to attend a baseball game on the cheap then yes that is strictly true. But we're talking about the "edge" cases of a typical fan experience given your examples.
Yes. Attending sporting events has become massively more expensive...needless to say in ways that inflation measures don't catch.
Why?..
Algorithmic pricing models that are increasingly sophisticated in extracting top dollar from customers giving music performers, sports teams less incentive to cater to broad fan base and instead the top 10-20%. Disney is the same way.
Relatedly teams would prefer to sell only half their seats at much higher prices because the fan base that shells out more per ticket also spends much more when they get to the park.
All this creates a society that feels much less democratic over time where more people feel like losers.who are falling behind in their ability to afford things that used to even as median real incomes tick up.
And neoliberal economists can't figure out why people are unhappy.
This makes no sense. You can price discriminate by seat quality so you don't need to price on-average above demand. Said differently - every professional sports team is trying to fill their stadium. The ones that don't have demand problems even at $0 tickets.
I would gladly pay more than $350 on hiking boots if I could find good ones. Recently, my 30 year old Vasque leather hiking boots fell apart. Those boots took me through mountains and mud and creeks and ice and slides comfortably, easily, and safely. I was going to replace them with the same model, but the reviews said the model is now made much more cheaply in China rather than in Italy like they were when I bought them, and they aren't as good and don't hold up. So I got a cheaper pair of LL Bean boots and am sorely missing my old ones. Now that I am in my 50s, I definitely need boots for the ankle support. Suggestions for brands to look at welcome!
Avid hiker Nicholas Kristof (of NY Times fame) advocates wearing running shoes. I think he's on to something. He claims the light weight more than makes up for any drawbacks.
This seems plausible to me for dayhikes, but if you’re doing a multiday backcountry trip with a 70L pack or something I think the case for coddling one’s feet gets stronger while the marginal weight significance gets weaker.
Trail runners are the answer - more comfortable, lighter, and one underrated advantage is if they get wet, they dry very quickly compared to goretex boots. I would also try to downsize to a 60-65L pack and be careful about weight. I've done 10 days with a 35# pack, food and water included.
I mean maybe on perfectly flat and prepared trails but wear running shoes on any hikes over rocks (e.g., any probably interesting hike, any hike in Yosemite) and you're gonna bruise your feet within the first three hours.
Absolutely. Trail running shoes built for 100K and even longer ultras are absolutely fine for multi-day hiking trips with packs. I usually grab my oldest pair of trail shoes and throw them away at the end of the hiking trip. Topo Athletic trail shoes are my current go-tos.
They’re not boots per se but I got a pair of Hoka Speedgoats last year before a trip to Glacier and I love them. I was *very* skeptical but they’re grippy and comfortable (and I got the Gore Tex ones so they also keep my feet dry). Probably not BIFL, but better than the LL Bean ones of mine that also fell apart.
Unfortunately we were there with extended family who were not as into hiking as they had professed to be prior to the trip (they also live in MT, had the pass, and controlled driving 😕), so we were mostly limited to the not-super-long/elevated trails around Lake McDonald and Avalanche Lake. It was also May, some areas were still inaccessible, and there was quite a bit of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Still amazing though! Sadly, we did not see a sunset, I can only imagine how spectacular that was. Can't wait to go back and do it right!
I thought these were great for 8-10 hour hikes but they're not waterproof so wouldn't recommend them if expecting wet conditions. Very light, amazing cushion. I did wear them one day around a waterfall and grip was great but - again - not waterproof. More just recommending On Cloud here because you'd probably want the higher ankle models too.
Yeah. It's interesting. I only picked these up because (1) they're like $110 and why not but (2) I have three friends with plantar fasciitis and all three swear by them. They held up perfect for me on a couple big hikes.
Waterproof shoes hiking are a double edged sword- it also means they take FOREVER to dry should they get wet. I prefer trail runners, and if they get wet or I just get too lazy to take them off during a stream crossing, I take them off on the other side, shake them out vigorously, and them swap in a pair of dry socks. They will be totally dry very soon.
Yeah. I agree and why I don't hike in waterproof shoes. My experience is they also "feel" like they breath less and get hotter / sweatier (word?). I know Gore-Tex swears the material breaths the same and / or more but it's just not my experience.
I would definitely rather your brother spend 8 grand on a bike he likes (supporting a business in the process to boot) rather than having it be confiscated by the government and spent by Donald Trump on his own companies or Biden hiring regulators to stop building LNG terminals.
Regardless the inclination to try and rob people of money because they are spending it the “wrong way” on consumption that doesn’t fit your aesthetic preferences and not for any genuine revenue need is a dark impulse, which you should resist. Tall poppy stuff is dark.
But I wouldn't be robbing them. I'd be taxing them. You're not one of those dreary CATO-types who thinks taxation is theft, are you (please say "no")? And there *is* a "genuine revenue need." Interest rates are too damn high. And we realistically probably have to spend more on the military. And we need a public option dammit. And a universal child benefit. And one or two other things.
I'd just "feel better* about crimping the consumption of affluent Americans, is all. I certainly don't advocate doing so unnecessarily! (I did mention I'm a neoliberal. The socialist part is just a voice that whispers from time to time to keep my honest.)
I'm all for increasing government revenue to more closely match its expenditures, and would support mild expansion of a couple of the things you listed. But the whole "I'd just *feel better* about crimping the consumption of affluent Americans" is a puritanical impulse I'd encourage you to avoid.
And the ultimate solution, somehow, is find a way to open up the economy that has become too winner-take-all and consolidated at the top, expand the field of dreams that people see as realistic to pursue (pun intended).
To put it in classic American political terms, we've been in a period of Hamiltonian centralization, and need to course correct for a while towards more Jeffersonian decentralization.
Liberals get annoyed when conservatives wax nostalgic for earlier eras but
There was of course elite status competition in the 50s but it was mitigated by the fact that
Fewer people had the after tax income to wage it.
Access to things really was more democratic. GE executives played in the same corporate golf clubs that line workers did.
Mandatory military service even if just national guard promoted more mixing of classes and the reminder of a broader civilizational purpose than just getting your own kid into a top college.
Yes I know...50s bad for blacks, women, gays etc but can we reach middle ground her
All the iconic country clubs started in the late 1800s / early 1900s (e.g., Shinnecock, Winged Foot). Are you assuming that the GE Execs of the 50s were so *low* status that they couldn't get into the iconic clubs? I can't follow what a "corporate golf club" is here exactly. Is it a lower-tier private country club or a public golf course?
A lot of the big companies had their own recreational facilities that were primarily for executives but open to all employees..in a high MTR environment this was a way of funneling tax free compensation to workers.
GE Execs at that time were living in NY / Connecticut and they weren't playing that course when they came through town. Maybe regional VPs and / or plant management were. But that's like 2-3 levels down from the Exec. team. Same for GM and Ford in Detroit. Michigan has some of the best country clubs in the US for a reason.
Yeah, the lifestyle creep of fancy fitness activities is totally real. Luckily Planet Fitness for gyms and Sierra for outdoor goods are going strong, so you can opt out of the craziness if you want to.
I mean, I think he did most of the work himself, so, it probably wasn't some huge expense. Just thought I'd throw that in my original comment as it seemed to kinda humorously fit. Although in the case of my brother, I'd be massively surprised if in any way, shape or form it was a money-saver.
It's interesting- West Virginia is trying to crank its tourism bux by being attractive to travel teams now and building these huge sports plexes and it all feels like a big ol bubble that's going to pop about as soon as the ribbon gets cut on the new sportsplex they're building in Charleston.
I do think we need to cultivate recreational leagues, and honestly I don't know how, but one thing i've seen way more of lately is people being afraid to even try to do things they're not good at.
There was a post before that was like "I want a league where you and I both know our 6 year olds aren't going pro"
Part of my job involves building these types of facilities for a local government on the east coast and the arms race to build professional level facilities as a tax and tourism driver is completely nuts.
Some of them will be great community assets but a lot of them are wildly expensive niche use boondoggles that suck up limited public parks dollars
Thank you for this info. My city is considering a soccer stadium. Private funders approached the city about doing this and would be providing the bulk of the money to build, but I haven't heard much about maintenance. I will be asking questions!
My inclination would be to try to steal the top-prestige position that these expensive commercial travel teams from them.
Encourage pro sports and big-time college sports to run their own junior teams, but to fund them, so they are not pay-for-play for parents. These teams will be hard to get into and highly meritocratic (and oriented towards training future players not to winning U11 tournaments). Because they will be the highest-prestige teams, they will take away prestige from the commercial travel teams. That will mean that parents of children who have above-average athleticism and talent but not the elite levels that can get them into these "academy" teams are going to start pulling their kids out of these expensive commercial teams and putting them into cheaper local neighborhood teams where they can have fun, because they recognise they can't get into elite sport.
That's not going to kill the commercial travel teams, but it can create a bit of a spiral where their best players are being taken away by the academies and their weakest players, realising they're never going to get into the academies are pulling out for local teams. They're still going to get parents to pay at the younger end of the scale because they'll think this is the way to get into the academy, but if we can get rid of them from the middle school age groups, then it'll be a lot easier for kids to play sports for fun right through into high school.
Alternative approach: states ban their state colleges from giving scholarships to anyone who played on a travel team. That'd kill the travel teams dead.
Interesting idea, with some pleasing symmetry--with state colleges benefitting from public funding just as public schools do, there's something about it that neatly tracks.
Isn't this what European soccer (sigh, football) leagues do? Granted, it may just set up a bunch of infrastructure around getting kids into these academies though maybe an earlier reality check will be enough.
Re: the name of the sport. I moved to St Helens, an industrial town in the North of England, while in elementary school. The St Helens dialect and accent is not my native one, but I do know it well - 12 years in school there before I went off to uni will have that effect.
In St Helens, unless the context is clear, it's "soccer". Because "football" alone will usually mean rugby league football, not association football.
There are a bunch of annoying Brits who will say that they don't say "soccer". They're wrong, they do. What they mean is that "football" can refer to any of a bunch of sports, all of which are types of football: association football, rugby union football, rugby league football, Gaelic football, American football, Canadian football, Australian Rules football, and once the context is clear which football you're referring to, you just say "football".
Generally, it's not the first use of "soccer" that's annoying to Brits. It's the second. Once you've made it clear that you're talking about association football, you just call it "football". It grates in the same way that referring to someone by name and never saying "he" or "she" does. Most Brits don't analyse their own language use and can't explain why they get so annoyed by it.
I think it is. AIUI one drawback is that most of the academy kids will also not go pro and the academy’s intensive sports focus and weak academics mean that the “plan B” options that most of them will be forced to take are worse. Also the youth focus exacerbates shifting hypercompetitiveness farther down the age ladder.
It is, though the academies don't have to be full-time things: at younger ages, they're usually evenings and weekends rather than full-time. And the full-time ones are starting to get better academics in areas where they are competitive. I live in Manchester, and Manchester City has been the more successful club in the last decade or so. Manchester United's academy has been responding to losing some of the most talented 10-11 year olds by improving the academic side, trying to win over parents (the kids usually want to go to the club whose pro team is most recently successful).
As for the hypercompetitiveness, that's weird: the pro teams don't care about the actual results of U11 or U13 or even U15 matches. They do care about U18 and U23 to some degree, but a lot of the academies lose a lot of games. This is because they're much more interested in skills development for the players. They want good 23-year-old players to put into the pro team, not U15 league titles. The result is that competitive local teams (the equivalent of the travel teams) often beat the academies even though the academies have much better players - because the "travel teams" are trained to win now, and the academies are trying to develop players for the future.
It's the equivalent of training basketball players in fundamentals, so they learn how to beat a defender with a low-post move, rather than just bulling through with superior athleticism. That low-post move might take a year or two to master and result in conceding lot of turnovers until the player has mastered it - so a travel team wouldn't want to do that; they'd prefer them to just use their athletic talent to smash through, which is fine until that player is in NCAA Div I or the NBA and their opponent is equally athletic and they have no technique to beat them. Of course, the travel team doesn't really care about that - they'll leave that to the G-League coach to fix. They're more interested in their own results.
Getting rid of the win-now mentality for youth sports and replacing it with the idea of building skills is one of the things that the academies do. They play games mostly so the players learn how all the skills fit together, not in a hypercompetitive style (obviously, they prefer to win than to lose, but the players need to learn more than they need to win).
The weak academics are definitely the weak point of the system, though. One reason I'd like them to be run by colleges is that there's a better chance of reasonable-quality academics from a college that needs to prep kids to get through four years of college in order to retain eligibility, while a pro team really doesn't care.
This is fascinating, especially as regards the U-15 results. Honestly I’m very surprised that the talent selection effects don’t dominate what I would have (apparently incorrectly) expected to be the fairly limited scope of learnable / learned skill expression in any age cohort.
There's a tendency for the local teams to have physically bigger/stronger players while the academies have the more skilful players. At that age, it's hard for the academy players to run rings around the bigger/stronger players. You get to U19 (they changed that from U18 at some point since I was a kid myself: I forgot earlier) and the skill players reach a point of dominating. Also the refereeing gets better as you go up, so the bigger players can't bully the smaller ones as easily. Oh, and the academy's physical training really kicks in around 15-16 years old; they are suddenly so much fitter and faster than the other teams, which they weren't at 13-14.
Would it be better or worse, do you think, to have a grades requirement for participation in the academies? Requirements could be set anywhere--passing all classes, B- average, etc.
My first thought was that this seems good, and my second thought worried about kids who don't thrive in educational settings at all, but have true talent at sports, and almost any requirement threatens their ability to participate in the one area they thrive in.
I think any metric that used GPA rather than standarized test scores would be heavily gamed because neither the players nor the academy particularly wants it not to be.
I think the only way that works is if the organizations paying for it can exert massive levels of control over the players later in life. E.g. if you go to this academy, the team that funds it controls your playing rights for (10?) years after you go pro. Most American sports are typically balanced heavily by draft rights that are assigned based on performance. This would require a complete abandonment of that process for an European style approach of long term talent development and control.
Much less control than you think - what they do instead is build up a personal affiliation for the club that trained them.
Legally, the player cannot be bound by a contract before they are an adult for contractual purposes (usually 16). The team will offer a player a contract at 16 which will commit them for a number of years. Note that this also commits the team (options are not lawful under EU law), so they have to carefully consider who they are prepared to pay a full-time salary to and how much and for how long. In theory a player at 16 can choose to sign for someone else - but they've been raised right through the process to regard signing a pro contract as the goal they're working for, so it's very unusual to turn it down.
It certainly won't be a 10 year contract; 3-5 is more typical, though note that the team will make them sign a new contract (resetting the contract period) when they get a raise (e.g. when they first get put on the pro roster, etc). Lots of young players will be on a series of one-year contracts until the team is convinced they will actually be good enough to take a risk on a long-term contract. This means that they often step down at 19, 20, 21 or so to a lower-level team at the end of a season and have no obligation to the high-level team whose academy they played for. The teams don't really care, though - that player is not going to reach the top level and their asset value is negligible. One top player can be worth hundreds of millions; that third-tier player might be worth a hundred thousand. It's just more hassle than its worth to try to force the third-tier team to pay a transfer fee.
But those top players - they sign up in their teens for a contract and then the team tries to keep them happy enough for them to choose to stay, or at least for them to choose to leave via transfer rather than deliberately waiting out the end of their contract and leaving on a free transfer. Players generally don't do that to their team unless they are properly annoyed.
Note that baseball has team-affiliated academies in a number of countries (most notably in the Dominican Republic) and they can sign those players without going through a draft.
Right, but even if it would be for a shorter contract, it would still negate the current draft process. All of which would require a major reworking of the league rules across most major US sports. You referenced baseball, but as I understand the league actually changed their rules in the last few years to decrease the ability of teams to recruit foreign players in that method.
Then there's the question of why major leagues and the teams they consist of would want to add this cost when the benefits would be so low. Take basketball for instance, there are 30 NBA teams right now. Right now, they typically have control for the first 7 years - so from years 19-26ish depending on when players come into the league. That's into the early part of most player's prime. Why would they switch to a system where they gain control of a player at 16, but would lose control right as the player turns into a star?
It was quite surprising when I learned that the middle schools here in Alexandria, VA have no sports teams. Not even a soccer or track and field team. You could easily have a mini league just in Alexandria and Arlington and have kids semi competitively get the option to plat sports in a diverse group and we just don’t.
It is clearly the case that the only kids playing sports at that age are those with the means to do so, which is just sad on every level Matt identifies.
That is surprising. Part of my plan to tackle this would be expanded middle school sports open to all.
In our area, all the middle schools have teams (basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, track).
The very large ones you have to tryout to make the team. This is part of the travel sports problem here - literally 100% of the boys on the baseball team at the largest school play on some kind of competitive team in the summer. None of the kids left in the local rec league are good enough to win at the tryout.
Meanwhile at the small rural or Catholic schools, everyone who comes out will be on the team. You don't have to play travel sports to be good enough to play school ball.
Here I think having expanded "B teams" so that everyone can play would help deflate some of the travel sports pressure in these situations.
I mean there’s a funding and literally just a willing adult problem here. I coach—a lot of my colleagues think I’m crazy for taking on two seasons of extra responsibilities.
The first year I did cross country I had so many people try out for Cross country that I would have needed two assistants. 40 elementary students for 5 boy and 5 girl spots. A good half dozen of them couldn’t run half the distance of the first race that was a week off and some literally were sick from the fact we run in Florida during August.
Really expanding this like you suggest isn’t impossible but it would actually involve pretty different arrangements than what we have.
I went to a small, rural elementary/middle school and was able to play school sports every season against the other schools in the county. And then at the relatively small regional high school, if you wanted to play a sport other than football it wasn’t that hard to make varsity. It’s such a huge difference here close to the city- no access to low key / less competitive / learn to play sports for kids.
I'm in a small NM town, and the school-offered sports are super limited. There are community leagues for kids with more options, and are cheap enough for most families to afford, but they come with a lot of the downsides of travel teams (odd practice and games hours, varying locations).
I'm surprised at how few options there are for kids here--and even more surprised to hear how limited access is to low key sports near a bigger city.
Indeed this is one of the marketing pitches for private or parochial schools: less competition to be on the sports teams. In a big school system it is quite hard to make the varsity team until senior year
Of course ironically the ability to escape competition is itself conditioned on ability to fork over school tuition.
My (fancy, private) school, 20 years ago, had intramural and intermural sports. Intermural were obviously for the more competitive players, but intramural was more like a rec league situation and focused on learning the game and having fun even if everybody sucked.
This was my experience playing high school baseball in South Florida in the early 2000s. By the time you got to high school every kid who was good enough to make a decent high school team played travel ball in the summer.
I have been very surprised by the apparent lack of this sort of thing in MoCo as well. I can't tell if it's part of a larger degradation of public schools in the area or if it really just is lack of interest driven by opt out by those parents most likely to form the core participating families. Probably a combination of the two.
No middle school teams here either in Fairfield County CT. There are plenty of town sponsored teams (travel and house), but they are independent of the schools. And of course plenty of club teams as well, although soccer is the only sport where the club teams draw kids away from the town teams (so far). Most of the other club sports compete in the off season (e.g. town lacrosse is in the spring and club lacrosse is in the summer) so kids can play both if they want. So it seems like we are a bit of an outlier in that the club teams have not totally taken over the youth sports landscape (save for soccer and the year round sports like swimming, gymnastics and hockey).
That is surprising to hear, but if the assumption (or experience) is that travel leagues would take all the kids, you’re school might not be able to field a team. I played neighborhood- or school-based sports and was an extremely competitive kid with a very bad attitude. I actually credit the guys in my neighborhood that stuck around to coach every kid and school leagues (where discipline could impact your sports availability) to be pretty important in retrospect - if I had a coach that was just as hyper competitive and didn’t put my attitude in check, I’d have probably played fewer sports and focused on only basketball, and then maybe played less hoops in the long run than I really did due to burnout, stress, injury, etc
"Unless you have some kind of good faith belief that your kid has the makings of an elite athlete, just chill out and be normal!"
