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Some parents hope their kids will win a college scholarship. Single mother Mar Rodriguez of Orlando, for example, is a graduate student at the University of Central Florida. Money is tight. She shuttles her three kids--Virgil, 14; Eva, 13; and Sara, 10--to dozens of youth-basketball events every week, year round. In a recent month, Rodriguez counted only three days without a practice or a game.
Inspired by her idol, Rebecca Lobo of the Women's National Basketball Association, Eva plays on five teams at once. Meals are on the fly, and other social activities are rare. Mar can only pray that the sacrifice will pay off in college aid. "By the time I graduate, it's going to be almost time for the two eldest kids to go to college," she says. "I'll need all the help I can get to pay for their education."
The Saunders family, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., nurtures the same hope. Every morning at 4 o'clock, 13-year-old Barry rises groggily from bed, pulls on his sweat suit and heads out for a 30-min. run at a nearby golf course. Every afternoon he has two hours of track practice. Barry has followed the same routine five days a week since he was seven--all in hopes of winning a college scholarship and eventually a shot at the Olympics. It's not a farfetched dream: already Barry holds the U.S. record for his age in the long jump and for 55-meter hurdles.
Barry's father Stan, an Olympic alternate in track in 1976, coaches his son's club track team, the Roosevelt Express. Last year the club spent $60,000--most of it raised from local companies--to travel to tournaments as far away as Seattle and Antigua. Saunders estimates his out-of-pocket expenses last year at $12,000.
But it's worth it, he says. The kids on the team, many from underprivileged backgrounds, get to go places and meet people they otherwise would not. Also, college coaches are scouting the national competitions for recruits, even among kids as young as Barry. "We just feel very fortunate," Stan says, "that we're able to afford for him to compete at the next level. Because that's where the recruiters are."
For most kids, though, the odds of a scholarship are long. Robert Malina, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, says most parents would be better off putting the money they spend on travel teams into a savings account. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, fewer than 1% of the kids participating in organized sports today will qualify for any sort of college athletic scholarship.
Still, Mar Rodriguez knows parents who have hired private coaches for girls as young as 10. Andrew Roderick, who heads UK-Elite, the company that supplies British coaches for Kelly Donnelly's team, says such parents may be setting up their kids for disappointment. "The big thing is fun," he says. "If you're not having fun with it, you shouldn't be doing it."
Ah, yes, fun. The primary importance of fun--of sport pursued for sheer exhilaration--is a credo repeated, and often honored, by coaches, kids and parents. At the same time, though, the pushy parent, red-faced and screaming from the sidelines or bleachers at a hapless preteen fumbling on the field, has become an American archetype and a symbol of the unmeasured costs of kids' sports.