Parents Spare No Expense in Children's Sports

WHEN TOMMY ZARZECKI JR. considers the money he spends on his 13-year-old son's hockey habit, he can't help but question his own sanity. In the space of a single conversation, he refers to himself as "nuts," "out of my friggin' skull" and "completely...delusional." But if he's crazy, so are the other hockey parents in Jefferson Township, N.J. Everyone there knows that promising puck chasers have to join a competitive travel team ($3,500 a season), attend practice and games four to five times a week at a rink 45 minutes away ($150 a week for gas), and play a 55-game schedule with matches in Boston, Baltimore and Pennsylvania. Then there's the gear: $200 hockey sticks are standard, as are $400 skates with Kevlar-composite blades. And that's just hockey. Zarzecki's son also plays baseball, which means additional travel-team fees, more out-of-state trips and $70 lessons with a private batting coach. All told, Zarzecki estimates he blew $10,000 last year on his son's jock life. "You need another job to pay for your kid's sport," he says.

Zarzecki is not actually delusional. The chatty 49-year-old adman turned cigar-company blogger (long story) played hockey back in the Dark Ages; he remembers loving the game even with cheap wooden sticks and lousy pads. He also knows something's askew when parents get all wound up over an adolescent game. But he can't help it. When he sees his son dominate the ice, he says, the euphoria kicks in — and questions of money and logic go out the window. Besides, he says, "your kid won't be as good if you don't pay for all the extras."

As any parent who's been around the peewee athletic circuit can tell you, the wide world of kids sports is something to behold these days. All around the country perfectly normal 10-year-olds now enjoy the attention of their own coaches, nutritionists and personal trainers. Baseball camp now means hopping a plane to distant locales like Puerto Rico or Australia. Suiting up for hockey might include a $3,000 goalie uniform with custom-molded padding. How far will it go? In one of the most publicized — and excessive — examples, Dallas billionaire Kenny Troutt built a million-dollar gym in his home for his preteen sons' basketball teams and carts all the kids to tournaments in a private jet, accompanied by a full-time nutritionist and travel planner. And the trend has even filtered down to sidewalk sports. In Mason, Ohio, one group of high schoolers is raising $39,000 to fly all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, for a championship competition...in jump rope.

The movement has not reached every ball field in America. Plenty of parents, concerned about the effects of heavy competition on an eight-year-old, are content to let their kids play casually in the local recreation league. But just try to resist the trend. Joe Hughes, a Cedar Grove, N.J., youth-fitness instructor who specializes in preseason conditioning ("I teach kids how to run"), says that thanks to the intensely supervised training many kids get from an early age, the average 12-year-old is much stronger, faster and more skilled than his 1980s counterpart. Which means that the youngster who skips private T-ball coaching today will have a tough time making the travel team tomorrow, never mind a slot on the high school varsity squad. Little wonder a parent like software consultant David Hinson just shrugs when he looks at the $2,500 bill for his eight-year-old son's hockey habit. "It's a different world," says the Nashville dad. "You just have to adjust to the new reality of how much things cost."

For many parents the single biggest expense is the travel team, which promises to expose their budding all-star to tougher competition, superior coaching and the attention of college recruiters — not to mention interminable car rides and the vagaries of vending-machine food. But youth travel teams, once reserved for a region's elite athletes, have steadily expanded to include average players, who now zigzag the country to battle the similarly undistinguished competition; USSSA Baseball says its team roster has grown from 1,000 a year in 1997 to 40,000 today, while some 450,000 kids now cross state lines for soccer tournaments. "Now everyone can play," says Bruce Doig, director of the Beverly, Mass., recreation department, "as long as they pay the fee." (Fees range from several hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the length of the season, distances traveled, and whether or not the team has attracted sponsors to help defray the cost.) Like many small towns, Beverly has seen an explosion in the number of travel teams since 2004; as a result, Doig says, rec-league participation is dwindling by 5 percent a year.