Ay, there's the rub. I bet part of what is going on is Lake Woebegon effect, which affluent parents are quite susceptible to. Not paying for the travel team means admitting your kid is not elite and isn't going to eventually get that college scholarship.
And that I think at least puts a gloss on the collective action problem- we are not simply dealing with parental conformity, but with having to convince parents that their kid is just average.
And that has knock on effects. "Mom, why aren't you signing me up for the travel team?" "Because you aren't good enough, honey." Will any affluent parent have THAT conversation?
I think this is much more baked in than Matt thinks. Unless you actually banned the travel leagues or something, this is here to stay.
I genuinely don’t know who is feeding these parents their delusions. Is it the travel teams making them think their 70th percentile rank athleticism is actually 99 percentile rank.
At least with running the stopwatch is pretty objective.
It’s also worse because this sorting happens LONG before anyone can know what abilities these kids will ultimately have. E.g., kid down the street is 14, upper class travel sports kids in multiple sports. He’s been doing travel sports since elementary school.
Right now, I’d bet he’ll play division I basketball or football. Best athlete I’ve seen at his age by a wide margin. 6’, big, and very fast and athletic.
But he’s already having to specialize. And if he stops growing at 6’1”, he probably still doesn’t have a prayer.
The competitive aspect is here to stay, and probably always was. But private travel teams accessible only to kids with family money and means do not need to be here to stay. There were no private sports teams in the small town I grew up in, just the public school teams, and yes if you wanted to be competitive and high-pressure about your little budding sports superstar you could be, and some parents were. But the kids played on the same public teams as everyone else, that everyone had access to.
2. It is easier to keep in touch with home when you do travel due to cell phones, videoconferencing software, etc.
3. The Internet spreads the word of the travel teams-scholarship-selective college route to elite education.
4. Upper class parenting has become more structured over the years because of publicized cases of stranger danger, accusations of neglect, etc.
5. People have less kids, so there's more parental time to dote on the kid they do have.
I think you combine all that along with some factors I may have not mentioned and it's perfectly obvious why this is a thing now and wasn't a thing in the past. Times change and these sorts of trends seem hard to reverse. (Heck, forget about travel teams, consider how difficult it would ever be to reverse (4).)
Yes, it's not terribly mysterious how we got to this point. If you go back and retrace the history of the last half century or so, the points you make have good explanatory power for how the accumulation of individual choices led us to this place. But I don't think that's the issue. The issue is where do we go from here, where we are today.
I had a college professor many years ago who told the class, the new American dream is to win the lottery or have a kid go pro in sports.
So many parents are willing to sacrifice money they don't necessarily have in the hopes that their kid will break out into the pros. And at 5 or 6 or 7, who can really tell which kid has the chops? It probably seems like a reasonable investment at first.
As a school sports coach I’m a bit perplexed at why parents suddenly started to believe that we weren’t good enough. Like very few timed sports have travel leagues. I’ve had middle schoolers who went on to compete for state championships and went to d1 schools in xc/track.
Some part of me thinks there’s a mix of delusional parents and opportunistic grifters in the major team sports who pretend that this isn’t overwhelmingly about genetics and that d1 basketball and football players aren’t genuinely obviously superior athletes. It’s almost never like close, the first time I saw a runner who went on to get a scholarship he was like the flash out there several hundred yards ahead of second place.
You can -- or at least you used to be able to -- get significant amounts of admission preference to non-Div-1, good colleges without being a Div-1 level immensely gifted athlete. Not full-ride scholarships, but access to schools that otherwise would be unlikely to let you in.
- depends on the ratio of skill : physical ability
The higher the level of competition, the higher the "physical ability" or genetic bar will be. You can practice all you want, but the genetically lucky will run track at the Olympics or play in the NBA.
But "make the high school baseball team?" Lower physical bar, relativelt higher impact of practice.
Do you know who can deliver those practices just fine?
Elementary and middle school coaches. Elementary basketball is super enjoyable to coach and you can develop skills really well at that age without thousands of dollars of investment on 3 times a week practice.
As far as I can tell almost no one does xc or track in travel teams and like times keep getting lower, long jumps and shootouts keep getting longer in middle school contests.
Theres very little benefit to head to head competition with equally skilled opponents in “timed sports”. Theres also little need for “visibility “ because the stopwatch says everything that needs to be said.
As far as we know middling soccer kids today would have dominated 30 years ago, but it’s not nearly as clear cut as the times and distances and heights improving inexorably in “timed sports”
Track is different from team sports. I agree with you, but on soccer, lacrosse, basketball, etc. there is a real trend toward club teams. And if you didn't spend all the time on the club team, you won't even get into the Freshman team in HS in my area.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit, and played soccer through high school. My teammates and I played travel leagues (limited travel though) from about 4th grade through 8th, and then we all migrated to our high school team and made varsity, almost without exception, freshman year.
I guess I'm unclear about whether that kind of thing happens today--do kids move back to their school's team in high school?
Let me explain. A lot of kids these days play on both their town travel leagues (inexpensive, parent coaches) and club leagues (expensive, prof. and semi-prof. coaches). Some kids leave their town travel leagues in 3rd or 4th grade and pop back in for high school. So there is almost no chance of making varsity your freshman year, even if you are very good. And your chances of making even the freshman team if you haven't playing club (in addition to town soccer) are poor.
I'm generally a bit unclear on how much of this would persist if they were the same people. Like it seems to me a lot of the best athletes get hoovered up in these leagues and they'd be able to play with just regular practice.
Maybe, but they get more reps, more practice, and more individualized instruction. In fact the decent athletes with parents who have time and money to burn take advantage, and the best athletes may not have those advantages. Hence the idea of scholarships is a good one if we are stuck with this otherwise pay-to-play system.
I think I replied elsewhere but that would really require a top down rethink of school based sports because leagues, and budgets and expectations are set up for something more selective. It’s not a bad idea but it’s not a small add on to elementary and middle school systems.
A stretch comparison here, but in my high school (20 years ago) there were a few girls whose parents took them to modeling/acting scouts, and believe you me when I say there were parents paying a lot of money to have the scouts tell their girls they had a legitimate chance based on no discernible basis.
Father of four. My ex-wife really wanted the oldest two to play soccer like she did. We went all in on soccer starting at six, through middle school, travel teams, community teams (“not good enough for my kids” she said) until they finally made High School varsity teams and promptly burned out and rebelled. At that point my ex-wife was curiously spending too much time with my son’s travel team coach and the whole circus suffered spontaneous rapid disassembly. After the divorce I told the kids to play sports for fun but focus on grades. Ex married the travel team coach.
Matt, I think your description of kids and travel parents and their motivations is at least somewhat inaccurate, and the criticisms of most of the commenters are really off base.
It is so enjoyable to make fun of dumb parents who are so out of touch with reality that they think their kid is special!!! Ha ha!!
Now picture the environment of the town leagues: no one is special. No one can play with players at their level, no matter what level that is—either kids who are so bad they don’t know the rules and their parents are making them play, or so good they get all the playing time. No one gets a good field. No one gets a good coach. No one plays extra because it’s fun - there aren’t enough fields. No one reschedules when there is a rainout.
I think for a kid that really likes to play, a travel team is a rational decision and I’m surprised anyone would expect a kid or parent to turn that down. If your kid wanted to make themselves crazy by acting in the community theater play on top of school productions, would anyone be as stupefied as they are here?
Many parents enjoy meeting parents (from other surrounding towns), traveling with the family to new places, and see their kid get to play what they enjoy with kids at their level.
And, many kids ALSO play their town sports. Yes, there can be conflicts, but surely this is better than more kids on more screens.
I think you’re wrong to assume everyone sees their kid as a future pro athlete. Childhood is short and can be taken away in an instant (see: Covid). The more things a kid can do, the better.
To address inequality, instead of cancelling travel teams, how about we expand access with scholarships (many teams already have this).
I have no delusions that any of my kids playing travel soccer will get scholarships…but they are good enough and competitive enough that the rec experience very quickly failed them. My oldest daughter explicitly asked to play on a team where her teammates weren’t always goofing off during practice and where she could get better.
So if I deny her the more selective team, there’s really no “real” sports experience available to her (at least not of the type I experienced 30 years ago, that might have some hope of competing with the screens).
These effects are probably much more pronounced with girls sports, as even the selective teams often have trouble fielding a full team of girls for a given age.
Yeah, I genuinely have a hard time reconciling the fact that travel sports have gotten insane with my own personal competitiveness and desire for my kids to be great at whatever they choose (sports or otherwise).
For example, I started my 4 year old son in tee ball this year and as someone who played travel baseball, I found it too unstructured - to the point where it was hard to see how he was getting anything from it. On the other hand, I have friends pressuring me to have him join another park where they practice twice a week and play games on weekends. This also seems to be overkill for 4/5 year olds.
It's admittedly, a tough needle to thread and I say all of this as someone who still plays competitive flag football in my mid 30s.
Anything at that age is just for the fun of kids running around. We did T-ball with our first kid but did not make that mistake again. Playing backyard / park Wiffleball is much better. Playing catch with you is much better. Rec league coach pitch is fine. But once the kids start to pitch, the stratification of level of play between travel and rec gets really dramatitic ages 9-12, as the difference between "having faced fast pitching" and "not having faced fast pitching" is stark. The gaps narrow later in middle school though, as the kids who stick with it improve regardless and strength and size start to make a bigger impact.
I mean, of course it's for the fun of kids running around, but as David S has already replied, it's also about slowly inculcating kids into how to play the sport, in a structured way.
Every kid is different. I can barely get my son to play catch or hit the ball in the backyard with me for more than 3 minutes so I think he needs a bit more structure, and for someone else besides me to coach him.
Yes, travel sports are often a lot of fun for kids and parents.
I wonder if there is a bit of social pressure here also to say that you are "so busy," "crazy weekend," etc. - like how you are always supposed to say work is "busy" in that American way. But actually that, for all the hassle of running around, the tournament was a lot of fun.
The kids played well, there were some exciting moments, the team dinner was fun, the kids played in the pool, and honestly hanging out in a lawn chair routine on your team on a summer afternoon isn't actually horrible
Playing sports with people at your competitive level is fun.
I would also say that is generally good for kids and adults.
If we could get (back) to a system where the vast majority of kids participated in a robust local league, then we could have that fun competition but at a much lower cost in time and money.
I don’t think Matt was arguing for “cancelling” travel teams, but rather for parents opting not to put their kid on travel teams. If you want to keep your kid on their travel team you’re free to keep doing so.
Re: scholarships, I don’t think it makes sense because there will still be a number of slots and that will still result in some of the exclusion and atomization Matt mentions in the piece.
Huh? No. Matt is recommending everyone stop paying for travel teams so they will no longer exist, and we can return to the glory days of bad youth sports. :)
Sorry, I was responding to this remark by you (I know you're fielding responses from all over): "I will in fact keep doing so [taking part in travel teams], despite the fact that elites are flipping the tables to make success and ambition a bad thing." That seemed to suggest that elites are against these teams and non-elites are the ones availing themselves of them. But surely the costs and time commitment involved complicate this populist account?
I also just dispute the idea that bad youth sports were the norm, unless we've raised the bar for what level they should be played at, which I think one could reasonably regard as a bad idea.
Yes - elites, like Matt, like you apparently, seem to be against kids having nice things and developing themselves. I see similar patterns in other domains - eliminating honors classes; schools not giving out awards for anything, only participation. I don't think it's a good thing to discourage kids from doing things that they are interested in and trying to maximize their potential. I think the better question is how to make those experiences accessible to more kids. Have more fun teams with varying levels of commitment! Give scholarships! I personally disagree that telling parents to quit pursuing those goals is the right approach.
It’s not just this one column. Honors classes are being canceled. At my high school, international trips are being canceled because not everyone can afford them. I’ve also seen academic awards being eliminated. Let a kid show any ambition or passion and we have Matt saying they are ruining society. I think it was a bad and lazy argument.
I don't think these are the same phenomenon. The whole point of Honors classes in public schools is that you don't pay for them. You test into them and get to do them. The travel and club teams are expensive and run to thousands of dollars plus the time commitment of ferrying the kids around. It would be like complaining that after school private cram schools are a problem. Let's go back to having kids have to test into honors programs and go from there.
Well, there is no more testing into honors - anyone can do it if they want. In general, I do not think the solution to inequality is less options. Even if the nostalgia of rec leagues is very powerful for some.
Its hard enough to play division 1 sports, let alone get a scholarship. Parents are better off putting the money in a 529 if they are concerned about paying for college.
One more thing. I don’t think it’s fair to make well intentioned parents or their kids the target of criticism? According to you and most commenters, they should just recognize and admit they actually suck at sports and are miserable driving to practices and are also hurting democracy? Usually, if you have to work that hard to make an argument, your argument’s wrong.
I just scrolled through all the comments and I don't really recognize them in your rehash of what other commenters are saying. Here and there people might say that *some* of the parents overestimate their kids' abilities, but I don't see why that's not fair game? For the most part they're talking about how it's a tremendous time and resource sink that have ended making it harder for many children to participate in sports.
The scholarship idea is nice and good make a marginal difference for kids who'd like to be committed but whose parents don't have money. But the share of kids whose parents are just uninvolved, like single parents who can't drive their kids out of town or deadbeat parents is probably larger. And I definitely think it hurts kids who would want to play somewhat casually. What you described above as the "bad" local league sounds exactly what I wanted from 6th grade baseball as a 6th grader.
I’m so glad your enjoyment of your sport and commitment to it is low. You probably also didn’t have any seasons canceled due to a pandemic. But why make other parents feel bad about helping their kid maximize their enjoyment if they want to?
Also, *some* parents actually *underestimate* their kids’ abilities, believe it or not. They want to be hanging around their house all weekend, not doing anything for their kids, but maybe the kid could actually grow and develop as an athlete? Which parents are worthy of an entire critical article by Matt?
Someone linked to a boring article about a mom who is Just! So! Tired! Of having to go to games every weekend!! And the practices!! Whew!! What a pain!! So many more parents enjoy their time with their kids and with a community of others, even if, god forbid, they are from out of town.
And yes - commenters are blaming parents for “delusions” - I can’t quote from my phone but maybe I will scroll through and comment on every one so you can see.
"I’m so glad your enjoyment of your sport and commitment to it is low."
Well now you're just sounding bitter.
But the overall point was that the overall tenor of the comments and especially the article is nothing to take so personally. If some people said the mother's of travelling team players are delusional, they are probably being a bit tongue-and-cheek but you can respond to them personally.
The overall vibe is not the parents are bad, and in fact it's that they are acting perfectly rationally. But what gets leftover may not be so great for the left-behinds. It's not a lot different from private schools in areas with bad school districts.
I think if you put your experience out there with less defensiveness and related it a bit more, both in pros and cons, to Matt's overall point, it would be received very well.
Without getting into the tenor of your exchange with Baseball mom, I do think she's pointing out a tension here between "kids should be able to play low-competition sports for the run of it" and "kids who are super into their sport should have the opportunity to play at a higher level", and I'm not sure it's a coherent argument to say that having higher level players leaving local leagues to play on travel teams somehow diminishes the low-competition local leagues.
Like, if we're talking about low-competition, low-stakes sports, isn't it actually *better* to have the competitive players leave for a different league?
I also agree with her that these ideas apply to more than just travel vs. local/school sports. There is clearly a sense that some kids (the more driven, talented, etc.) owe the other kids something, and the directionality of the benefit sure seems to only run in one direction.
I'm not quite sure what I said above and throughout, but I agree there is a tension. And in terms of diminishing the school leagues, I agree that star athletes leaving isn't a "big" problem. The big problem is that sometimes the school teams actually disappear, ad that's an especially big problem if not every kid was actually all that pumped to travel so much on their parents money, or if some kids couldn't afford it, or if some kids wanted to play some sports formally, but less seriously than travel teams. (coincidentally, believe it or not, yesterday afternoon I found out my cousin's kid quit baseball to play football in his 11th grade year. His dad had made it to AAA baseball and pushed him a lot and I guess he got burned out)
I remember when we talking about something to do with private or STEM schools and this concept came up that the "level the field" crowd felt something was owed to the less good kids. I didn't really see that idea surfacing yesterday. I don't feel it about school sports. But I think the idea that we're part of communities is true, and generally being part of your community is a positive thing, so I think Matt's post makes sense from that point of view.
But that tension is there in communities, too, because talented ambitious people often leave their ghetto / mill town / reservation rather than stay and try to make it better. I don't fault them for them, but at the same time it's fine to observe that the brain drain is bad for the left behinds.
You seemed really proud that you weren’t that into your sixth grade sport. I want to honor that, as people should honor those who love their sports and want to play more and be better.
I didn't perceive Matt as criticizing parents at all (although some comments definitely are). He said that they are caught up in a system that they can't do anything about as an individual beyond quitting sports altogether. His question is how and why did we get this way, and what does it mean for society overall.
Are the parents well-intentioned? Or are they focused on win-now vs. skill and personal development of their kids over the long haul? How would you know?
The point is that it doesn’t matter. Matt is painting a picture of delusional adults, and it’s not correct, and it’s lazy. Parents have all kinds of motivations, as do their children. I know parents who want to be the kings of their town’s rec league and have turned the rec league into something more political and cutthroat than gangsters I’ve read about. If something’s wrong with the world, it is so easy to point fingers at other parents and say they’re doing a bad job.
You're the one asserting that the parents are well-intentioned. How would you know? I'm a youth coach who interacts with lots of parents. Some are well-intentioned and some are not.
Should I unsubscribe to Slow Boring because it’s way too intense policy analysis and I should just chill out? Should I unsubscribe because some people can’t afford the time or money it takes to read? Should I abandon my ambition to be well read? Am I delusional about whether or not I truly am smart enough to understand it?
I think the key difference is that there is no supply constraint on SB subscriptions but there is on sports team slots. SB subscriptions are excludable but not rivalrous whereas sports team memberships are both.
I don’t think that’s the point. If more kids wanted to play there would be way more spots and more teams. Not so with rec leagues. Those are surely limited.
This only works if the whole family isn in on the travel team thing. If you have multiple kids, the whole weekend can be blown as different parents split up to shepherd the kids to different events. In many cases, I see one of the parents take on as a part-time or full-time job equivalent being the kids chauffeur and executive planner. Of course, the worst is hockey. Driving an hour through a snowstorm to get a 7 am ice time. Yay!
Hmmm, interesting. A local (association) football club here would have a bunch of teams at each age - a first team, a second team, etc: often five or more teams. That way kids get to play with and against others at the same level. The league will have promotion and relegation, but they do that for the age group, ie the results of one year's U8 team determine which level the following year's U9 team plays at, so the same kids get affected by their own results. This generally results in teams of similar ability being in the same division of the league.
Winning the division seven championship while playing for the fourth XI (or whatever) can be just as much fun and just as meaningful as playing for the first XI.
[I guess that referring to teams as an "eleven" and writing that in roman numerals is very British - the number obviously varies by sport, and is also used to let people know which sport it is, so an XI is either football or cricket, a VIII is rowing, XIII is rugby league, XV is rugby union]
I agree with this. The local town leagues here (very inexpensive, not club teams) have teams at various levels and tryouts to sort players. It's not a perfect process, but playing competitive games at your level is quite rewarding, even if you are the 4th best team in your age group in town. I can attest (as a coach) that the players find it very rewarding.
Everything you're describing is exactly what we have in the United States in the "travel team" world that Matt's writing about. It's literally exactly the same. The potential difference may be how much it costs. My son plays for a soccer club called Minneapolis United and it charges, for his U11 age group, $2,100 per year. Then there are uniform costs and some tournaments that cost extra, so the total out-of-pocket is probably $2,750 or so per annum.
