Kelly Donnelly is bright and pretty and lives in Cranford, N.J. She is 13 years old, and she plays soccer. Boy, does she play soccer! Her sister Katie is 15. She plays soccer too. And their dad Pat--well, Pat drives. He drives one girl or the other to soccer practice most every day, and to Virginia for the occasional soccer tournament, and even to Canada once in a while, for more soccer. Last week he drove the girls home from soccer camp in Pennsylvania. Not long ago, Pat logged 300 miles in his green 1994 Dodge Caravan so that Kelly could play in three games on Saturday. Katie had two games that day.
Then they had five on Sunday.
And how was your weekend?
Pretty much the same, probably, if yours is among the growing number of American families that have succumbed to the mania of kids' athletics as they are conceived in the late 1990s: hyperorganized, hypercompetitive, all consuming and often expensive. Never before have America's soccer fields, baseball diamonds, hockey rinks and basketball courts been so aswarm with children kicking, swinging, checking and pick-and-rolling.
Some estimates put the number of American youths participating in various organized sports at 40 million. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the number of kids playing basketball now tops 12 million. Not to mention the nearly 7 million playing soccer. Or the 5 million playing baseball. Hockey, originally played on frozen ponds, is now a year-round sport involving more than half a million kids from Maine down through the Sunbelt. The Turcotte Stickhandling Hockey School, based in Ormond Beach, Fla., of all places, expects 6,400 kids to take part in its clinics this summer, up from 2,600 in 1992.
But it is not just the number of kids playing an organized sport that's unprecedented. It's the way they're playing it--or, to be more precise, the way their parents are arranging for them to play it. Kelly Donnelly's team, the SMC Strikers, offers a good illustration of what is happening to kids' athletics. Not so long ago, games were weekly, teams were local and each sport had its own brief season. And now? "I played varsity soccer in high school and college," says Bob Seiple, a coach for Kelly's team. "During that time, I might have played a total of 50 games. Kelly might play 50 games in a single year."
The Strikers are a travel team--sometimes known as a select or club team--comprising kids who have risen through local soccer squads to be selected for more competitive play. They're drawn from a variety of mostly suburban neighborhoods and towns in a given region, and they will make single-day or weekend-long pilgrimages to meet other similarly skilled teams on distant soccer fields. Their coaches are not volunteer dads but traveling professionals, some of them imported from countries like Britain. Kelly's parents will pay roughly $3,000 a year for her soccer experience, including club dues (which cover the coaches' pay), private clinics, summer camps, travel and hotels. For the kids, the commitment sometimes seems almost total. Many have abandoned other organized sports--and sometimes even their school's team--to concentrate on the travel squad. "It's tough to play at this level if you don't do it year round," Seiple says.