re: How much is too much to spend on your kids sports?

My son is 10 but it is about $4k all up costs a year last season. He moved up a tier on his club soccer team last year. At the lower club level, it was $1800 a year. Daughter is still in rec sports thank god.

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If everyone had your mindset, professional sports would cease to exist.

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Oh, bull.

Professional sports has been around a long time. Travel ball hasn't.

The pipeline used to be City League when kids were in elementary school, then junior high and high school sports, then college, then pros.

That pipeline worked just fine and cost very little.

It's true that there have always been "boutique" sports for the rich like rowing or fencing or some other such Ivy League pastime, but those were not pipelines to the pros. Those were pipelines to the Ivy leagues. They were about building an aristocratic resume more than an athletic resume.

Dirt biking fits in with that history/tradition?

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No kid has a legitimate chance of rising to the top of any sport without indulging into it.

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I don't know what you mean by "indulging into it," so I may or may not agree with that statement. If you mean practicing and training, sure. But unless we're talking about one of those boutique sports mentioned above, that can be accomplished with a pair of the correct shoes and a basketball goal in a driveway, the local public course driving range, some old tire to throw passes into, or if you want to really splurge, a pitching machine. That and using municipal tracks and fields and gyms to train on.

That's how Larry Bird, Joe Montana, Tiger Woods, and Mike Schmidt did it. All of them worked with extremely hard to get to the pros and excel once they got there. Working hard doesn't have to cost a lot of money or involve traveling around to compete.

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Your kids won’t have that either.

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I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you mean that in a very specific way, since you have no idea what memories my children have of growing up with me and on the surface that's a very arrogant statement.

Memories are free. You type as though if you don't spend $80k a year on kid's sports, you can't make memories.

My dad coached me and my two siblings in city league baseball (and softball) from the time we were around 8 to the time we were around 12. He coached my teams in basketball for a couple of years too. I have plenty of sports memories with my Dad.

They just didn't cost $80k a year.

Spend lots of summers at Bennett’s in the 90s

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We can flat out disagree here.

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Sure, we can disagree.

Let's all remember that the prompt was, "Where do you draw the line and say that's enough?"

I'm just answering the question and describing how I relate to it.

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If my kid has generational talent at something

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If your child has "generational talent" at something, they're going to excel at it without spending that kind of money on it.

"Generational talent" describes someone like Bo Jackson. Who didn't even lift weights until he got to college.

Yes, there are the boutique sports mentioned above that are expensive just to participate in, but then you have to ask yourself of what value "generational talent" is in fencing.

Again, I'm giving my opinion (which is what was asked for), and my opinion is that children in 2025 are indulged far too much already, and you can see the effects of that in the workforce.

Like I said earlier, I can think of lots of things that I would have "loved" when I was a kid that cost $80k a year. That doesn't mean my parents should have spent it to indulge my wants.

Lance Vincent had a short gig with Factory Honda after his amateur days with Honda of Houston.

Right now Easton Graves is probably Louisiana’s best next hope, he was injured for Loretta’s this year.

Deacon Denno won 250B and Schoolboy2 at Loretta’s, I heard he is signing Factory Triumph.

Darren Pine may be signing Triumph too after both Supermini wins.

Parents buying equipment to make their kids competitive never works out.

Michael Schumacher learned to race at his local go kart track using discarded tires from other wealthy teams. If the kid is killing it i can see spending every dime to get him to comps etc.

or you could be Lance Stroll, your dad buys a racing team and you get a ride only to be an embarrassment to the sport.

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I have a lot less trouble with that, but why in the hell do these school activities cost so much?

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She has to fly to meets, or take a ferry and it involves overnight stay.. For the State championship she had to go to Anchorage and stay 3 days, then nationals in Des Moines was over 2k.

Same for all sports teams here. There are no competitors you can drive to play...

If a kid plays youth sports, turn on your bullshite detector and root out the scumbags. When my oldest was about 8 years old, around 2017 or so, we were on a pretty popular local BR baseball "travel" team. I was talking to a mom who had a 10 year old on the same organizations 10U team and she casually told me "I don't know how I'm gonna swing this once they price goes up.." At this point, we were paying about $250 a year for the 8U. Being clueless to this point, I asked her "how much does it go up"?

That day was the day it all became crystal clear to me. She said "It's $2500 now but they're going up to about $3K next season..." I was like "WHAT?!" and it was loud enough for some of the others to hear me. I was abso-fricking-lutely shocked. I sincerely could not believe this. Needless to say we found some other avenues to explore and it all worked out. I mean, there was some terrible fricking kids on this team and it dawned on me... this whole thing is a con job.

A few weeks later I was talking to a friend of mine who had coached travel ball for a while and lived in Central. He'd taken teams all up the ranks and to various youth world series, etc. He told me "Somebody will always take your money." It was around then I realized that your kid can be complete dogshit at something but there's still a market for you to get fleeced. They will tell you he's on the cusp, he just needs training, etc.

Since this time, my kid has become a stellar athlete and has played on many many varsity level school teams, AAU basketball teams, baseball, all that. But I learned a very valuable lesson. These worthless and downright scheming, thieving motherfrickers are out there everywhere looking to take you for a ride. Make sure you vet it... hard. Because they're everywhere out there. Be smart. Be careful.

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The amount I hear my buddies throw around for travel ball is insane. I just feel bad for the kids whose parents are more obsessed with it than they are. Also cracks me Mr. & Mrs. Smith shelling out $50k a year for junior to achieve his dream of playing two years of D3 ball while Pedro in the Dominican Republic hits rocks with a stick on a dirt street gets a $5M signing bonus before his balls drop.