Do you happen to know how that would compare with the UK? I've always been curious about that kind of thing.
I was wondering to what degree this had been ignored in the piece. Like, how different is this from moving your kid to a better/more challenging private school because they're bored at the private school and not getting the challenge they need to thrive?
"Now picture the environment of the town leagues: no one is special. No one can play with players at their level, no matter what level that is—either kids who are so bad they don’t know the rules and their parents are making them play, or so good they get all the playing time. No one gets a good field. No one gets a good coach."
This is a series of generalizations that don't seem warranted to me. To the extent this is true now, was it also true back before traveling leagues became so common? I don't remember ever hearing this kind of complaint about little league, AYSO, etc.
I think it's always been pretty true, yeah. Exceptions to every rule, sure. We've had great town coaches who have helped my kid realize how much fun it is to really work hard at something and get better, then play with other kids who feel the same way. We've also played against really bad coaches who stack the decks for their kid, play dirty, make everything political, etc. If I can get my kid another good experience on a travel team to do something he loves, am I destroying democracy? Matt says yes; I think that's ridiculous.
Since we've both seen hard-working, committed coaches who are able to motivate kids to be their best, maybe (whatever our feelings on travel leagues) we could agree that parks departments should see if they can find reliable ways of hiring and improving such coaches? In the same way that we should want public schools to find and retain great teachers, even as we acknowledge private schools will continue to exist.
Absolutely! Matt should write a post about that! But I personally have not seen any such motivation on the part of any town or rec leagues I've ever seen. Not blaming them; they have their own restrictions and constraints. But that's beside the point: why criticize parents for paying for travel teams? It seems like the answer is: because it's easy to criticize parents by painting them as delusional about their kids' abilities.
I agree completely on the explanation of the problem, but this seems unduly pessimistic on policy solutions. Why not tax private travel teams and/or subsidize traditional school-based teams?
Widespread youth participation in night/weekend cram schools in East Asian nations is driven by similar collective action problems, with similar negative effects on quality of life for parents and children, and East Asian governments have responded by starting to try to use policy to reduce cram school participation. Tackling collective action problems is one of the more useful things governments can do.
We should use tax policy as a tool when there are cases of market failure. But is this in fact a market failure? Are we absolutely sure that this is a collective action problem where the large majority of parents would like external action taken to relieve them of this burden?
Factor in the parents who want their kids to do sports but can’t even consider a travel team, but are watching the public teams get worse because of the travel teams.
Interesting parallel with cram schools here. Nice observation and potential source of policy ideas. I'm not deep into cram school policy - have those governments succeeded any at reducing cram school participation yet? What policies have they implemented?
I’m not sure to what degree school-based teams are underfunded. At least at middle class schools it’s that kids do both travel and school-based and only the kids on the travel are good enough to make the school team.
I’m all for going after root causes, and I wholeheartedly endorse higher top marginal tax rates for lots of reasons, including this.
While we’re thinking big picture, I’d also take a look at university admissions. Maybe we could get all the elite university presidents into a room and just ask them to make a conscious attempt to coordinate and refocus their admissions criteria to stuff that’s less responsive to parent/child expenditure of effort. It’ll be easier to hector people to go back to a more normal old-fashioned child rearing experience if we stop actively rewarding modern high-investment high-stress strategies.
But while we’re trying to get at the roots of the problem, I do still think there’s an argument for hacking at whatever branches come within reach. Cultural change takes time, and a lot of parenting is driven by conformism, as Matt notes. If we cut expenditures of time and effort on youth sports, sure, some of those resources will eventually end up going to test prep, essay writing coaching, services that help high schoolers start their own non-profit, or whatever. But I think the shift will take time, and for a little bit at least parents and kids will just be able to enjoy a windfall of more free time and less expense, and making parents’ lives easier is critical when we’ve got a fertility crisis on.
If a state taxes travel teams, many of the families with the best children in those sports will just move to another state. A similar happened during COVID when states like California shut down recreational facilities. I know three families who temporarily moved to Arizona.
Good post. My older son is a sports fanatic. Having watched what has happened with friends and relatives with older children I am dreading the day the request comes to join one of these things. I have no expectations or delusions of grandeur of his 'being pretty good and motivated for a little kid' leading to anything beyond that. But I do like that he is into something that isn't video games or other sedentary, socially atomizing stuff. What sucks is the prospect of eventually spending weekends on the road, spending crap tons of money, and losing any prospects of weekend relaxation solely so there are possibilities of playing moderately competitive games and/or having a shot at making a team in HS.
This is what I, a person without kids, don’t understand: parents spending huge amounts of money and giving up literally all of their free time for years. I see my friends doing it. Maybe I’m a selfish jerk, but I think parents are entitled to have a little bit of fun while raising their kids, and this doesn’t seem very fun, or very good for the kids. I’ve also seen people trying to leverage their kids into elite universities via these “club” sports, and when it doesn’t work everyone is hugely disappointed, even when the kid “just” gets into a very good school (maybe Big State U) but isn’t recruited for the sport. There are also less sporty kids in some of these families who lose the opportunity to do other activities on weekends and during the summer while the families frantically travel throughout the region, and who maybe turn away from sports altogether because they don’t feel they’re “good enough” to try. Once again I’m so grateful that I grew up in a different era.
Its actually a lot of fun if you do it right. Let the kid drive the process and make the decisions about where they want to play. Play multiple sports to keep it from being boring. Sure the trips can be a drag, but you get some alone time with your kids which can be harder to do as they get older. I know I'll miss it when its over.
I think the hard part is when you have a kid that isn't interested in sports at all and gets dragged away on these weekend trips. My kids are completely unathletic, so no worries about this for me, but I have seen it happen with other families. They do try to build in fun things for the other kid(s) on the trips, but it can get really boring for those kids if you are doing it once a month or more.
We were lucky in that both our kids play the same sports and on the same teams so they would generally be in the same place, if not necessarily at the same time. But we never dragged one kid to another's tournament unless there was something fun at the other end (e.g. Hershey Park).
On an individual level, let the kid drive the process. If they want to do a "travel team" to play sports, that seems fine on an individual basis. But what if they're into it only because most of their friends are doing it, because their friends' parents are pushing it?
But so far my kids' only interest in sports has been volleyball(we tried to get them into soccer but they weren't interested) and the school is doing a team for that next year so they should be able to play at school.
If they want to do it b/c their friends are doing it, I don't see the issue with that. At some point if they aren't into it they will drop out on their own. I think most kids are pretty honest about their abilities and how the measure against their peers. Its the parents that are unrealistic about their children's abilities.
You dodged a bullet with soccer. IME, soccer is the worst of the youth sports. Its turned into a year round sport (even our rec league requires a spring season), the club teams require an unrealistic commitment level (must chose between playing for your HS or your club team in the fall), and there is little to no payoff in the end (colleges recruit world wide for soccer). Maybe its different in other parts of the country, but my advice to younger parents is to make sure their kids try sports other than soccer b/c they will likely quit well before they get to HS.
What I meant by "if they're doing it b/c their friends are doing it is this:
Option 1: All of their friends play sports at school, or the local YMCA, or the some local team thing that doesn't travel. Great! I spend time with the kids on sports but it's _also_ not eating up all the time in cars.
Option 2: All of their friends play in travel leagues, so they want to as well. I'm not saying I would say _no_ - I think that's a fine reason to want to do it, but I do think this is making us worse off than if the travel leagues weren't a thing.
(This is hypothetical - no interest so far in anything that would require one of these travel leagues)
It's all part of the same larger arms race that leaves everyone worse off. Whenever my boss tells me she spent the weekend going across the country for some teenage boys soccer game I chuckle. As if there's anything going on in some other state that couldn't be replicated locally in the DC burbs. But then I get a sick feeling in my stomach as I realize that could easily be me in a few years, if my son maintains anything like current levels of interest.
I could've responded to any one of several comments about this, but I'm choosing yours for some reason.
When did "travel sports" go from "traveling within an hour of your home" to "across the country"? Was it always like that, but my MI travel soccer teams circa 1990-98 were different?
No idea and not sure what the norm is. I never played travel sports growing up and the farthest I can recall going is to a neighboring county in high school for states. Anecdotally my boss' case is the most extreme I am aware of but I know multiple families that travel hours and hours away for this stuff, have to stay in hotels, etc.
Good luck - my advice to you would be that if he stays interested and motivated, and there isn't a good rec league in town, to try and band together with other likeminded parents to create a "travel light" team. I've seen those work really well - if you can get a core group of boys and parents together, you can create a team that plays locally, sticks together, costs little, and has a lot of fun. And usually just being on a team where kids are trying hard and having fun is enough training to let the kids stick with it until middle school when puberty hits and the realities of genetics reorder the hierarchy.
The whole thing is indeed infuriating. We live next to a large park. Municipal leaders built a bunch of turf soccer fields, not to offer an affordable public league option for the community but so a for-profit youth team could charge parents thousands of dollars a year and leave the infrastructure cost to the taxpayers.
That is horrible. And I suspect it is happening more often than we realize. Your post reminded me of a fight in my city over different baseball leagues using a field. My kids don't do sports, so I didn't pay that much attention, but I will after reading your comment.
Played travel soccer from age 11 to 18 in LA. I was not recruited for college (i am a good athlete, but a great one). Soccer was the defining experience of my childhood, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I understand how it can be a strain on big families, but my family of four (with an older sister not especially into sports) did not seem stretched thin by my participation. The drives with my mom out to Riverside and Thousand Oaks and Downey and Redondo Beach made our relationship much stronger.
The part about this being only for elite rich kids doesn’t match my experience at all. I went to a top prep school in LA. My ONLY experiences with the middle-class Latinos who are the plurality of the Los Angeles area was playing travel soccer. I simply would not understand my hometown without it. I played on all-Latino travel teams, I practiced Spanish with my teammates parents’, I explored neighborhoods of Los Angeles I would’ve never been to, and ate more postgame Mexican food and Dairy Queen (only found in the suburbs) with my mom than you can imagine. My life without travel soccer would’ve been more sheltered, less involved with the community, and with the amount of pressure that smart elite kids were under at school, soccer was my actual non-high-pressure outlet with actual non-elite friends. Reading this was like reading about a foreign country. I believe you that DC is like this, but all I can say is that SoCal is not.
Matt, thank you for mentioning my book! You manage to touch on all the major problems in this blog post. All the comments, too, add telling details. While I do write about the need for more investment in parks and school sports programs, I also offer advice to parents about how to navigate this expensive and fraught universe. Yes, it's a collective action problem, but parents need to embrace their agency on this. Get educated about the facts on recruitment to a college team (5-6% of high school athletes) and likelihood of getting any--not full--sports scholarship (3% of high school athletes.) The most reliable predictor of whether a child will play in college? If either or both parents did. Learn about the risks of early specialization in a sport: these are the kids who get injured, drop out, and never play again. Refresh your knowledge of why playing sports matters at all: they can be great for physical health! Exercise thwarts depression and anxiety! It lifts the mood and helps with self-regulation! Playing on a well-coached team, with a humane adult in charge, can be especially important for teenagers, who crave connection with peers and benefit from the structure and discipline a good team provides. To realize these benefits, children do NOT need an intense, competitive environment that costs a lot and disrupts the family. While the problem can seem too big to change, parents are not powerless.
How little actual money is available for college scholarships outside big football and basketball programs is a point that cannot be broadcast often enough.
For instance, under NCAA rules, a Division 1 baseball team is allowed a maximum of 11.7 scholarships, and not every school even fully funds that many. That 11.7 can be divided between a maximum of 27 players on a 39-player roster, with all players on athletic scholarship having to receive a minimum of a 25 percent scholarship.
In wholehearted agreement with Matt's essay today, I submit my comment from last week's post regarding the "care agenda" and the cost of child care / elder care:
"I think the real societal pressure against having more kids is what is expected to be a “good” parent. The level of parental involvement expected in planning, managing and directing all parts of their child’s life is what makes the parenting role harder today than it was in the past. Kids are resilient. They can be bored sometimes. They can be unstructured. They can just wander around the neighborhood all by themselves sometimes. But those things are indicators of “bad” parenting by today’s standards."
My slogan: Have more kids. Do less parenting. It'll be fine.
Tim Carney has a new book ("Family Unfriendly") and while I think he gets a bit trad-Cath towards the end of it, he does a masterful job making exactly the point you make here in the first third, even focusing explicitly on the scourge of travel sports for quite a while.
I have friends ranging from PMC DINKs to 5+ kid homeschool Catholic families, and I gotta say daytime hangs with the giant Catholic families are fun. I let my kids loose, they get lost in the swarm, and I get to crack beers and eat food for an afternoon. Many kids, basically no parenting. I love my DINK friends too, but it's a bit more arranging of schedules to make it work.
A significant part of the reason we have the kids in Catholic school is to participate in this effect, even if most Catholics (at least around here) have uh, creatively interpreted things in such a way that 2-3 child households are the norm, and only a handful have more. There's a nice community and most importantly you can crack a beer or two and talk with the adults while the kids go crazy with each other in the yard or basement or wherever.
We can't go backwards, and nostalgia isn't the answer, but that doesn't mean that every change is an improvement. As the article states, it's sometimes the case that "everyone’s individual decisions about this stuff ends up impacting the rest of the community" in a negative way. That's a cost of individual freedom -- over time the weight of individual free choices can accumulate in a way that is collectively not optimal and box people in -- and it occasionally requires democratic collective action to re-channel individual free choices in intentional directions that are more collectively satisfying.
It also doesn't mean we can't take lessons from other cultures and adapt some lessons from observing other ways of doing things that seem valuable to our situation. And cultural borrowing or learning can occur in any direction -- learning from other cultures that exist today simultaneously with us, or given that as they often say, "the past is a different country", from the cultures that previously existed in our own cities, towns and rural areas in our own country.
I grew up hearing about the much freer childhood both of my parents had in the 1940s and 50s and have no doubt there was much about that that was better, in terms of giving kids more room to explore and develop their own independence and resilience and less pressure on parents-- my dad in a rural Minnesota farm community, surrounded by a dense clan of cousins, aunts and uncles who there for each other; my mom in a middle class urban city neighborhood where kids ran free. Obviously, there was also a lot not to like about it. Many rural communities were dirt poor and my dad's family didn't even have electricity until he was about 10 - he wired the house together with his brother who was a few years older than him! And the city mom grew up in was racially segregated by law. So again, nostalgia or reactionary thinking isn't the answer. But that doesn't mean those other bygone cultures didn't also have good things we don't have. The challenge is to find ways to take lessons about the good parts, that open our eyes to better possibilities in the present and future, and leave the bad behind.
I grew up in a small Southern town as part of a distinct minority, surrounded by bunches of aunts, uncles and cousins around whom our social life orbited. We were together all the time, for all kinds of family and religious celebrations.
Oh man, I couldn't wait to blow that town when I turned 18. I left and never regretted not living there again.
Sometimes, sadly, it's true that l’enfer, c’est les autres.
Sort of off-topic, but this is why I love the movie Midsommar so much. It encapsulates our simultaneous desires to be individuals, but also subsumed into a greater community.
Yes, nothing binds people together like gruesome murder rituals.
#inspiring
Well said; not surprising, given your pragmatic Minnesota roots.* Skol Vikes, etc.
This subject is a point of passion for me, and I have to consistently check myself for overweening nostalgia and the urge to go in reverse.
I have to think that the idea here will be to instead look forward, and imagine the world we're creating: children who grow up without agency, with shuttered avenues for creative exploration, and with limited experience handling autonomy and risk will create their own kind of world. Projecting which pros and cons will emerge from this paradigm is worthy of our attention.
*My grandparents: Browerville, Watkins...
A quibble, isn’t it “DOINKs?” DINKs are Double Income No Kids and Doinks are Double Income One Kid.
DINKs are easy to hang with. They have all the time in the world and are happy, low-stress, well-rested people. 😀 I kid, sort of.
I disagree. My friends with no kids have too much nice stuff in their house that I have to worry about my kids breaking and very few things for little ones to do. It's too quiet. When you go over somebody's house and they have a bunch of kids, your kids will just slide into the mix and you just check on them once in awhile.
Yep. My husband is a kindergarten teacher (small class) and we have one kid. He's always commenting that one kid is much more work than a group of them.
My twins alternate between more and less work than one kid.
Playing together so I'm not responsible for their entertainment? Less work
Fighting/yelling enough that I need to intervene? More work :)
To the degree we spend time with people who don’t have kids, and that’s not very often, we generally either get a sitter or it’s at our house.
Their houses are too boring for an 8 year old.
Some of my DINK friends are better with kids than others! Even with the ones that are awesome, if it's only my kids around I still have to parent, so it's hard to hang sometimes. With other parents, you can hit a kid critical mass where they amuse themselves and all you have to do is feed them every few hours.
To be clear, few things better than a night out with my DINK friends when I can get shore leave approved by the captain (my wife).
I have more single friends without kids than married friends without kids but in both cases they have always tended to hang out with me and my daughter in a more aunt/uncle way that has been really nice for her. They were also our go to babysitters. It is obviously different now that she is older but it was interesting to see how differently they talked to her than friends with kids. I have had mixed experiences with our few friends who have larger families. Sometimes it is great and does feel like hanging with cousins. Other times it ends up feeling like my kid has to babysit all the other kids because the parents are so excited for adult time that they check and don't notice that their kids are fighting or running with knives etc.
If we hang out with our friends without kids, we either get a sitter or it’s at our place.
I was thinking more about how it’s frequently hard to hang out with our friends with just one kid because we both are very scheduled to keep our respective children entertained.
I was thinking that was part of your point in highlighting how it’s easier to hang out with families with a lot of children who rely on siblings to entertain each other.
I wonder if a piece of the intense-parenting puzzle isn't social and individual guilt-tripping of working women, such that they have to compensate and also be supermom in order to 'justify' a career. The have-it-all principle.
Catholic schools in the Chicago area are a racket as far as sports are concerned.
My buddy is the head basketball coach at one of the Catholic League high schools in Chicago, and it's basically an all day, damn near year-round job.
Hoop Dreams was filmed over 30 years ago and documents how a couple black kids in the ghettos of Chicago are literally scouted by elite Catholic HS coaches. Theyre scouted during literal pickup street basketball games on courts with no nets sometimes. Much of it was filmed while the crack wars were still raging and setting record homicide numbers in the US. The kids who got the scholarships to elite catholic schools honestly had more on the line than when they were getting recruited for college. Avoiding the gang infested local public HS had much more of a lasting impact on their life than whether they played college ball at a crappy D3 or a D1.
But regardless the stakes were still extremely high in the 80s whether or not stupid travel leagues conned people into believing they could magically make their mediocre kids. Athletes are both born and made but even the made factors aren't as malleable as ppl think. Our personalities are pretty much set in stone by age 6. We can change and grow but researchers can identify with amazing accuracy the personality traits that kids will have at 18 based on a single day of observing and talking to them in kindergarten.
And that matters bc even putting aside innate physical or mental gifts even the skills that are produced through intense practicing or studying are massively influenced by the psychological profile that is already set by age 6. Unless you want to get outright abusive and insanelt ly controlling you can't force a kid to practice to the extreme level it would take to give a physically ungifted kid a realistic chance getting a college scholarship for sports.
Funny thing is, in terms of crime and whatnot, I think most communities now are safer than when I was growing up (in the 60s-70s), yet parents are terrified to let their elementary-school age kids leave the house alone. When I was that age we all walked to school (and sometimes bitched about having to, but not because we were afraid of being kidnapped).
Not to be the "it's all housing" guy this week, but I suspect that built environment affects things a lot. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s in a subdivision built in the early-to-mid 70s. It was probably one of the earlier truly dendritic/cul-de-sacy neighborhoods in our area and it would've counted as exurban when it was built.
