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

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Oh, bull.

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

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Travel ball has been around a lot longer than you realize. The Babe Ruth league was going strong back in the 80's and it was very much a pipeline league.

Sure, there are some sports where you can make it by practicing daily in your yard. However, even the names you mentioned didn't make it without significant coaching. Do you think Tiger Woods went out there and just smacked balls around? No, his dad knew the fundamentals and coached him extensively. Not everyone has a resource like that that can teach to that level, in fact it's very rare.
Tiger wouldn't have been Tiger without that, and his family wouldn't have been able to afford the coaching if they had to pay someone for all the lessons he received from his dad.
What you're also dismissing is the coaching that the kids receive in school sanctioned sports that parents don't have to pay for.

Now step into our world of motocross where it's not school sanctioned and the coaches aren't employeed by the school. I'm paying $150 for 2 hours of coaching plus $40 to get into the track. None of these kids have a chance of making it pro by riding around in an open lot without a coach.
Take away coaching, high level tracks to train on and everything that makes it expensinve and see how boring it would be to watch professional racers that look like beginners.
Same goes with all sports. That's why the WNBA sucks to watch, they play at the same level as a middle school team.

We watch professional sports because they are the elites. You take away the tools that got them to be where they are and the level of play is going to drop enough that it's not worth watching, and therefore they would cease to exist.

I don’t spend any money, I just spent time on Facebook, begging friends and family for money and also force my kids to stand on street corner selling water accepting donations for their World Series

Maybe $5k per kid, for all sports combined.

You people are fricking nuts

I know the football team pays 60k per year for out of town teams to play here and routinely fundraise over 100k for travel..

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None of these kids have a chance of making it pro by riding around in an open lot without a coach.

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And only 1 in probably 20,000 has a chance of making it pro no matter what they do or how much money you spend.

And of the 430 pro riders that currently exist in the US, only the ones at the very, very top are making any money. Call it the top 20, just as a guess.

So now you're looking at odds of more like 1 in 250,000 or more who can cash in on it.

As for the rest of your post, I will guarantee you that virtually no significant number of people in the 1980s were spending the equivalent of $80k a year on their kid's games. Not anywhere near where I lived in the 80s, anyway.

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How much does little league cost these days? Beyond that is too much.

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This.

Today I learned about dirt bike academies for kids?

WTF?

They pull their kids out of school to ride dirt bikes around all day?

Is this right?

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But when 100% of the girls even playing on school team are training with clubs there unfortunately isn’t much else to do unless your kid is just a unicorn athletically.

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There is an embedded presupposition in comments like these and that is that all of this coaching and one-on-one training produces a significantly higher level of play. Such that you just can't compete without it. I've even been told that without these methods, professional sports would cease to exist.

If that's the case, why aren't the levels of performance exponentially improving at the next level? I don't pretend to know enough about high school sports to know whether that's happening in high school, but it doesn't seem to be happening in college. I do pay enough attention to college to know that.

Kids coming into college sports aren't blowing the top off of previously held records or leaving players from 30 years ago in the dust performance-wise. Not when you account for the natural evolution of any given sport.

And y'all are telling me that these super intense training methods for kids have been around and widely utilized for decades, so the kids coming into college now should have had this sort of training their entire lives.

Why aren't they revolutionizing every sport? Why aren't we seeing college kids breaking records left and right?

I imagine there is a bunch of kids trapped in these sports and can't give them up because the parents have so much invested.

In the 80s my older sister begged for a flute. She eventually got it and hated it. She had to stay home and practice all summer since the flute cost so much. I went out having fun to get away from the horrific flute sounds. My dad is still appalled that I never learned an instrument.