re: Is Dance Competition the worse of all the “Travel Leagues”?

10-12? My daughters doing travel cheer at 8. It’s fricking stupid.

You know the dumbest part? There’s so many categories and divisions you travel and compete against 1 team sometimes, sometimes 0. But no, I can’t ask my wife why we have to skip the local tournament to go 2 hours away to compete against no one. That’s too much damn sense.

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What happened to the good ole all star teams? Play your regular season, get good, go play after season all stars... or stay home.

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Money

Get your daughters out of dance and into racing.

You are training them to accept the subjective judgement of other people.

Teach them to fight for their own survival and allow them to win or lose on their own merits.

I work with a lady whose daughter does all the dance competition stuff. She's about 9 or 10 now. My co-worker makes good money. Her husband makes pretty good money. They struggle financially due to all the dance spending. It's ungoldy how much they spend on clasees, costumes, shoes, practice outfits, bags, etc, etc, etc. Not to mention they are constantly stressed about getting the girl to dance practice multiple nights a week. Plus they always eat out from necessity. Even if the girl winds up with a full-ride scholarship one day they have still lost money. I have to say I do not get it. And I am not convinced the little girl "loves" it as much as they say she does. I think she'd just rather play with her friends and be a little girl sometimes.

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At dance competitions, they are judged and ranked Bronze to Platinum (or even Double Patinum). There is no point system.

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This is false, there is a point system. You just arent told it when they announce results.

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The studios have dance teams, everything from solos to entire team dances. I don’t understand why it can’t be a point system, and they have “Winners” in each category, plus an overall team winner.

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Ive never been to a dance competition that didn't have winners, maybe you go to different types.

They definitely over-trophy, and it's crazy expensive but those are not really issues unique to dance.

Ive found dance to be very similar to travel ball. Lots of great lessons can be learned, if your girl enjoys it then its hard to put a price on it. However, they very much will find a way to put a price on it, and they do over-trophy.

But like i mentioned, those are not unique to dance, it's all travel sports/activities.

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The ones that I know that are in it or have gone through it ended up with major college dough - 2 of them got cheerleading schollies - one at Ole Miss, the other at Clemson.

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Yup. Many of my daughter’s former teammates are Golden Girls or Tiger Girls.

A couple became show characters for Disney

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Biggest money grab of all is a wedding that a Dad pays for. 1 freaking day $$$$$$$

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in terms of straight ROI I don't think there's a single investment that beats paying for your daughter's wedding. $25k and you're off the hook for the rest of her life.

A friend of my wife and I did this with their daughter. age 10-18 spent 1/2 of all weekends away from home not to mention the 3-4 practices a week. Now the daughter is really, really good and did get a scholarship to the state college and dances for the FB and basketball teams but she would have gotten the same scholly for her academics. The mom has said she doesn't regret it because the daughter loves it but the Dad has told me in confidence that it cost low six figures over those 8 years they did it and he regrets it