The effect of this is that the streets were wide and encouraged drivers to speed on the street. The larger lot sizes also meant that we had fewer neighbors our age to randomly meet and play with, and also meant that the nearest public park was relatively far away (like a half hour walk at least and involving crossing at least 1 and I think 2 4-lane 45-mph arterials). Contrast this with even early postwar suburbs that tended to have smaller lots (even if they were much bigger than what you'd see in a traditional town/city), narrower streets, more gridlike street networks if not outright grids, and therefore more people and more stuff in walking or biking distance.
The effect of all that is that (1) children growing up in this environment have less *ability* to go and be unstructured because there's less they can physically get to on their own and (2) parents rightly fear their kids getting run over at least as much as they fear other dangers. The latter overall level of fear might or might not still be too high, but the fact of the matter is that big cars (and cars are getting bigger) traveling at high speed are a big danger to kids. I do remember from experience that one main reason I didn't go and play with the neighborhood kids is that for the longest time there just weren't any--except for a brief when I was in 4th and 5th grade when 2-3 new families moved in, everyone within walking distance was either much older than me or much younger. And those families moved out soon after.
Now, how many people does this affect? I don't know. But I can tell you that the overall trend has been towards less-dense, more dendritic street networks, and that the Sun Belt--where the growth has been--has gone in for this style of development more. So whether or not this is the main factor, it can't have helped.
Isn't the benefit of dendritic and cul-de-sac development over grid-structured development that the *volume* of traffic is much lower on the dendrites because there's no through-traffic? AIUI Culs-de-sac are traditionally considered desirable places to have kids playing outside.
The dendritic layout creates a hierarchy of car traffic from the cul de sac to the arterial. The cul de sac itself is safe, but the progressively higher traffic roads towards the subdivision entry are increasingly dangerous and then the collector road servicing the subdivision is an absolute no-go zone. If you are lucky, the subdivision has a small internal park or playground, but the elementary school, other parks, shops, etc. likely require traveling on the collector.
In a streetcar suburb style grid, children can use low-traffic residential streets parallel to the arterials to get anywhere, including school and Main Street shops.
Exactly. And because the houses in dendritic-designed neighborhoods tend to be on such large lots, the number of places to go and people to meet (i.e. kids your age) within walking/biking distance and without crossing or walking down the collector tends to be low. I have cousins who grew up in Atlanta's northern suburbs in a truly dendritic (I checked the map this time), large-lot development built in the 1990s and there was, like, one other kid their age who lived remotely nearby and the only place kinda within walking distance to go was a clubhouse for the subdivision (which was basically always empty, even though we always went in the summer--I know, Atlanta in the summer--and the clubhouse had a pool). Also, this neighborhood had very spotty sidewalk coverage, especially at that time, so you might have to walk on the shoulder of the collector.
I grew up less than 12 miles from where I live now but my more central neighborhood has a walkability score of 89 and there are many kids living within a block of us at almost every age. The neighborhood that I grew up in had a walkability score of 14. I had the same amount of freedom but I didn't use it much since most of my friends houses weren't in easy walking or biking distance without going onto main roads. I did walk by myself to the local pool but that meant walking along a lot of streets without sidewalks and across major roads. My daughter has about 10 kids from her high school who live within two blocks and she can walk to 3 different parks within six blocks from us including one with a swimming beach. She is also less than five blocks from several coffee shops and stores. She just has a lot more to do with her freedom!
Sorry to double-post, but this is a separate point: Much of this is also a function of larger lots/houses, as that reduction in density mechanically makes it harder for kids to find things to do within a radius they can get to on their own. Even bikes don't help that much because especially in elementary and middle school, kids' bikes can't go as fast as adults'. So dendritic street network or no, the newer form of suburbia reduces children's opportunity to be independent.
And while it is true that rural areas have low density (or at least can have it; there is of course the historic pattern of having a dense, walkable village/town where rural folks live and work the surrounding fields) that has historically been tempered with long-standing ties to the area. People moving to a new-build large-lot suburb don't have the deep family, religious, and general community connections to their neighbors that historically prevailed in rural areas in the past.
(Edited to add stuff because I accidentally saved early)
Yes, except that the street width (which encourages speeding) and increasing size of cars over time negates that.
Also, reviewing the map of my neighborhood, it was actually only quasi-dendritic--connected enough to have some through traffic, not connected enough to serve as a useful grid. Worst of both worlds. (What confused me was that there are a few cul-de-sacs (culs-de-sac?) in the area.) I'd say that geometry is probably more common than true dendritic.
"Isn't the benefit of dendritic and cul-de-sac development over grid-structured development that the *volume* of traffic is much lower?"
It only takes one car to kill one's child.
Yes, but Kareem appears to be contrasting this form of development with predecessor grid-based development, arguing that the latter was more kid-friendly.
So? I'm saying that vehicle speed, not density, is the relevant factor for child danger. And dendrites perform worse on that metric.
It’s a collective action problem. Each cul-de-sac means no outsiders drive through *that* street, but also means that residents of this neighborhood and the ones on the far side all do slightly further distances of driving. The few through streets end up with a lot more traffic, and everyone does more driving total than they would on a grid system, so there’s more congestion, unless all the streets are widened, which then encourages faster driving, especially at times when there is no congestion.
Thanks to Social Media basically every mom thinks their 13 year old will be kidnapped if they ride their bike 2 blocks to school.
My daughter and her friends walked to school without adults and supervising younger siblings from age 8 onward and we live in an area with a lot of visible poverty and some street crime. It was easier to do because it is dense enough that they could meet up with each other on the block and walk the rest of the way there. I sometimes walked with them but mostly to hang out and get some exercise.
I think the best we can do is model the behavior we want - prisoners dilemma be damned. Our daughter is seven. We've decided we won't participate in any sports league that holds Sunday games. Kindof like how we grew up in the 90s. And we won't do any year around sports.
Obviously we'll see how this shakes out; if there's incredible pull (i.e., she becomes ~ obsessed with a sport, and really really wants it) we'll probably bend but as of now, that's what we're doing knowing she might be at a disadvantage later. My wife played D1 tennis and was really pushed as a kid - so this is also a bit of a reaction to her just not wanting that for our kid. TBD.
I like it but yep, if your kid is into it you’re gonna go all in..
Great comment. No kids here, and the amount of planning and managing I see all my friends with kids do is shocking compared to the amount of involvement my parents did when I was a kid. I played soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring, and tennis in the summer. I never traveled to a tournament once that required an overnight stay. And this might seem like emotional neglect now, but they missed far more games of mine than they watched in person. The sport was my thing, not a thing they had to be a cheerleader for.
Except for my sister, every single one of my friends with kids does the travel team thing, with weekends and holidays consumed with tournament play. Approximately 0% of them are good enough to play in college.
So what if you have more than one kid and they are involved in different sports?
It becomes a logistical puzzle on par with airlines trying to get planes to all the airports at the right time.
I’m in the have one kid, do less parenting, enjoy lots of leisure boat.
That's it. If parents didn't feel they had to give up every ounce of their own freedom, and trusted that kids could play and manage without constant oversight, being a parent wouldn't be so overwhelming and expensive. Totally agree with you.
From my own personal experience, having a large family has less to do with the actual realities of parenting (because those come later) and more to do with how much you as a person of child-bearing age personally freak out at the possibility of adding an additional kid to the mix.
Because my wife and I knew several families that had 4, 5, 6+ kids, we didn't freak out when our surprise 3rd kid came. A vasectomy was talked about, but the prospect of 4 kids was not frightening enough to spur me on to get one. Then several years later my wife was surprise pregnant with #4. I booked the vasectomy immediately. It turned out that 4 was our limit.
My point is that the more that each individual person has a hard limit of what number of kids they want to have, the less kids will be born. Vasectomies and tubectomies might be uncomfortable, but well worth it for the peace of mind of solidifying your limit. Birth control is well liked by some women, but many (like my wife) don't like how it makes them feel - and this can result in extra kids (we had originally talked about having just 2).
These decisions are made on the front end, not the back. Most of us have no idea what we are getting ourselves into - my kids are all teens and young adults now. We made these decisions back when we were barely adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_curve
Be more like frogs. Be less like...humans?
Uh…no. There was a time when humans commonly died in infancy, I don’t think any of us want to go back to that.
Thanks, Susan. I invoked the survivorship curve exactly to show what the “more kids/less parenting” motto can lead to. Low parental investment makes sense when you treat the loss of kids (or frog eggs) as an acceptable outcome.
It’s a strategy that also discounts the woman’s investment via pregnancy and childbirth, so it appeals to certain kinds of men. Men who look at kids and say, “easy come, easy go” are not themselves taking the risk of dying in childbirth.
This all is pretty much the same point I made a few weeks ago.
Basically, the take was that it's a combination of our "K-selection" strategy and the emergence of an enormous middle class. Our evolutionary hardwiring as social animals is maladapted to measure success against our neighbors/peers instead of the straight definition of having successfully reproduced at the replacement rate.
Agrarian/pre-industrial societies face a brutal survivorship curve, so K-selection means having a bunch of kids and then investing in the ones who survive childhood. There was little hope of graduating to the next level (nobility/bourgeoisie), so you just focused on getting those survivors to adulthood.
Industrialization changed the definition of success to "a decent factory job", which was better than toiling away on a farm. And modern medicine increased the survivorship rate, so of course absolute births plummeted to just about the replacement rate.
But they also created a large middle class whose next rung to aspire to was college. And now that we have widespread college education and an information-age economy, we have this enormous glut of people, and their definition of success is unreasonably high: the upper middle class. A globalized and social-network-ized media environment puts this lifestyle front and center to an ever-growing middle class.
Currently, the only way to get a kid from the middle to the upper-middle class is a combination of luck and a LOT of investment. An interesting note from sociology studies is that regardless of number of children, couples tend to spend the same overall proportion of income on them; so when MC couples are looking at a fixed budget for investing in their childrens' success, it's obvious that the best way to maximize entry to the UMC is to put all your eggs in one basket.
One final note is that UMC fertility is conspicuously *at or above replacement*! When parents don't have resource constraints on raising more UMC-eligible children, they simply keep rolling the dice on as many children as they want to have. Thus, my suspicion is that if we can unlock UMC-level abundance for the middle class, then they'll go back to having more kids.
Do you have a link for UMC fertility being at or above replacement? I hadn't seen that.
https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-us-are-the-ones-having-the-most-kids
This was the best one I could find in a 5-minute search. I'll post more if I can find them.
Ed: Here's one more.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenaebarnes/2022/07/10/elon-musk-isnt-the-only-billionaire-with-9-plus-kids-meet-the-us-richest-people-with-the-most-children/
jinx!!
Your last point is both one of the more optimistic and one of the more plausible. Only quibble is class status is always relative - once UMC abundance is common, it's not UMC anymore. I am Noah Smith-pilled on the likelihood of a near-in age of abundance, but I still think there's something that needs to happen culturally to get TFR back up. Not that I know what that is.
To build on Noah's article today, I think it's possible that what we're actually seeing with TFR is a dependence on energy abundance. Perhaps when we hit the combustion plateau he describes, it subverted families' expectations of continued relative growth.
RE class status, I think that the critical point about creating "UMC abundance" isn't that it "[won't be] UMC anymore" but that the abundance itself is what matters WRT unlocking TFR.
Right now, there are a lot of different product categories where relative status markers create a false impression of underabundance. Lamborghinis may be insanely expensive to make, but it's not all that hard to make Audi-shaped sedans relative to a Ford Focus-shaped one; and yet, most sedans on the market aren't as sexy as the Audi.
However, what we HAVE seen over the last several generations of the Focus (and its predecessor, the Taurus) is that an ugly-ass boxy car got slightly less boxy and eventually ended up mildly sexy, relative to the Audi which just *stayed sexy*. Technology is slowly closing a lot of these kinds of gaps, and perhaps that plateau Noah mentioned has had something to do with the recent slowness.
In the pessimistic view, perhaps we'll just ALWAYS be on a status-marker treadmill that keeps us trapped with low TFR. Even if everyone gets Audis, the Audis will just be considered the new Focus, and everyone will pine after the ultra-rich's Lamborghinis.
But in the optimistic view, even though the status markers matter, objective quality-of-life ALSO matters -- tastes vary, but the Audi is objectively sexier than the Focus, and is objectively a nicer car. Like that study about the "$70k income happiness threshold", there'll be some objective point at which people say "Yeah, sure, this is enough, I'm going to go back to having babies". And so, if we can create enough abundance that the marginal cost difference between an "Audi lifestyle" and a "Focus lifestyle" is minuscule, then people will start living like Audi owners and have kids whenever they feel like it.
IOW, if we can reduce the *absolute* level of investment required to make a "UMC-eligible" kid, by a combination of reducing the cost level of a "UMC lifestyle" and making all the inputs to the UMC kid likewise abundant, then maybe that's the recipe for recovering TFR.
UMC fertility is above replacement?
Source?
Or how are you defining UMC?
Anecdotally:
We're a top 10% income household and my peers do not generally seem to be at the 2.1 kids/family rate.
EDIT: I'm looking at the other reply now.
ADD'L EDIT: Possibly true for >500,000$ year/family, but that's 0.4% of households, so that's more than just UMC, that's RICH.
Sorry, I got a bit muddled there and misspoke. I was specifically imagining basically a combined class of the UC ("millionaires and billionaires") down to the segment of the UMC where TFR flips *above* replacement, wherever that actually happens to be.
The important aspect here isn't the specific *point* of the phase change, it's that there clearly does seem to be *A* point in the prosperity regime where a phase change happens. IE, where people are so well-off that they stop giving a shit about whether they're having too many children to sufficiently give them a shot at what I was calling the "Audi lifestyle".
And from there, the question becomes whether the point is objective or relative -- or rather, since we know it's probably a combination of BOTH, to what extent either aspect is true of TFR in the high-prosperity regime. Because the closer we are to "objective", the more hope we can have for a future where we might sprint to that level of abundance and head off the apparent demographic collapse facing us.
And the further we are from that... IE the closer we are to a hedonic treadmill where the newest Audi Lifestyle keeps becoming the next Focus Lifestyle, well, that also informs us about what other kinds of societal changes we might need to focus on instead of an abundance agenda.
Basically, IMO the entire exercise here is to determine whether the abundance agenda could actually solve TFR, or if there's something else we should be focusing on.
Please show a good link for the proposition that UMC fertility is well above replacement.
Replied to Ethics Gradient. Hope it helps!
I was referencing the level of parental involvement of the 1950's - 1980's, not the 1650's - 1680's.
The actuarial tables published by the Social Security Administration show this is a false choice. Fewer than 1 in 1000 of 5-15 year olds dies per annum. Even dead best parents enjoy great survival odds for their offspring.
This really resonates with me and is spot on.
My son is 16, just finishing his sophomore year of HS. He played rec baseball for several years and I was a coach and active participant in running the league for that time. What Matt says about travel teams being about making money is spot on. In my neighborhood league, they even expanded the number of travel teams per age group as demand increased. They just wanted to get more people paying and there were plenty of parents of mediocre players who didn't want to be left out of saying their kid was on a travel team. One thing not mentioned here is that not only do the non-travel teams get worse and less fun for the kids, but they get less fun for the parents too. Kids who are decent at playing tend to have more involved parents. Those more involved parents are more likely to volunteer with coaching and management of the league. When those kids go to travel, you have fewer parents available to help with the other teams and that makes doing it much harder. We even ran into a situation where participation in non travel teams was getting so low we had to band together with other rec leagues for competition and created de facto free travel leagues (!). I'm glad to say I resisted my son's requests and we never joined a travel team. I hope this is another bubble ripe for popping at some point.
Did year round travel baseball from basically 8-16. And all it got me was a blown out elbow and the vague sense that I wasted a decent amount of my childhood doing something that never really paid off.
Of course I made life long friends and learned all the normal lessons of youth sports, but hard to imagine not learning those if I just played locally my entire childhood.
Baseball in particular seems like the worst end of the cost/benefit curve for youth sports. The majority of time is spent actively sitting or standing in one place *by design.*
There's a reason South Park chose baseball for its youth sports lampoon.
The standing around part is not really the issue (if anything it's good to try to get Generation ADHD to focus on something like that), it's more that baseball can be really hard and pitching is an injury factory.
I wish that youth baseball had a rule that you have to rotate pitchers every inning. Gives more kids the chance to pitch, while also significantly decreases the pressure and chance for injury.
There are good guidelines from MLB:
https://www.mlb.com/pitch-smart
Making following them the norm or required helps.
Honestly I’d like to see these guidelines be more conservative. 95 pitches for a 13 year old on 4 days rest is very aggressive. IMO velocity training is the bigger danger for injuries than high pitch counts but still being more conservative with pitch counts would surely help.
I earnestly think that being bored is an important life skill that is being lost, or maybe has already been lost. Constant stimulation is not good for us.
It is and like Ben, I played travel baseball. For that reason, I almost don't want my almost 5 year old to take to much to baseball - selfishly I don't want to give up my entire life for travel baseball and I'm not sold it's a good thing for him anyways.
I feel the exact same way about my travel experience. It was great, but me and almost everyone I played with had no beyond-high school playing career. I could have gotten a similarly beneficial experience from rec ball which was far cheaper and didn't involve like 6 hours (!!) in the car a week.
Baseball I think is especially pernicious in that there seems to be at least some evidence that for pitchers its leading to more arm problems. In other words in the past, kids were more likely to be playing a variety of sports whereas today you're more likely to get kids only playing the one sport. But for pitchers that leads to a lot more stress on elbows and arms generally and result is more injury. https://www.jshoulderelbow.org/article/S1058-2746(23)00116-7/fulltext
I see you as the grizzled veteran who will be the coach of the Slow Boring baseball team, as we travel to play against Barro and Deboer and them.
I just listened to a podcast on this topic last night, and "blown-out elbow" was specifically discussed. As an aging adult with chronic tennis elbow, I'm sorry you had to endure this as a kid!
Yeah this is great point about the parental selection.
As someone who grew up where travel sports weren’t much of a Thing I’ve always wondered what the driver is for their adoption. It seems like such a UMC striver thing to do, but UMC strivers as a class presumably make all their money in white collar professions and as a class are aware that aspiring to play Div 1 sports in college (which should not be the end of anyone’s career aspirations) let alone professionally, are not realistic aspirations for a supermajority of individuals.
In that respect the disconnect or missing part of the adoption story seems like the bootstrapping part of this: how is it even individually welfare-enhancing to spend a ton of cash and waste all your weekends for a marginal boost towards an unrealistic aspiration that (assuming it maxes out at college because it usually requires borderline insanity or ludicrously improbable talent to aspire to play professionally) doesn’t even reflect a terminally useful career path?
I’m going to expand my answer in another post but I really think the answer here is college admissions.
Even if you’re a kid has no chance at going to the Olympics, having multiple sports on your college resume is giving you a big leg up in getting into the college you want to go to. And notice I didn’t mention anything about scholarships. This is purely padding the resume stuff.
One of the very correct pushbacks against getting rid of testing and SAT was people pointing out that all you’re going to is make it easier, not harder, for rich kids to game the system. The pushback focused on stuff like college essays but the more likely avenue is stuff like sports participation. I also think this is a case where the revenue generating sports of basketball and football warps this conversation. Those sports have a disproportionate number of black athletes often from disadvantaged backgrounds. I think as a result it creates a perception that sports is leveler, when in fact for the vast majority of sports it’s the opposite.
Yup. It’s also why parents maniacally push their kids in cello and yearbook and pay for the stupid “volunteering” safaris.
Can we just base admissions on scholastic aptitude please? Scores, grades, and any other evidence of intellectual prowess (math team counts). We’ll have fairer admissions and happier kids.
I've known people who graduated from places like Yale and don't like to talk about it specifically because they got in because of sports like tennis and felt they basically jumped the queue academically.
Ramey, Garey, and Valerie A. Ramey. "The Rug Rat Race." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2010, no. 1 (2010): 129-176.
See this article which argues that time spent parenting teens went way up for white college-educated parents in the late 1990s as the large millennial birth cohort was aging into college years and thereby created more competition for admission.
I suspect an additional factor was that after several states banned affirmative action in the late 90s, many state universities switched to 100% holistic admissions (as compared to previously admitting much of the class via GPA+SAT alone) and SCOTUS blessed this change in Grutter. This meant that being "well rounded" went from a particular strategy to a universal one and sports went from "you might get a scholarship" for Gen X to practically an admissions requirement for millennials.
This is just a weird claim that sports help substantially. I was a mediocre high school athlete who played for 3 years, and still went to Stanford because you know I was actually good at school. I think people are kidding themselves if they think “played two varsity sports at a B- level” is a good strategy for getting into their desired college.
You're missing the point. It doesn't help at the "B- level", it helps at the "A+" level.
If Stanford is looking at 2 different A+ students, the one who does two varsity sports will look more well-rounded and highly-motivated than the one who spent all that time in the library.
Fair or not, that's the calculus that a lot of administrators leaned into.
As a former coach I suspect it helps at the B- level as well, particularly at small schools. Lots of marginally academic students get into small schooks that they could not qualify for if they play a major sport (football, basketball, baseball and increasingly soccer).
At the NAIA they can even get some scholarships/grants and in the NCAA I suspect they get a leg up on some financial aid.
Granted, taking up rowing to help with college is definitely an ivy league thing but being good at a popular sport still helps in some instances.
I agree with your point, but note that he's saying the sports were played at a B- level, not the academics.
Sports had zero to my getting into college. I read my application it was not remarked upon!
I think the point is that admissions to top level colleges is a very "on the margin" issue. Which means you're correct to note that if you're grades and test scores are mediocre but you play varsity sports, you're probably not getting into Stanford (or Harvard or Yale etc.).
But reality is even if you limit applications to those with GPA of 4.0 or higher and SAT scores in 90% percentile, you're still going to have way more applicants than slots available. Which is where the extra stuff comes in and specifically sports that are really only open to kids with parents of means.
End result is stuff like this. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/12/05/country-club-sports-and-pay-to-play-pipelines-does-athletic-recruitment-favor-certain-yale-applicants-2/
"I think people are kidding themselves if they think 'played two varsity sports at a B- level' is a good strategy for getting into their desired college. "
Maybe. But for a very long time, the high school I attended published where each student attended college. For at least a decade, the only students who attended Princeton had a sports scholarship.
As Colin mentioned, I was fairly close to the student he described academically and I didn’t get into Stanford when I applied around 15 years ago. I’m curious when you went to Stanford.
Applied and was wait listed to Georgetown. I actually ended up eventually getting accepted but only after I had sent my acceptance letter to William & Mary.
Point being I was almost the definition of the marginal "last one in". I basically found out later kind of randomly that if I had played a high school sport, even as a benchwarmer, I would have been accepted first time round without being wait listed at all.
Worth mentioning as I have some personal experience with this.
I think its less about college admissions and more about the people doing this are competitive. I work with a decent number of people who went to state schools and expect their kids to go to their alma mater. They still get into travel sports because they are competitive, want their kids to be competitive, and to win.
I suspect most members of the UMC find it a lot easier to brag to their neighbors about what awesome things their kids are doing than about how much money they're making. The latter is gauche whereas the former supposedly reflects well on you as a parent, not to mention your awesome genes.
For sure. But UMC with kids has got to be 15% of the population with kids tops. This phenomenon goes way further than that. I have some very blue collar extended family (that do make decent money as plumbers) who are deep into the travel leagues with their kids.
Important distinction--sports can be an extracurricular like any other OR if you're really good, can totally change the odds of getting in. And not just basketball and football--we're talking about cross country runners 200 points below the average SAT score at Princeton (or wherever) getting in. The teams aren't entirely made up of people below the normal academic standard but it's common practice at a kind of shocking number of places and sports. Actually kind of hard to say why these schools do it though I guess there was that NYT article about how Wesleyan got a lot of donations when they started winning their conference in football
It’s not difficult to get admitted to college, in general, and I don’t think too many youth sports add to your resume, SAT or not. I just sent off a pair of kids and I don’t know that it was even part of the application, let alone a criterion.
Again I think we need to distinguish between all schools and elite schools. As Matt notes repeatedly (and correctly) most people who attend colleges are not attending the highly selective schools.
But I think the point is there is enough upper middle class and upper class parents who are desperate to get their kids into elite schools that it ends up having knock on effects in other walks of life. And one of those knock on effects is how youth sports operate.
I think one thing Matt is getting at is the people and kids probably most harmed by this "pay for play" system are the kids least likely to go to college at all.
Yes resume padding has gotten out of control as well
Because it is not about the unrealistic expectation of a college scholarship. That's a misconception.
It is about:
- striver parents wanting their kid to have a chance to play high school sports, which probably carries some amount of boost/ prestige to the kid at that time, at least in American cultural folklore
- competitive parents who want their kid to play higher competition, tougher games with other similarly motivated kids and coaches rather than the sort of lackadaisacal local rec league where some portion of the kids are unskilled / forced to be there despite hating sports
- conformist parents who are pushed into it so that their kid isn't "the only one not on a team" who do then end up creating their semblance of community and interaction via the team and parents
I did the competitive travel soccer thing and my mom did not approve. My Dad took me through it (assistant coach for a while, took me to all the games) because I was super competitive and I loved it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed a rec league because I would have been so much better than everyone else. They didn’t let me go to an additional training program on top that a lot of girls did aimed at getting scholarships bc they actually didn’t want me to get a scholarship- my dad was a college athlete, and as he says ‘they own you’
The thing is, absent the travel teams, the rec teams, add in a couple of all star games and the rec teams would have been competitive.
yep - a collective action problem. I do think the biggest problem though is when you end up with multiple layers of travel teams and even the kids who are good play travel instead of just the few kids who are outstanding
It's hard to get a scholarship for sports that many kids play. It's easier to get one if you choose a less popular sport like tennis.
But what you are saying about making varsity teams is true. In a big school it's hard to make the varsity team at all let alone get significant playing time. This is actually why many parents choose private or parochial schools--less competition in sports. Of course this costs a ton of money too..
Consider also that apart from actually getting a scholarship, colleges do select for kids who excel in extracurriculars and having lots of varsity letters helps your application.
It also gives you as a parent status among other parents as having a kid on varsity squad.
Tennis scholarships are pretty hard, given the fact that teams are just smaller and it requires years of hard work and lots of lots of money to be good enough.
Rowing is something that has a decent amount of roster spots, isn't super expensive, and you only really need to do for maybe 5-6 years to be good enough (it really just depends on build).
Or you could just call Rick Singer!
At my daughter's public high school there were about 10 students with commitments to play college sports. One was the start of my daughter's water polo team, one was a shotput thrower, one cross country, three were ultimate frisbee players and the rest were all rowers. This is likely because Seattle has a lot more rowers and ultimate frisbee players than most towns. But I was surprised how many rowers we had for a fairly low income public high school. I was also shocked that playing college ultimate frisbee was a thing!
Agree. Rowing or lacrosse better examples..
Parent status and/or parents living vicariously is definitely a thing. (FWIW, also, it's really hard to get a D1 scholarship in tennis due to international recruiting. You'd be better off with a true esoteric sport like crew or diving or something, probably.)
Right...tennis might be a bad example. Crew is a better one..
I honestly don't think the PMC parents who are the main drivers of the status competition know anything else other than to be extremely purposeful about piling up the skills, the credentials, the resumes, the profiles that supposedly set them apart in the market. This was the strategy they followed in their own lives and careers so they know no different than to get their kids into the same treadmill early in life.
If everyone else is shelling out big money to purchase an advantage for the other kids, what will they do with their own?
I played in travel leagues in a suburb the 1990s when they were first becoming a thing. The cultural class divide back then was that the working class were more sports-focused than the UMC. The one way UMC values were expressed was putting your kids in soccer (which the children of high-achieving immigrants played) vs. hockey/baseball, which tended to be more culturally working class. If anything, the working class was a lot more focused on college sports since the UMC didn't really have a local college sports fandom.
What's UMC?
Upper middle class.
Got it. I was using PMC as this professionalization of youth sports leagues is a distinctive quirk of how managerial professionals have learned to approach life.
My experience both growing up and seeing this as an adult is that it’s much more of a phenomenon among well off but not well educated parents. For many people in that group doing something that specifically isn’t education focused is the point.
That being said iirc certain sports are played because they do make it easier to get into an elite private school eg lacrosse.
“kids who are decent tend to have more involved parents”
not sure. perhaps parents are more likely to put skin in the game when their kids are “decent” or better.
Surely it's both.
The reintroduction of test scores into college admissions (SATs, ACTs) may help this a bit by reducing the weight of sports and other extracurriculars in admissions decisions.
The admissions scandals of a few years ago involved fake sports participation in part because elite schools shifted from grades and test scores to a variety of metrics that were even easier to buy and fake.
ETA: the admissions-driven pressure to have some sports on your application is not limited to cases involving Harvard and fencing. Lots of parents want their kid to go to a *better* school, at whatever level of better that is. And if they consult the high school counselors, they will hear that listing sports activity increases their kids chance of getting into a better school.
I wish that were true, but I doubt it is. The travel sports thing has become so big that I don't think many people even consciously connect it with college any more. Most familes participating have no elite college goals
The end goal of most of the kids in my travel baseball program was to go and play at a DII school and then get drafted.
Uffda. I know the baseball draft goes like 37 rounds or something, but I would think the success rate of DII draftees at converting baseball into a gainful career is... not high.
It is not!
That is unusual, especially in elementary and middle school, but baseball might be different. It is not at all popular where I live. I am more familiar with soccer, hockey, swimming.
Those schools still weighted grades and test scores highly…them requiring test scores again isn’t going to make sports or other ECs less relevant
You *could* prohibit public schools from considering non academics in admissions to an academic institution couldn’t you?
The problem is, I think the instinct for seeking well-rounded applicants is fundamentally a good one.
Of course, "I spend every waking hour in travel sports" is not well-rounded. As an admissions officer, I don't know how you incentivize "you dabbled in sports enough to challenge yourself in something you're not naturally talented in, and enough to develop good habits, but you didn't let it monopolize your life either".
Why, though? Why should piano playing and oil painting prowess make someone a better chemical engineering student? Why should those things be relevant to one’s opportunity to pursue chemical engineering at the college of their choice?
Well roundedness is important to general life success and fulfillment. It’s just not clear to me why a college should care. I would love to see colleges step back from serving as nannies. At 18, you’re responsible for your own personal development. The school is responsible for teaching you academic material and giving you opportunities to apply it.
No matter how into chemistry a high school kid is, they will run into novel chemistry-related challenges as a chemical engineering student. Having a more diverse set of life experiences is going to be associated with a demonstrated propensity for successfully tackling those challenges.
Ultra-narrow-focus one-trackers are, in my anecdotal experience, prone to brittleness, insular failure, and burnout.
>> Having a more diverse set of life experiences is going to be associated with a demonstrated propensity for successfully tackling those challenges.
I doubt it. It’s the kid with the scientific aptitude who’d succeed best. Combined with correct academic habits, of course, which could be assessed by a competent admissions process.
The evidence is on Sharty's side in this. I no longer have jstor access, but this page links to several of the relevant studies, and breaks down their implications:
https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2024/01/beyond-the-renaissance-nobel-laureates-and-their-creative-pursuits/
Creative (non-science related) pursuits reinforce scientific creativity.
P.S. I think it’s ultimately a problem if k-12 education. Bright kids are forced to think for themselves and work hard in school way to rarely so you have to use very poor proxies like how they meet the challenges of an athletic competition.
Obviously if you had to pick a single predictor of college success, you would use K-12 educational success, but I think this is a false dilemma. Conditioned on already using K-12 educational success (and other academic-adjacent measurements like the SAT), I just disagree with your assessment that athletic hard work (c.f., athletic success) is a low-value predictor.
It wouldn't surprise me if many admissions officers unconsciously resent the nerdy STEM students and prefer the more "well-rounded" types because the latter remind them more of themselves.
Underrated point and comment, I think.
Colleges are probably looking for the most impressive future graduates, who are not just super talented in engineering but have a thriving hobby of painting they showcase in galleries, or whatever.
But why?
Well, isn't part of the idea that colleges want students who are well-placed for general life success and fulfillment? That makes them look better and it also benefits other students to be on campus with such students.
Thank you. Precisely. Only academics should matter. College is supposed to be an institution of higher learning. Everything else is or ought to be ancillary.
But the boundaries just aren't that clear. Even elite universities and liberal arts colleges have serious art, music, and dance programs. Additionally, they would usually like to have a functional school papers, field completely-staffed student governments, etc., have academic elements.
An art program should examine the candidate's art portfolio, a music program should hear them perform, a dance program should watch them perform etc. Academic programs similarly should assess their academics. You don't recruit nba players holistically. Students of history or chemistry are no different. Assess them based on the relevant knowledge and skiils. How well you can throw and catch a ball (or how far you can jump etc.) has nothing to do with your ability to solve equations or read and analyze texts. It's not rocket science (but the same principle applies when it is!).
Except they were never that, even back in the 1600's when it was only Harvard and three other colleges in the whole of the colonies.
I don't get this obsession a certain group of people have for turning college into the highest quality possible ITT Tech.
Expect just about every university outside the states doesn’t participate in the classist nonsense that’s non-academic admissions criteria, and hasn’t for generations (if ever). I don’t know what “itt tech” means, but I know what universities are about, and it’s called academics.
I don’t think that’s right. College is a time of personal development, with academics being the focal aspect of that, but not the only aspect. In any case, I would rather attend, and would rather my kids attend, and would rather teach at, a place where the people are good at school but have other interests too, rather than a place where the people are laser focused on academics and studying and don’t have outside interests.
Oxford and Cambridge have lots of strong student traditions, including athletic ones. As far as I know all of these are considered hobbies.* Their admissions are 100% academic merit, and to my knowledge the school doesn’t helicopter student life either. I am all for genuine school tradition and school spirit and student having a full life, running their own clubs and organizations and competing in sports against each other and rival schools. Selecting them to produce this artificially in a way micromanaged by an ever growing admin class isn’t the way to go. Concentrate bright young people in one place and challenge them academically. They’ll do the rest best if the old profs stay out of all non academic matters (and the old admins interfere to the bare minimum).
“ You *could* prohibit public schools from considering non academics…”
Not just anyone could do that, but I certainly could.
Good luck with that in Alabama, Nebraska, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, or any other state with a big time college sports program.
Just say that they can only take account of athletics if they are offering an athletic scholarship.
No scholarship, no benefit from "well-roundedness", or "might be a useful walkon".
Huh? There is a difference between a few students who get athletic scholarships to play a specific sport and the vast majority who are the rest. If you have a good SAT and apply to Bama you will most likely get in. That is not the case for Harvard.
Yeah. I’m fully aware that’s the least feasible of all my recommendations…
It wouldn't have to be every school or state in America to make a difference.
I'm not sure these big public schools really use them as much anyway. When you have 20,000 undergrads your athletes are a pretty small portion of your enrollment.
Good colleges don’t care whether you played travel sports. My college counselors knew this, and told me as much. For kids at elite high schools or in elite milieus (like the one I grew up in), travel sports was the one thing I did in high school that wasn’t a means to getting into college. Without it, my high school life would’ve been MORE focused on college and the admissions rate race. This is backwards.
I'm curious what your school's counselors thought was important if you were competing with many other 4.0 students from across the country in admissions. They may have (potentially correctly) assumed that a 4.0 from your school carried more weight than a 4.0 from a less elite public school.
They stressed having good admissions essays, and doing interesting extracurriculars (travel sports isn’t interesting). And having incredible grades and test scores. As you say, they correctly assessed that I was only ever competing with other prep school kids. They also followed a rigid internal ranking system. I wasn’t to apply early to Harvard or Yale where I wouldn’t get in (but 10 of my classmates with better grades would) and throw away my chance of getting into a school like Dartmouth early when it was harder to get in regular. So that’s what I did.
Thanks for outlining that, I'm curious about the extracurriculars that were high value-add in their view.
I can only assume that my membership in the Anime Club wasn't interesting enough!
Anything that made you “stand out” is what they would tell us. It was always vague. I was on the school improv troupe (LA is a weird place) and I did a good amount of community service. I also played classical guitar. Varsity and travel soccer were my boring extracurriculars. I get tired just thinking back to high school.
No. Travel sports was well out of control before schools started their experiment of dropping admissions tests. A few realities at play:
1) Even with tests, kids with perfect grades and scores get rejected.
2) Sports are a status thing among parents and possibly to a lesser extent the kids. My kid doesn’t really do sports. But all other parents seem to be able to talk about is their kids’ sports exploits.
The financialization of every once good thing in American cannot fail. It can only be failed.
Joking aside, it does seem like this sometimes. More and more aspects of society these days appear to be an intense dance between status spending (on the one hand) and the efforts of firms only too happy to supply the market for status spending. Look at what people spend on health clubs, exercise gear and the like. Hiking is no longer a nice way to get exercise while you see the outdoors—it's a reason to spend $350 on hiking boots. And don't get me started on golf. And definitely don't get me started on cycling. One of my brothers (the childless one who does triathlons) dropped eight grand on a racing bike. He's a middle aged tech executive, not an Olympic hopeful.
I'm deeply neoliberal to the core, but I'll admit to also having a socialist inner voice that sometimes whispers "Government could be expanded by a lot because, let's face it, PMC Americans actually have more money than they know what to do with."
My other brother has a son who is a hockey player and, well, this is in a rather hockey-obsessed part of suburban Boston. So he built a hockey rink in his back yard.
It's funny, because you can sort of extend this to sporting events themselves. Because the phenomenon of extremely rich people getting box seats or sitting courtside is actually more recent than we think (Showtime Lakes I think is a big change in the culture here).
But for decades, attending baseball or football games in America or attending soccer games in places like England was considered a very working class way of spending your leisure time. Indeed, in England, there was a definite sense where if you were "middle class" you dare not say you're a fan of "the footy" let alone go to the game. It's striking to back to the 80s and see how Thatcher and advisors close to Thatcher talked about soccer and hear the absolute disdain in their voice*. Now granted, this was in part due to the very real hooliganism problem that existed. But it very clearly went beyond that to a kind of ugly class based disgust for anyone who goes to games.
Now? To bring back to America. My friend's dad was able to in 1969 on the day of the game go to Shea stadium, buy a ticket and attend a World Series game. He was a teenager at the time. Read that again. There's absolutely no scenario where that is happening today.
I really don't want to go full on "back in the good ole days" here. There is A LOT about the fan experience is wildly better than it used to be (see above regarding England and hooliganism. Going to a match involved the very real possibility of getting serious injured or even killed). But there is something really wrong to me about the fact we've made attending sporting events a pretty financially exclusive pursuit.
*If you read about the Hillsboroguh disaster, it's amazing how much class disdain and specific disdain for people who come from the city of Liverpool helped create the disaster in the first place, led to a very real cover up and led to some astonishingly awful news coverage that has warped popular conception of that event to this day. Look up The Sun newspaper and Hillsborough. You think Murdoch media is bad here, it's is miles worse in the UK.
I mean, there are more people and they’re richer, but there’s still only one World Series and sports fields aren’t getting any larger. Attendance at sub-professional apex sports like AAA ball and non-Div I college games is still dirt cheap.
Take a look at the ticket price on this ticket stub for a Mezzanine level seat. https://goldinauctions.com/1969_world_series_game_4_ticket_stub___tom_seaver_-lot16785.aspx
Cost is $10 or $85 today with inflation.
Game 1 of the 2023 World Series in Arlington. Cheapest standing room seat was $451 and cheapest actual seat was $774. https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/sports/red-fever/heres-how-much-world-series-tickets-cost-for-games-in-texas-and-arizona/3369661/
Even accounting for the fact that World Series is the pinnacle sporting event, that is an incredible increase in price from 1969. Part of the story here is we are a richer country today which means more people have the financial means to attend this event. In addition, more people have cars which means you're expanding the pool of people who can physically attend the event. Lastly, plane tickets have famously dropped making it easier to fly in from out of town.
But even with all that, we're still talking about some pretty pricey tickets. No way you can charge that amount unless there has been a cultural change around going to sporting events. I think at this point, we can call box seats for the biggest sporting events possibly the ultimate example of "Veblen" goods.
Probably worth noting that box seats are ~ only purchased by businesses and they're only sold through season and / or stadium all packages (e.g., the mercedez benz box seats cover Falcons games but also every event the stadium hosts). I think it's the opposite of a "veblen" good in that those packages have ROIs associated with them and are negotiated pretty intensely.
Interesting set of statistics! Although for Veblen goods exemplars I'd guess that handbags beat box seats by a country mile. (Also, basically anything of or relating to high end watches.)
Ed.: on reflection, I think I'd need a clearer set of metrics t make that assessment because you specified the "biggest sporting events," where stuff really has gone absolutely nuts.
Right and to piggyback off of "David in Chicago" he's right to note that box seats for regular season games are often purchased by companies. So yes, if you factor in that the purchase of box seats for those games are really about sales and not really different from eating out at an expensive steakhouse in order to finalize a deal.
But yeah biggest sporting events is a different story. The example that was coming to my head was the phenomenon of the V.V.I.P section at the Qatar World Cup in 2022 which is obviously the very biggest sporting even. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/sports/soccer/qatar-world-cup-vip.html
The VVIP section was in part about the booze issue; officially Qatar bans alcohol but if you're important enough or rich enough you can get it easily. But it also seems very clear to me that it was in large measure status; a way to show you're elite even among the elite. One of the details in this story that was hilarious is this "There is also, according to someone who has been in it, a suite at Al Bayt that, for some reason, boasts a retractable bed and a bathroom equipped with a shower." The qualifier "for some reason" is perfect because the writer is very clearly pointing out how utterly unnecessary this should be. What possible circumstance are you taking a shower at World Cup game (Qatar is famously quite hot, but these are climate controlled suites. If you can afford this, you're arriving in a fancy limo and have some climate controlled entrance). Like paying extra to have a shower in your suite is just pure "look at how rich I am" showing off.
World Series ticket prices are very much a Baumol Disease phenomenon.
Britain - I won't get into America, because I don't understand American class dynamics - used to have a really strong class divide in sports. Football (soccer) and rugby league were only for the working class; cricket had a class divide in where you sat (the pavilion was only for members, which were middle-class; the open seating was for the working class). Rugby union was middle-class (except in Cornwall and Wales). Horse racing included upper-class as well as middle and working, with various class-segregation on the seating and also in which events they went to. The truly upper-class sport is polo.
These divides are breaking down: a lot more middle-class people watch football which has pushed prices up at the top-level and pushed many working-class fans to lower level teams or to watching on TV. A lot of the former class-segregation at events that had it is just ticket-price segregation now - the only real exceptions are membership of some cricket clubs (especially the Marylebone Cricket Club) and the Royal Enclosures at some horse-racing, where people who are nouvelle riche and don't ape upper-class manners will be excluded regardless of how much money they have.
This is just a function of population growth (200m in 1969 vs. 333m today) and GDP growth. Both good things. It's the same with everyone bitching about skiing. Yes, I loved skiing for $50 a day and zero lines in the 90s but inflation adjusted that's still $125 in today's money and I'm paying $175 at the same mountains for WAY more terrain, 10x better lifts, and better grooming. All you got to do is manage the lines. Which can be done.
“…we've made attending sporting events a pretty financially exclusive pursuit.…”
There are Yankees tickets available for the July 2nd game for less than $20 each. You can go see the dead-last in their division Marlins for $12.
This is some real cherry picking here.
Marlins had the second worst attendance in all of baseball in 2023. The only team worse was Oakland and there are some very specific reasons related to the owners trying to move the team that is impacting things with the A's. https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance/_/year/2023/sort/allAvg
Regarding the Yankees. Yes, it is strictly true you can get tickets for $25. But take a look; those are standing room only seats. There are actually tickets for $35 for a Blue Jays game two weeks from that date, but again we're talking some of the very worst seats in the entire stadium. We're also talking about regular season baseball in July; 162 games and in middle of the hottest part of the year when people are most likely to be vacationing.
If you're point is that it is technically possible to attend a baseball game on the cheap then yes that is strictly true. But we're talking about the "edge" cases of a typical fan experience given your examples.
It’s the opposite of cherry picking: The Yankees are in second place for attendance:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/attendance
$19.20 gets you a reserved seat on the upper deck.
Yes. Attending sporting events has become massively more expensive...needless to say in ways that inflation measures don't catch.
Why?..
Algorithmic pricing models that are increasingly sophisticated in extracting top dollar from customers giving music performers, sports teams less incentive to cater to broad fan base and instead the top 10-20%. Disney is the same way.
Relatedly teams would prefer to sell only half their seats at much higher prices because the fan base that shells out more per ticket also spends much more when they get to the park.
All this creates a society that feels much less democratic over time where more people feel like losers.who are falling behind in their ability to afford things that used to even as median real incomes tick up.
And neoliberal economists can't figure out why people are unhappy.
This makes no sense. You can price discriminate by seat quality so you don't need to price on-average above demand. Said differently - every professional sports team is trying to fill their stadium. The ones that don't have demand problems even at $0 tickets.
I would gladly pay more than $350 on hiking boots if I could find good ones. Recently, my 30 year old Vasque leather hiking boots fell apart. Those boots took me through mountains and mud and creeks and ice and slides comfortably, easily, and safely. I was going to replace them with the same model, but the reviews said the model is now made much more cheaply in China rather than in Italy like they were when I bought them, and they aren't as good and don't hold up. So I got a cheaper pair of LL Bean boots and am sorely missing my old ones. Now that I am in my 50s, I definitely need boots for the ankle support. Suggestions for brands to look at welcome!
Avid hiker Nicholas Kristof (of NY Times fame) advocates wearing running shoes. I think he's on to something. He claims the light weight more than makes up for any drawbacks.
This seems plausible to me for dayhikes, but if you’re doing a multiday backcountry trip with a 70L pack or something I think the case for coddling one’s feet gets stronger while the marginal weight significance gets weaker.
Trail runners are the answer - more comfortable, lighter, and one underrated advantage is if they get wet, they dry very quickly compared to goretex boots. I would also try to downsize to a 60-65L pack and be careful about weight. I've done 10 days with a 35# pack, food and water included.
I have done this, but the grip is so much worse, that I am unwilling to tackle more challenging heights with them.
Trail running shoes have soles much more suited to dirt&rocks than road running shoes.
I mean maybe on perfectly flat and prepared trails but wear running shoes on any hikes over rocks (e.g., any probably interesting hike, any hike in Yosemite) and you're gonna bruise your feet within the first three hours.
Even without ankle support?
Absolutely. Trail running shoes built for 100K and even longer ultras are absolutely fine for multi-day hiking trips with packs. I usually grab my oldest pair of trail shoes and throw them away at the end of the hiking trip. Topo Athletic trail shoes are my current go-tos.
They’re not boots per se but I got a pair of Hoka Speedgoats last year before a trip to Glacier and I love them. I was *very* skeptical but they’re grippy and comfortable (and I got the Gore Tex ones so they also keep my feet dry). Probably not BIFL, but better than the LL Bean ones of mine that also fell apart.
Where did you hike in Glacier? The sunset at Upper Quartz Lake is still probably the most serene place I've ever been.
Unfortunately we were there with extended family who were not as into hiking as they had professed to be prior to the trip (they also live in MT, had the pass, and controlled driving 😕), so we were mostly limited to the not-super-long/elevated trails around Lake McDonald and Avalanche Lake. It was also May, some areas were still inaccessible, and there was quite a bit of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Still amazing though! Sadly, we did not see a sunset, I can only imagine how spectacular that was. Can't wait to go back and do it right!
Thanks! Will look for these.
I thought these were great for 8-10 hour hikes but they're not waterproof so wouldn't recommend them if expecting wet conditions. Very light, amazing cushion. I did wear them one day around a waterfall and grip was great but - again - not waterproof. More just recommending On Cloud here because you'd probably want the higher ankle models too.
https://www.on.com/en-us/products/cloudtrax-53/mens/ink-frost-shoes-53.99055
Oh wow. I never heard of these. The traction looks great, and they do have waterproof models. Thanks!
I have the waterproof on cloud hikers from a few years ago, they're great!
Yeah. It's interesting. I only picked these up because (1) they're like $110 and why not but (2) I have three friends with plantar fasciitis and all three swear by them. They held up perfect for me on a couple big hikes.
+1000 points for recommendations of specific products from actual humans with experience with them and no commercial stake in the outcome.
Waterproof shoes hiking are a double edged sword- it also means they take FOREVER to dry should they get wet. I prefer trail runners, and if they get wet or I just get too lazy to take them off during a stream crossing, I take them off on the other side, shake them out vigorously, and them swap in a pair of dry socks. They will be totally dry very soon.
Yeah. I agree and why I don't hike in waterproof shoes. My experience is they also "feel" like they breath less and get hotter / sweatier (word?). I know Gore-Tex swears the material breaths the same and / or more but it's just not my experience.
Well. Until you're winter hiking, then it's kind of mandatory....
Zamberlain. Made in Italy.
I would definitely rather your brother spend 8 grand on a bike he likes (supporting a business in the process to boot) rather than having it be confiscated by the government and spent by Donald Trump on his own companies or Biden hiring regulators to stop building LNG terminals.
Regardless the inclination to try and rob people of money because they are spending it the “wrong way” on consumption that doesn’t fit your aesthetic preferences and not for any genuine revenue need is a dark impulse, which you should resist. Tall poppy stuff is dark.
But I wouldn't be robbing them. I'd be taxing them. You're not one of those dreary CATO-types who thinks taxation is theft, are you (please say "no")? And there *is* a "genuine revenue need." Interest rates are too damn high. And we realistically probably have to spend more on the military. And we need a public option dammit. And a universal child benefit. And one or two other things.
I'd just "feel better* about crimping the consumption of affluent Americans, is all. I certainly don't advocate doing so unnecessarily! (I did mention I'm a neoliberal. The socialist part is just a voice that whispers from time to time to keep my honest.)
I'm all for increasing government revenue to more closely match its expenditures, and would support mild expansion of a couple of the things you listed. But the whole "I'd just *feel better* about crimping the consumption of affluent Americans" is a puritanical impulse I'd encourage you to avoid.
Well said.
I love it .this is almost exactly my comment below.
The fundamental problem here is too much income chasing too many narrow dreams.
And the ultimate solution, somehow, is find a way to open up the economy that has become too winner-take-all and consolidated at the top, expand the field of dreams that people see as realistic to pursue (pun intended).
To put it in classic American political terms, we've been in a period of Hamiltonian centralization, and need to course correct for a while towards more Jeffersonian decentralization.
Agree 1000%
Liberals get annoyed when conservatives wax nostalgic for earlier eras but
There was of course elite status competition in the 50s but it was mitigated by the fact that
Fewer people had the after tax income to wage it.
Access to things really was more democratic. GE executives played in the same corporate golf clubs that line workers did.
Mandatory military service even if just national guard promoted more mixing of classes and the reminder of a broader civilizational purpose than just getting your own kid into a top college.
Yes I know...50s bad for blacks, women, gays etc but can we reach middle ground her
All the iconic country clubs started in the late 1800s / early 1900s (e.g., Shinnecock, Winged Foot). Are you assuming that the GE Execs of the 50s were so *low* status that they couldn't get into the iconic clubs? I can't follow what a "corporate golf club" is here exactly. Is it a lower-tier private country club or a public golf course?
A lot of the big companies had their own recreational facilities that were primarily for executives but open to all employees..in a high MTR environment this was a way of funneling tax free compensation to workers.
https://www.golflink.com/golf-courses/oh/cincinnati/general-electric-employees-activity-association
https://www.mlive.com/auto/2009/09/general_motors_getting_out_of.html
GE Execs at that time were living in NY / Connecticut and they weren't playing that course when they came through town. Maybe regional VPs and / or plant management were. But that's like 2-3 levels down from the Exec. team. Same for GM and Ford in Detroit. Michigan has some of the best country clubs in the US for a reason.
Yeah, the lifestyle creep of fancy fitness activities is totally real. Luckily Planet Fitness for gyms and Sierra for outdoor goods are going strong, so you can opt out of the craziness if you want to.
A hockey rink in your back yard is very conceivably a cost-saving measure!
I mean, I think he did most of the work himself, so, it probably wasn't some huge expense. Just thought I'd throw that in my original comment as it seemed to kinda humorously fit. Although in the case of my brother, I'd be massively surprised if in any way, shape or form it was a money-saver.
It's interesting- West Virginia is trying to crank its tourism bux by being attractive to travel teams now and building these huge sports plexes and it all feels like a big ol bubble that's going to pop about as soon as the ribbon gets cut on the new sportsplex they're building in Charleston.
I do think we need to cultivate recreational leagues, and honestly I don't know how, but one thing i've seen way more of lately is people being afraid to even try to do things they're not good at.
There was a post before that was like "I want a league where you and I both know our 6 year olds aren't going pro"
Part of my job involves building these types of facilities for a local government on the east coast and the arms race to build professional level facilities as a tax and tourism driver is completely nuts.
Some of them will be great community assets but a lot of them are wildly expensive niche use boondoggles that suck up limited public parks dollars
Thank you for this info. My city is considering a soccer stadium. Private funders approached the city about doing this and would be providing the bulk of the money to build, but I haven't heard much about maintenance. I will be asking questions!
My inclination would be to try to steal the top-prestige position that these expensive commercial travel teams from them.
Encourage pro sports and big-time college sports to run their own junior teams, but to fund them, so they are not pay-for-play for parents. These teams will be hard to get into and highly meritocratic (and oriented towards training future players not to winning U11 tournaments). Because they will be the highest-prestige teams, they will take away prestige from the commercial travel teams. That will mean that parents of children who have above-average athleticism and talent but not the elite levels that can get them into these "academy" teams are going to start pulling their kids out of these expensive commercial teams and putting them into cheaper local neighborhood teams where they can have fun, because they recognise they can't get into elite sport.
That's not going to kill the commercial travel teams, but it can create a bit of a spiral where their best players are being taken away by the academies and their weakest players, realising they're never going to get into the academies are pulling out for local teams. They're still going to get parents to pay at the younger end of the scale because they'll think this is the way to get into the academy, but if we can get rid of them from the middle school age groups, then it'll be a lot easier for kids to play sports for fun right through into high school.
Alternative approach: states ban their state colleges from giving scholarships to anyone who played on a travel team. That'd kill the travel teams dead.
Interesting idea, with some pleasing symmetry--with state colleges benefitting from public funding just as public schools do, there's something about it that neatly tracks.
Isn't this what European soccer (sigh, football) leagues do? Granted, it may just set up a bunch of infrastructure around getting kids into these academies though maybe an earlier reality check will be enough.
Re: the name of the sport. I moved to St Helens, an industrial town in the North of England, while in elementary school. The St Helens dialect and accent is not my native one, but I do know it well - 12 years in school there before I went off to uni will have that effect.
In St Helens, unless the context is clear, it's "soccer". Because "football" alone will usually mean rugby league football, not association football.
There are a bunch of annoying Brits who will say that they don't say "soccer". They're wrong, they do. What they mean is that "football" can refer to any of a bunch of sports, all of which are types of football: association football, rugby union football, rugby league football, Gaelic football, American football, Canadian football, Australian Rules football, and once the context is clear which football you're referring to, you just say "football".
Generally, it's not the first use of "soccer" that's annoying to Brits. It's the second. Once you've made it clear that you're talking about association football, you just call it "football". It grates in the same way that referring to someone by name and never saying "he" or "she" does. Most Brits don't analyse their own language use and can't explain why they get so annoyed by it.
I think it is. AIUI one drawback is that most of the academy kids will also not go pro and the academy’s intensive sports focus and weak academics mean that the “plan B” options that most of them will be forced to take are worse. Also the youth focus exacerbates shifting hypercompetitiveness farther down the age ladder.
It is, though the academies don't have to be full-time things: at younger ages, they're usually evenings and weekends rather than full-time. And the full-time ones are starting to get better academics in areas where they are competitive. I live in Manchester, and Manchester City has been the more successful club in the last decade or so. Manchester United's academy has been responding to losing some of the most talented 10-11 year olds by improving the academic side, trying to win over parents (the kids usually want to go to the club whose pro team is most recently successful).
As for the hypercompetitiveness, that's weird: the pro teams don't care about the actual results of U11 or U13 or even U15 matches. They do care about U18 and U23 to some degree, but a lot of the academies lose a lot of games. This is because they're much more interested in skills development for the players. They want good 23-year-old players to put into the pro team, not U15 league titles. The result is that competitive local teams (the equivalent of the travel teams) often beat the academies even though the academies have much better players - because the "travel teams" are trained to win now, and the academies are trying to develop players for the future.
It's the equivalent of training basketball players in fundamentals, so they learn how to beat a defender with a low-post move, rather than just bulling through with superior athleticism. That low-post move might take a year or two to master and result in conceding lot of turnovers until the player has mastered it - so a travel team wouldn't want to do that; they'd prefer them to just use their athletic talent to smash through, which is fine until that player is in NCAA Div I or the NBA and their opponent is equally athletic and they have no technique to beat them. Of course, the travel team doesn't really care about that - they'll leave that to the G-League coach to fix. They're more interested in their own results.
Getting rid of the win-now mentality for youth sports and replacing it with the idea of building skills is one of the things that the academies do. They play games mostly so the players learn how all the skills fit together, not in a hypercompetitive style (obviously, they prefer to win than to lose, but the players need to learn more than they need to win).
The weak academics are definitely the weak point of the system, though. One reason I'd like them to be run by colleges is that there's a better chance of reasonable-quality academics from a college that needs to prep kids to get through four years of college in order to retain eligibility, while a pro team really doesn't care.
This is fascinating, especially as regards the U-15 results. Honestly I’m very surprised that the talent selection effects don’t dominate what I would have (apparently incorrectly) expected to be the fairly limited scope of learnable / learned skill expression in any age cohort.
There's a tendency for the local teams to have physically bigger/stronger players while the academies have the more skilful players. At that age, it's hard for the academy players to run rings around the bigger/stronger players. You get to U19 (they changed that from U18 at some point since I was a kid myself: I forgot earlier) and the skill players reach a point of dominating. Also the refereeing gets better as you go up, so the bigger players can't bully the smaller ones as easily. Oh, and the academy's physical training really kicks in around 15-16 years old; they are suddenly so much fitter and faster than the other teams, which they weren't at 13-14.
Would it be better or worse, do you think, to have a grades requirement for participation in the academies? Requirements could be set anywhere--passing all classes, B- average, etc.
My first thought was that this seems good, and my second thought worried about kids who don't thrive in educational settings at all, but have true talent at sports, and almost any requirement threatens their ability to participate in the one area they thrive in.
I think any metric that used GPA rather than standarized test scores would be heavily gamed because neither the players nor the academy particularly wants it not to be.
I think the only way that works is if the organizations paying for it can exert massive levels of control over the players later in life. E.g. if you go to this academy, the team that funds it controls your playing rights for (10?) years after you go pro. Most American sports are typically balanced heavily by draft rights that are assigned based on performance. This would require a complete abandonment of that process for an European style approach of long term talent development and control.
Much less control than you think - what they do instead is build up a personal affiliation for the club that trained them.
Legally, the player cannot be bound by a contract before they are an adult for contractual purposes (usually 16). The team will offer a player a contract at 16 which will commit them for a number of years. Note that this also commits the team (options are not lawful under EU law), so they have to carefully consider who they are prepared to pay a full-time salary to and how much and for how long. In theory a player at 16 can choose to sign for someone else - but they've been raised right through the process to regard signing a pro contract as the goal they're working for, so it's very unusual to turn it down.
It certainly won't be a 10 year contract; 3-5 is more typical, though note that the team will make them sign a new contract (resetting the contract period) when they get a raise (e.g. when they first get put on the pro roster, etc). Lots of young players will be on a series of one-year contracts until the team is convinced they will actually be good enough to take a risk on a long-term contract. This means that they often step down at 19, 20, 21 or so to a lower-level team at the end of a season and have no obligation to the high-level team whose academy they played for. The teams don't really care, though - that player is not going to reach the top level and their asset value is negligible. One top player can be worth hundreds of millions; that third-tier player might be worth a hundred thousand. It's just more hassle than its worth to try to force the third-tier team to pay a transfer fee.
But those top players - they sign up in their teens for a contract and then the team tries to keep them happy enough for them to choose to stay, or at least for them to choose to leave via transfer rather than deliberately waiting out the end of their contract and leaving on a free transfer. Players generally don't do that to their team unless they are properly annoyed.
Note that baseball has team-affiliated academies in a number of countries (most notably in the Dominican Republic) and they can sign those players without going through a draft.
Right, but even if it would be for a shorter contract, it would still negate the current draft process. All of which would require a major reworking of the league rules across most major US sports. You referenced baseball, but as I understand the league actually changed their rules in the last few years to decrease the ability of teams to recruit foreign players in that method.
Then there's the question of why major leagues and the teams they consist of would want to add this cost when the benefits would be so low. Take basketball for instance, there are 30 NBA teams right now. Right now, they typically have control for the first 7 years - so from years 19-26ish depending on when players come into the league. That's into the early part of most player's prime. Why would they switch to a system where they gain control of a player at 16, but would lose control right as the player turns into a star?
It was quite surprising when I learned that the middle schools here in Alexandria, VA have no sports teams. Not even a soccer or track and field team. You could easily have a mini league just in Alexandria and Arlington and have kids semi competitively get the option to plat sports in a diverse group and we just don’t.
It is clearly the case that the only kids playing sports at that age are those with the means to do so, which is just sad on every level Matt identifies.
That is surprising. Part of my plan to tackle this would be expanded middle school sports open to all.
In our area, all the middle schools have teams (basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, track).
The very large ones you have to tryout to make the team. This is part of the travel sports problem here - literally 100% of the boys on the baseball team at the largest school play on some kind of competitive team in the summer. None of the kids left in the local rec league are good enough to win at the tryout.
Meanwhile at the small rural or Catholic schools, everyone who comes out will be on the team. You don't have to play travel sports to be good enough to play school ball.
Here I think having expanded "B teams" so that everyone can play would help deflate some of the travel sports pressure in these situations.
I mean there’s a funding and literally just a willing adult problem here. I coach—a lot of my colleagues think I’m crazy for taking on two seasons of extra responsibilities.
The first year I did cross country I had so many people try out for Cross country that I would have needed two assistants. 40 elementary students for 5 boy and 5 girl spots. A good half dozen of them couldn’t run half the distance of the first race that was a week off and some literally were sick from the fact we run in Florida during August.
Really expanding this like you suggest isn’t impossible but it would actually involve pretty different arrangements than what we have.
I went to a small, rural elementary/middle school and was able to play school sports every season against the other schools in the county. And then at the relatively small regional high school, if you wanted to play a sport other than football it wasn’t that hard to make varsity. It’s such a huge difference here close to the city- no access to low key / less competitive / learn to play sports for kids.
I'm in a small NM town, and the school-offered sports are super limited. There are community leagues for kids with more options, and are cheap enough for most families to afford, but they come with a lot of the downsides of travel teams (odd practice and games hours, varying locations).
I'm surprised at how few options there are for kids here--and even more surprised to hear how limited access is to low key sports near a bigger city.
Indeed this is one of the marketing pitches for private or parochial schools: less competition to be on the sports teams. In a big school system it is quite hard to make the varsity team until senior year
Of course ironically the ability to escape competition is itself conditioned on ability to fork over school tuition.
My (fancy, private) school, 20 years ago, had intramural and intermural sports. Intermural were obviously for the more competitive players, but intramural was more like a rec league situation and focused on learning the game and having fun even if everybody sucked.
This was my experience playing high school baseball in South Florida in the early 2000s. By the time you got to high school every kid who was good enough to make a decent high school team played travel ball in the summer.
I have been very surprised by the apparent lack of this sort of thing in MoCo as well. I can't tell if it's part of a larger degradation of public schools in the area or if it really just is lack of interest driven by opt out by those parents most likely to form the core participating families. Probably a combination of the two.
No middle school teams here either in Fairfield County CT. There are plenty of town sponsored teams (travel and house), but they are independent of the schools. And of course plenty of club teams as well, although soccer is the only sport where the club teams draw kids away from the town teams (so far). Most of the other club sports compete in the off season (e.g. town lacrosse is in the spring and club lacrosse is in the summer) so kids can play both if they want. So it seems like we are a bit of an outlier in that the club teams have not totally taken over the youth sports landscape (save for soccer and the year round sports like swimming, gymnastics and hockey).
That is surprising to hear, but if the assumption (or experience) is that travel leagues would take all the kids, you’re school might not be able to field a team. I played neighborhood- or school-based sports and was an extremely competitive kid with a very bad attitude. I actually credit the guys in my neighborhood that stuck around to coach every kid and school leagues (where discipline could impact your sports availability) to be pretty important in retrospect - if I had a coach that was just as hyper competitive and didn’t put my attitude in check, I’d have probably played fewer sports and focused on only basketball, and then maybe played less hoops in the long run than I really did due to burnout, stress, injury, etc
"Unless you have some kind of good faith belief that your kid has the makings of an elite athlete, just chill out and be normal!"
Ay, there's the rub. I bet part of what is going on is Lake Woebegon effect, which affluent parents are quite susceptible to. Not paying for the travel team means admitting your kid is not elite and isn't going to eventually get that college scholarship.
And that I think at least puts a gloss on the collective action problem- we are not simply dealing with parental conformity, but with having to convince parents that their kid is just average.
And that has knock on effects. "Mom, why aren't you signing me up for the travel team?" "Because you aren't good enough, honey." Will any affluent parent have THAT conversation?
I think this is much more baked in than Matt thinks. Unless you actually banned the travel leagues or something, this is here to stay.
I genuinely don’t know who is feeding these parents their delusions. Is it the travel teams making them think their 70th percentile rank athleticism is actually 99 percentile rank.
At least with running the stopwatch is pretty objective.
It’s also worse because this sorting happens LONG before anyone can know what abilities these kids will ultimately have. E.g., kid down the street is 14, upper class travel sports kids in multiple sports. He’s been doing travel sports since elementary school.
Right now, I’d bet he’ll play division I basketball or football. Best athlete I’ve seen at his age by a wide margin. 6’, big, and very fast and athletic.
But he’s already having to specialize. And if he stops growing at 6’1”, he probably still doesn’t have a prayer.
The competitive aspect is here to stay, and probably always was. But private travel teams accessible only to kids with family money and means do not need to be here to stay. There were no private sports teams in the small town I grew up in, just the public school teams, and yes if you wanted to be competitive and high-pressure about your little budding sports superstar you could be, and some parents were. But the kids played on the same public teams as everyone else, that everyone had access to.
So consider several things:
1. Travel is cheaper than it was in the past.
2. It is easier to keep in touch with home when you do travel due to cell phones, videoconferencing software, etc.
3. The Internet spreads the word of the travel teams-scholarship-selective college route to elite education.
4. Upper class parenting has become more structured over the years because of publicized cases of stranger danger, accusations of neglect, etc.
5. People have less kids, so there's more parental time to dote on the kid they do have.
I think you combine all that along with some factors I may have not mentioned and it's perfectly obvious why this is a thing now and wasn't a thing in the past. Times change and these sorts of trends seem hard to reverse. (Heck, forget about travel teams, consider how difficult it would ever be to reverse (4).)
Yes, it's not terribly mysterious how we got to this point. If you go back and retrace the history of the last half century or so, the points you make have good explanatory power for how the accumulation of individual choices led us to this place. But I don't think that's the issue. The issue is where do we go from here, where we are today.
I had a college professor many years ago who told the class, the new American dream is to win the lottery or have a kid go pro in sports.
So many parents are willing to sacrifice money they don't necessarily have in the hopes that their kid will break out into the pros. And at 5 or 6 or 7, who can really tell which kid has the chops? It probably seems like a reasonable investment at first.
As a school sports coach I’m a bit perplexed at why parents suddenly started to believe that we weren’t good enough. Like very few timed sports have travel leagues. I’ve had middle schoolers who went on to compete for state championships and went to d1 schools in xc/track.
Some part of me thinks there’s a mix of delusional parents and opportunistic grifters in the major team sports who pretend that this isn’t overwhelmingly about genetics and that d1 basketball and football players aren’t genuinely obviously superior athletes. It’s almost never like close, the first time I saw a runner who went on to get a scholarship he was like the flash out there several hundred yards ahead of second place.
You can -- or at least you used to be able to -- get significant amounts of admission preference to non-Div-1, good colleges without being a Div-1 level immensely gifted athlete. Not full-ride scholarships, but access to schools that otherwise would be unlikely to let you in.
I think there are two things here:
- depends on the level of competition
- depends on the ratio of skill : physical ability
The higher the level of competition, the higher the "physical ability" or genetic bar will be. You can practice all you want, but the genetically lucky will run track at the Olympics or play in the NBA.
But "make the high school baseball team?" Lower physical bar, relativelt higher impact of practice.
Do you know who can deliver those practices just fine?
Elementary and middle school coaches. Elementary basketball is super enjoyable to coach and you can develop skills really well at that age without thousands of dollars of investment on 3 times a week practice.
As far as I can tell almost no one does xc or track in travel teams and like times keep getting lower, long jumps and shootouts keep getting longer in middle school contests.
Theres very little benefit to head to head competition with equally skilled opponents in “timed sports”. Theres also little need for “visibility “ because the stopwatch says everything that needs to be said.
As far as we know middling soccer kids today would have dominated 30 years ago, but it’s not nearly as clear cut as the times and distances and heights improving inexorably in “timed sports”
Track is different from team sports. I agree with you, but on soccer, lacrosse, basketball, etc. there is a real trend toward club teams. And if you didn't spend all the time on the club team, you won't even get into the Freshman team in HS in my area.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit, and played soccer through high school. My teammates and I played travel leagues (limited travel though) from about 4th grade through 8th, and then we all migrated to our high school team and made varsity, almost without exception, freshman year.
I guess I'm unclear about whether that kind of thing happens today--do kids move back to their school's team in high school?
Let me explain. A lot of kids these days play on both their town travel leagues (inexpensive, parent coaches) and club leagues (expensive, prof. and semi-prof. coaches). Some kids leave their town travel leagues in 3rd or 4th grade and pop back in for high school. So there is almost no chance of making varsity your freshman year, even if you are very good. And your chances of making even the freshman team if you haven't playing club (in addition to town soccer) are poor.
I'm generally a bit unclear on how much of this would persist if they were the same people. Like it seems to me a lot of the best athletes get hoovered up in these leagues and they'd be able to play with just regular practice.
Maybe, but they get more reps, more practice, and more individualized instruction. In fact the decent athletes with parents who have time and money to burn take advantage, and the best athletes may not have those advantages. Hence the idea of scholarships is a good one if we are stuck with this otherwise pay-to-play system.
Agree 100%. This is why on one of my other comments is that my plan to fix this problem is expanded middle school sports open to all.
I think I replied elsewhere but that would really require a top down rethink of school based sports because leagues, and budgets and expectations are set up for something more selective. It’s not a bad idea but it’s not a small add on to elementary and middle school systems.
A stretch comparison here, but in my high school (20 years ago) there were a few girls whose parents took them to modeling/acting scouts, and believe you me when I say there were parents paying a lot of money to have the scouts tell their girls they had a legitimate chance based on no discernible basis.
Father of four. My ex-wife really wanted the oldest two to play soccer like she did. We went all in on soccer starting at six, through middle school, travel teams, community teams (“not good enough for my kids” she said) until they finally made High School varsity teams and promptly burned out and rebelled. At that point my ex-wife was curiously spending too much time with my son’s travel team coach and the whole circus suffered spontaneous rapid disassembly. After the divorce I told the kids to play sports for fun but focus on grades. Ex married the travel team coach.
Can't click the like button for this one but appreciate the comment. Brutal.
Wow, my condolences. This is surprisingly common - I mean the kids burning out in late middle and high school.
Matt, I think your description of kids and travel parents and their motivations is at least somewhat inaccurate, and the criticisms of most of the commenters are really off base.
It is so enjoyable to make fun of dumb parents who are so out of touch with reality that they think their kid is special!!! Ha ha!!
Now picture the environment of the town leagues: no one is special. No one can play with players at their level, no matter what level that is—either kids who are so bad they don’t know the rules and their parents are making them play, or so good they get all the playing time. No one gets a good field. No one gets a good coach. No one plays extra because it’s fun - there aren’t enough fields. No one reschedules when there is a rainout.
I think for a kid that really likes to play, a travel team is a rational decision and I’m surprised anyone would expect a kid or parent to turn that down. If your kid wanted to make themselves crazy by acting in the community theater play on top of school productions, would anyone be as stupefied as they are here?
Many parents enjoy meeting parents (from other surrounding towns), traveling with the family to new places, and see their kid get to play what they enjoy with kids at their level.
And, many kids ALSO play their town sports. Yes, there can be conflicts, but surely this is better than more kids on more screens.
I think you’re wrong to assume everyone sees their kid as a future pro athlete. Childhood is short and can be taken away in an instant (see: Covid). The more things a kid can do, the better.
To address inequality, instead of cancelling travel teams, how about we expand access with scholarships (many teams already have this).
This describes my experience almost exactly.
I have no delusions that any of my kids playing travel soccer will get scholarships…but they are good enough and competitive enough that the rec experience very quickly failed them. My oldest daughter explicitly asked to play on a team where her teammates weren’t always goofing off during practice and where she could get better.
So if I deny her the more selective team, there’s really no “real” sports experience available to her (at least not of the type I experienced 30 years ago, that might have some hope of competing with the screens).
These effects are probably much more pronounced with girls sports, as even the selective teams often have trouble fielding a full team of girls for a given age.
Yeah, I genuinely have a hard time reconciling the fact that travel sports have gotten insane with my own personal competitiveness and desire for my kids to be great at whatever they choose (sports or otherwise).
For example, I started my 4 year old son in tee ball this year and as someone who played travel baseball, I found it too unstructured - to the point where it was hard to see how he was getting anything from it. On the other hand, I have friends pressuring me to have him join another park where they practice twice a week and play games on weekends. This also seems to be overkill for 4/5 year olds.
It's admittedly, a tough needle to thread and I say all of this as someone who still plays competitive flag football in my mid 30s.
Anything at that age is just for the fun of kids running around. We did T-ball with our first kid but did not make that mistake again. Playing backyard / park Wiffleball is much better. Playing catch with you is much better. Rec league coach pitch is fine. But once the kids start to pitch, the stratification of level of play between travel and rec gets really dramatitic ages 9-12, as the difference between "having faced fast pitching" and "not having faced fast pitching" is stark. The gaps narrow later in middle school though, as the kids who stick with it improve regardless and strength and size start to make a bigger impact.
I mean, of course it's for the fun of kids running around, but as David S has already replied, it's also about slowly inculcating kids into how to play the sport, in a structured way.
Every kid is different. I can barely get my son to play catch or hit the ball in the backyard with me for more than 3 minutes so I think he needs a bit more structure, and for someone else besides me to coach him.
Yes, travel sports are often a lot of fun for kids and parents.
I wonder if there is a bit of social pressure here also to say that you are "so busy," "crazy weekend," etc. - like how you are always supposed to say work is "busy" in that American way. But actually that, for all the hassle of running around, the tournament was a lot of fun.
The kids played well, there were some exciting moments, the team dinner was fun, the kids played in the pool, and honestly hanging out in a lawn chair routine on your team on a summer afternoon isn't actually horrible
Simple idea:
Playing sports with people at your competitive level is fun.
I would also say that is generally good for kids and adults.
If we could get (back) to a system where the vast majority of kids participated in a robust local league, then we could have that fun competition but at a much lower cost in time and money.
I don’t think Matt was arguing for “cancelling” travel teams, but rather for parents opting not to put their kid on travel teams. If you want to keep your kid on their travel team you’re free to keep doing so.
Re: scholarships, I don’t think it makes sense because there will still be a number of slots and that will still result in some of the exclusion and atomization Matt mentions in the piece.
I will in fact keep doing so, despite the fact that elites are flipping the tables to make success and ambition a bad thing.
One column from one guy != "elites flipping the tables to make success and ambition a bad thing"
Sorry Milan, replied to the wrong comment.
Wait, you're saying it's the non-elites who are paying to put their kids on these teams and the elites who are not?
Huh? No. Matt is recommending everyone stop paying for travel teams so they will no longer exist, and we can return to the glory days of bad youth sports. :)
Sorry, I was responding to this remark by you (I know you're fielding responses from all over): "I will in fact keep doing so [taking part in travel teams], despite the fact that elites are flipping the tables to make success and ambition a bad thing." That seemed to suggest that elites are against these teams and non-elites are the ones availing themselves of them. But surely the costs and time commitment involved complicate this populist account?
I also just dispute the idea that bad youth sports were the norm, unless we've raised the bar for what level they should be played at, which I think one could reasonably regard as a bad idea.
Yes - elites, like Matt, like you apparently, seem to be against kids having nice things and developing themselves. I see similar patterns in other domains - eliminating honors classes; schools not giving out awards for anything, only participation. I don't think it's a good thing to discourage kids from doing things that they are interested in and trying to maximize their potential. I think the better question is how to make those experiences accessible to more kids. Have more fun teams with varying levels of commitment! Give scholarships! I personally disagree that telling parents to quit pursuing those goals is the right approach.
I'm confused what you mean about success and ambition? How is being on a travel team equal to success and ambition?
It’s not just this one column. Honors classes are being canceled. At my high school, international trips are being canceled because not everyone can afford them. I’ve also seen academic awards being eliminated. Let a kid show any ambition or passion and we have Matt saying they are ruining society. I think it was a bad and lazy argument.
I don't think these are the same phenomenon. The whole point of Honors classes in public schools is that you don't pay for them. You test into them and get to do them. The travel and club teams are expensive and run to thousands of dollars plus the time commitment of ferrying the kids around. It would be like complaining that after school private cram schools are a problem. Let's go back to having kids have to test into honors programs and go from there.
Well, there is no more testing into honors - anyone can do it if they want. In general, I do not think the solution to inequality is less options. Even if the nostalgia of rec leagues is very powerful for some.
Its hard enough to play division 1 sports, let alone get a scholarship. Parents are better off putting the money in a 529 if they are concerned about paying for college.
Think she was talking about having scholarships for travel teams
One more thing. I don’t think it’s fair to make well intentioned parents or their kids the target of criticism? According to you and most commenters, they should just recognize and admit they actually suck at sports and are miserable driving to practices and are also hurting democracy? Usually, if you have to work that hard to make an argument, your argument’s wrong.
I just scrolled through all the comments and I don't really recognize them in your rehash of what other commenters are saying. Here and there people might say that *some* of the parents overestimate their kids' abilities, but I don't see why that's not fair game? For the most part they're talking about how it's a tremendous time and resource sink that have ended making it harder for many children to participate in sports.
The scholarship idea is nice and good make a marginal difference for kids who'd like to be committed but whose parents don't have money. But the share of kids whose parents are just uninvolved, like single parents who can't drive their kids out of town or deadbeat parents is probably larger. And I definitely think it hurts kids who would want to play somewhat casually. What you described above as the "bad" local league sounds exactly what I wanted from 6th grade baseball as a 6th grader.
I’m so glad your enjoyment of your sport and commitment to it is low. You probably also didn’t have any seasons canceled due to a pandemic. But why make other parents feel bad about helping their kid maximize their enjoyment if they want to?
Also, *some* parents actually *underestimate* their kids’ abilities, believe it or not. They want to be hanging around their house all weekend, not doing anything for their kids, but maybe the kid could actually grow and develop as an athlete? Which parents are worthy of an entire critical article by Matt?
Someone linked to a boring article about a mom who is Just! So! Tired! Of having to go to games every weekend!! And the practices!! Whew!! What a pain!! So many more parents enjoy their time with their kids and with a community of others, even if, god forbid, they are from out of town.
And yes - commenters are blaming parents for “delusions” - I can’t quote from my phone but maybe I will scroll through and comment on every one so you can see.
"I’m so glad your enjoyment of your sport and commitment to it is low."
Well now you're just sounding bitter.
But the overall point was that the overall tenor of the comments and especially the article is nothing to take so personally. If some people said the mother's of travelling team players are delusional, they are probably being a bit tongue-and-cheek but you can respond to them personally.
The overall vibe is not the parents are bad, and in fact it's that they are acting perfectly rationally. But what gets leftover may not be so great for the left-behinds. It's not a lot different from private schools in areas with bad school districts.
I think if you put your experience out there with less defensiveness and related it a bit more, both in pros and cons, to Matt's overall point, it would be received very well.
Without getting into the tenor of your exchange with Baseball mom, I do think she's pointing out a tension here between "kids should be able to play low-competition sports for the run of it" and "kids who are super into their sport should have the opportunity to play at a higher level", and I'm not sure it's a coherent argument to say that having higher level players leaving local leagues to play on travel teams somehow diminishes the low-competition local leagues.
Like, if we're talking about low-competition, low-stakes sports, isn't it actually *better* to have the competitive players leave for a different league?
I also agree with her that these ideas apply to more than just travel vs. local/school sports. There is clearly a sense that some kids (the more driven, talented, etc.) owe the other kids something, and the directionality of the benefit sure seems to only run in one direction.
I'm not quite sure what I said above and throughout, but I agree there is a tension. And in terms of diminishing the school leagues, I agree that star athletes leaving isn't a "big" problem. The big problem is that sometimes the school teams actually disappear, ad that's an especially big problem if not every kid was actually all that pumped to travel so much on their parents money, or if some kids couldn't afford it, or if some kids wanted to play some sports formally, but less seriously than travel teams. (coincidentally, believe it or not, yesterday afternoon I found out my cousin's kid quit baseball to play football in his 11th grade year. His dad had made it to AAA baseball and pushed him a lot and I guess he got burned out)
I remember when we talking about something to do with private or STEM schools and this concept came up that the "level the field" crowd felt something was owed to the less good kids. I didn't really see that idea surfacing yesterday. I don't feel it about school sports. But I think the idea that we're part of communities is true, and generally being part of your community is a positive thing, so I think Matt's post makes sense from that point of view.
But that tension is there in communities, too, because talented ambitious people often leave their ghetto / mill town / reservation rather than stay and try to make it better. I don't fault them for them, but at the same time it's fine to observe that the brain drain is bad for the left behinds.
You seemed really proud that you weren’t that into your sixth grade sport. I want to honor that, as people should honor those who love their sports and want to play more and be better.
I responded to Wigan just above this, but can't tag you in it and think you'd appreciate what I've said to him.
I didn't perceive Matt as criticizing parents at all (although some comments definitely are). He said that they are caught up in a system that they can't do anything about as an individual beyond quitting sports altogether. His question is how and why did we get this way, and what does it mean for society overall.
He literally ends the piece by saying parents are making the wrong choices.
You sound angry about this. What exactly is your complaint here? Are we supposed to be praising your commitment to sporting excellence?
You’re supposed to be thoughtful in finding real problems and real things to criticize.
I think this is a real thing to criticize.
Are the parents well-intentioned? Or are they focused on win-now vs. skill and personal development of their kids over the long haul? How would you know?
The point is that it doesn’t matter. Matt is painting a picture of delusional adults, and it’s not correct, and it’s lazy. Parents have all kinds of motivations, as do their children. I know parents who want to be the kings of their town’s rec league and have turned the rec league into something more political and cutthroat than gangsters I’ve read about. If something’s wrong with the world, it is so easy to point fingers at other parents and say they’re doing a bad job.
How would you know either?
You're the one asserting that the parents are well-intentioned. How would you know? I'm a youth coach who interacts with lots of parents. Some are well-intentioned and some are not.
Should I unsubscribe to Slow Boring because it’s way too intense policy analysis and I should just chill out? Should I unsubscribe because some people can’t afford the time or money it takes to read? Should I abandon my ambition to be well read? Am I delusional about whether or not I truly am smart enough to understand it?
I think the key difference is that there is no supply constraint on SB subscriptions but there is on sports team slots. SB subscriptions are excludable but not rivalrous whereas sports team memberships are both.
Yes.
I don’t think that’s the point. If more kids wanted to play there would be way more spots and more teams. Not so with rec leagues. Those are surely limited.
This only works if the whole family isn in on the travel team thing. If you have multiple kids, the whole weekend can be blown as different parents split up to shepherd the kids to different events. In many cases, I see one of the parents take on as a part-time or full-time job equivalent being the kids chauffeur and executive planner. Of course, the worst is hockey. Driving an hour through a snowstorm to get a 7 am ice time. Yay!
Hmmm, interesting. A local (association) football club here would have a bunch of teams at each age - a first team, a second team, etc: often five or more teams. That way kids get to play with and against others at the same level. The league will have promotion and relegation, but they do that for the age group, ie the results of one year's U8 team determine which level the following year's U9 team plays at, so the same kids get affected by their own results. This generally results in teams of similar ability being in the same division of the league.
Winning the division seven championship while playing for the fourth XI (or whatever) can be just as much fun and just as meaningful as playing for the first XI.
[I guess that referring to teams as an "eleven" and writing that in roman numerals is very British - the number obviously varies by sport, and is also used to let people know which sport it is, so an XI is either football or cricket, a VIII is rowing, XIII is rugby league, XV is rugby union]
I agree with this. The local town leagues here (very inexpensive, not club teams) have teams at various levels and tryouts to sort players. It's not a perfect process, but playing competitive games at your level is quite rewarding, even if you are the 4th best team in your age group in town. I can attest (as a coach) that the players find it very rewarding.
Everything you're describing is exactly what we have in the United States in the "travel team" world that Matt's writing about. It's literally exactly the same. The potential difference may be how much it costs. My son plays for a soccer club called Minneapolis United and it charges, for his U11 age group, $2,100 per year. Then there are uniform costs and some tournaments that cost extra, so the total out-of-pocket is probably $2,750 or so per annum.
Do you happen to know how that would compare with the UK? I've always been curious about that kind of thing.
I was wondering to what degree this had been ignored in the piece. Like, how different is this from moving your kid to a better/more challenging private school because they're bored at the private school and not getting the challenge they need to thrive?
"Now picture the environment of the town leagues: no one is special. No one can play with players at their level, no matter what level that is—either kids who are so bad they don’t know the rules and their parents are making them play, or so good they get all the playing time. No one gets a good field. No one gets a good coach."
This is a series of generalizations that don't seem warranted to me. To the extent this is true now, was it also true back before traveling leagues became so common? I don't remember ever hearing this kind of complaint about little league, AYSO, etc.
I think it's always been pretty true, yeah. Exceptions to every rule, sure. We've had great town coaches who have helped my kid realize how much fun it is to really work hard at something and get better, then play with other kids who feel the same way. We've also played against really bad coaches who stack the decks for their kid, play dirty, make everything political, etc. If I can get my kid another good experience on a travel team to do something he loves, am I destroying democracy? Matt says yes; I think that's ridiculous.
Since we've both seen hard-working, committed coaches who are able to motivate kids to be their best, maybe (whatever our feelings on travel leagues) we could agree that parks departments should see if they can find reliable ways of hiring and improving such coaches? In the same way that we should want public schools to find and retain great teachers, even as we acknowledge private schools will continue to exist.
Absolutely! Matt should write a post about that! But I personally have not seen any such motivation on the part of any town or rec leagues I've ever seen. Not blaming them; they have their own restrictions and constraints. But that's beside the point: why criticize parents for paying for travel teams? It seems like the answer is: because it's easy to criticize parents by painting them as delusional about their kids' abilities.
I agree completely on the explanation of the problem, but this seems unduly pessimistic on policy solutions. Why not tax private travel teams and/or subsidize traditional school-based teams?
Widespread youth participation in night/weekend cram schools in East Asian nations is driven by similar collective action problems, with similar negative effects on quality of life for parents and children, and East Asian governments have responded by starting to try to use policy to reduce cram school participation. Tackling collective action problems is one of the more useful things governments can do.
I think it’s probably hard to write down exactly what the tax rule says here in a way that is enforceable and effective.
We should use tax policy as a tool when there are cases of market failure. But is this in fact a market failure? Are we absolutely sure that this is a collective action problem where the large majority of parents would like external action taken to relieve them of this burden?
It smells kind of like nanny state to me.
Factor in the parents who want their kids to do sports but can’t even consider a travel team, but are watching the public teams get worse because of the travel teams.
Interesting parallel with cram schools here. Nice observation and potential source of policy ideas. I'm not deep into cram school policy - have those governments succeeded any at reducing cram school participation yet? What policies have they implemented?
Yes this entire article could have basically been /s/r “youth sports” “cram schools”
I’m not sure to what degree school-based teams are underfunded. At least at middle class schools it’s that kids do both travel and school-based and only the kids on the travel are good enough to make the school team.
Isn’t that just selection effects? What’s the value-add of the travel team there?
Selection effects to a degree, but in travel you do have professional coaches instead of someone's dad and then also just play all the time
Didn't China recently ban cram schools?
Rather than targeting sports leagues maybe higher marginal taxes on the PMC is the way to go.
You tax sports leagues now the money will flood into other experience goods...specialized youth camps, internships, music lessons etc.
The fundamental problem is wealthier families are chasing status for themselves and their kids and the disposable income is the driver
I’m all for going after root causes, and I wholeheartedly endorse higher top marginal tax rates for lots of reasons, including this.
While we’re thinking big picture, I’d also take a look at university admissions. Maybe we could get all the elite university presidents into a room and just ask them to make a conscious attempt to coordinate and refocus their admissions criteria to stuff that’s less responsive to parent/child expenditure of effort. It’ll be easier to hector people to go back to a more normal old-fashioned child rearing experience if we stop actively rewarding modern high-investment high-stress strategies.
But while we’re trying to get at the roots of the problem, I do still think there’s an argument for hacking at whatever branches come within reach. Cultural change takes time, and a lot of parenting is driven by conformism, as Matt notes. If we cut expenditures of time and effort on youth sports, sure, some of those resources will eventually end up going to test prep, essay writing coaching, services that help high schoolers start their own non-profit, or whatever. But I think the shift will take time, and for a little bit at least parents and kids will just be able to enjoy a windfall of more free time and less expense, and making parents’ lives easier is critical when we’ve got a fertility crisis on.
If a state taxes travel teams, many of the families with the best children in those sports will just move to another state. A similar happened during COVID when states like California shut down recreational facilities. I know three families who temporarily moved to Arizona.
How did you get from three families to all the families?
Most families aren't moving to a new state and looking for new jobs because of youth sport options.
I wonder what role cram schools have in retarding normal adolescent development thereby contributing to the fertility crisis in those nations.
Good post. My older son is a sports fanatic. Having watched what has happened with friends and relatives with older children I am dreading the day the request comes to join one of these things. I have no expectations or delusions of grandeur of his 'being pretty good and motivated for a little kid' leading to anything beyond that. But I do like that he is into something that isn't video games or other sedentary, socially atomizing stuff. What sucks is the prospect of eventually spending weekends on the road, spending crap tons of money, and losing any prospects of weekend relaxation solely so there are possibilities of playing moderately competitive games and/or having a shot at making a team in HS.
This is what I, a person without kids, don’t understand: parents spending huge amounts of money and giving up literally all of their free time for years. I see my friends doing it. Maybe I’m a selfish jerk, but I think parents are entitled to have a little bit of fun while raising their kids, and this doesn’t seem very fun, or very good for the kids. I’ve also seen people trying to leverage their kids into elite universities via these “club” sports, and when it doesn’t work everyone is hugely disappointed, even when the kid “just” gets into a very good school (maybe Big State U) but isn’t recruited for the sport. There are also less sporty kids in some of these families who lose the opportunity to do other activities on weekends and during the summer while the families frantically travel throughout the region, and who maybe turn away from sports altogether because they don’t feel they’re “good enough” to try. Once again I’m so grateful that I grew up in a different era.
Its actually a lot of fun if you do it right. Let the kid drive the process and make the decisions about where they want to play. Play multiple sports to keep it from being boring. Sure the trips can be a drag, but you get some alone time with your kids which can be harder to do as they get older. I know I'll miss it when its over.
I think the hard part is when you have a kid that isn't interested in sports at all and gets dragged away on these weekend trips. My kids are completely unathletic, so no worries about this for me, but I have seen it happen with other families. They do try to build in fun things for the other kid(s) on the trips, but it can get really boring for those kids if you are doing it once a month or more.
We were lucky in that both our kids play the same sports and on the same teams so they would generally be in the same place, if not necessarily at the same time. But we never dragged one kid to another's tournament unless there was something fun at the other end (e.g. Hershey Park).
I would say yes and no.
On an individual level, let the kid drive the process. If they want to do a "travel team" to play sports, that seems fine on an individual basis. But what if they're into it only because most of their friends are doing it, because their friends' parents are pushing it?
But so far my kids' only interest in sports has been volleyball(we tried to get them into soccer but they weren't interested) and the school is doing a team for that next year so they should be able to play at school.
If they want to do it b/c their friends are doing it, I don't see the issue with that. At some point if they aren't into it they will drop out on their own. I think most kids are pretty honest about their abilities and how the measure against their peers. Its the parents that are unrealistic about their children's abilities.
You dodged a bullet with soccer. IME, soccer is the worst of the youth sports. Its turned into a year round sport (even our rec league requires a spring season), the club teams require an unrealistic commitment level (must chose between playing for your HS or your club team in the fall), and there is little to no payoff in the end (colleges recruit world wide for soccer). Maybe its different in other parts of the country, but my advice to younger parents is to make sure their kids try sports other than soccer b/c they will likely quit well before they get to HS.
What I meant by "if they're doing it b/c their friends are doing it is this:
Option 1: All of their friends play sports at school, or the local YMCA, or the some local team thing that doesn't travel. Great! I spend time with the kids on sports but it's _also_ not eating up all the time in cars.
Option 2: All of their friends play in travel leagues, so they want to as well. I'm not saying I would say _no_ - I think that's a fine reason to want to do it, but I do think this is making us worse off than if the travel leagues weren't a thing.
(This is hypothetical - no interest so far in anything that would require one of these travel leagues)
It's all part of the same larger arms race that leaves everyone worse off. Whenever my boss tells me she spent the weekend going across the country for some teenage boys soccer game I chuckle. As if there's anything going on in some other state that couldn't be replicated locally in the DC burbs. But then I get a sick feeling in my stomach as I realize that could easily be me in a few years, if my son maintains anything like current levels of interest.
I could've responded to any one of several comments about this, but I'm choosing yours for some reason.
When did "travel sports" go from "traveling within an hour of your home" to "across the country"? Was it always like that, but my MI travel soccer teams circa 1990-98 were different?
No idea and not sure what the norm is. I never played travel sports growing up and the farthest I can recall going is to a neighboring county in high school for states. Anecdotally my boss' case is the most extreme I am aware of but I know multiple families that travel hours and hours away for this stuff, have to stay in hotels, etc.
Good luck - my advice to you would be that if he stays interested and motivated, and there isn't a good rec league in town, to try and band together with other likeminded parents to create a "travel light" team. I've seen those work really well - if you can get a core group of boys and parents together, you can create a team that plays locally, sticks together, costs little, and has a lot of fun. And usually just being on a team where kids are trying hard and having fun is enough training to let the kids stick with it until middle school when puberty hits and the realities of genetics reorder the hierarchy.
The whole thing is indeed infuriating. We live next to a large park. Municipal leaders built a bunch of turf soccer fields, not to offer an affordable public league option for the community but so a for-profit youth team could charge parents thousands of dollars a year and leave the infrastructure cost to the taxpayers.
That is horrible. And I suspect it is happening more often than we realize. Your post reminded me of a fight in my city over different baseball leagues using a field. My kids don't do sports, so I didn't pay that much attention, but I will after reading your comment.
Played travel soccer from age 11 to 18 in LA. I was not recruited for college (i am a good athlete, but a great one). Soccer was the defining experience of my childhood, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I understand how it can be a strain on big families, but my family of four (with an older sister not especially into sports) did not seem stretched thin by my participation. The drives with my mom out to Riverside and Thousand Oaks and Downey and Redondo Beach made our relationship much stronger.
The part about this being only for elite rich kids doesn’t match my experience at all. I went to a top prep school in LA. My ONLY experiences with the middle-class Latinos who are the plurality of the Los Angeles area was playing travel soccer. I simply would not understand my hometown without it. I played on all-Latino travel teams, I practiced Spanish with my teammates parents’, I explored neighborhoods of Los Angeles I would’ve never been to, and ate more postgame Mexican food and Dairy Queen (only found in the suburbs) with my mom than you can imagine. My life without travel soccer would’ve been more sheltered, less involved with the community, and with the amount of pressure that smart elite kids were under at school, soccer was my actual non-high-pressure outlet with actual non-elite friends. Reading this was like reading about a foreign country. I believe you that DC is like this, but all I can say is that SoCal is not.
Good to see you here again, Marc.
Matt, thank you for mentioning my book! You manage to touch on all the major problems in this blog post. All the comments, too, add telling details. While I do write about the need for more investment in parks and school sports programs, I also offer advice to parents about how to navigate this expensive and fraught universe. Yes, it's a collective action problem, but parents need to embrace their agency on this. Get educated about the facts on recruitment to a college team (5-6% of high school athletes) and likelihood of getting any--not full--sports scholarship (3% of high school athletes.) The most reliable predictor of whether a child will play in college? If either or both parents did. Learn about the risks of early specialization in a sport: these are the kids who get injured, drop out, and never play again. Refresh your knowledge of why playing sports matters at all: they can be great for physical health! Exercise thwarts depression and anxiety! It lifts the mood and helps with self-regulation! Playing on a well-coached team, with a humane adult in charge, can be especially important for teenagers, who crave connection with peers and benefit from the structure and discipline a good team provides. To realize these benefits, children do NOT need an intense, competitive environment that costs a lot and disrupts the family. While the problem can seem too big to change, parents are not powerless.
How little actual money is available for college scholarships outside big football and basketball programs is a point that cannot be broadcast often enough.
For instance, under NCAA rules, a Division 1 baseball team is allowed a maximum of 11.7 scholarships, and not every school even fully funds that many. That 11.7 can be divided between a maximum of 27 players on a 39-player roster, with all players on athletic scholarship having to receive a minimum of a 25 percent scholarship.