Part of any well-rounded child’s upbringing is getting involved in sports. Whether individual or team sports, they bring a sense of community and pride as well providing some healthy physical activity, which is important for every growing body.
But just like everything related to child rearing, it can get quite expensive. From team fees to uniforms, hotel stays and refilling the gas tank again, the cost of kids’ sports can easily get into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a year.
The costs add up a little at a time
Arlington, Virginia -based Sarah Snik, whose two children are highly competitive athletes, sometimes feels like she’s always shelling out more and more to keep her kids up to date in uniforms that fit, and for team registration fees and tournament costs. Her son, Quinn Snik-Norton, is 10 years old and plays competitive travel soccer year-round. His 8-year-old sister, Lindy Snik-Norton, does competitive cheer as well as soccer.
“We have to work in order to pay for all of their sports,” Snik says. In addition to the roughly $3,000 per child in soccer fees annually, Snik says the other costs rack up quickly. “Then you’ve got to pay for the uniform. The uniform brand is Adidas, and they charge you about $250 for the uniform, and there are two uniforms and then two practice uniforms. There are also soccer cleats, which they grow out of every season.”
Joshua Konowe lives in Reston, Virginia, with his teenage son Gen, a senior in high school. “We’re part of that whole DMV soccer crazy parent thing, and he’s been playing competitively since he was about 7,” Konowe says. The cost, he says, can sneak up on you.
“It is a crescendo that starts with recreation for a hundred or so dollars…and then as it gets more competitive, the costs start to go up,” he says.
“For a while, my son was technically on three teams,” Konowe adds. He was “playing high school, travel for Arlington’s Academy and a private club called Footstars.”
It isn’t just the uniforms and the team fees that can drain a bank account. “I can’t tell you how many pairs of socks we’ve gone through,” Konowe says. Another hidden cost? “The number of soccer balls a player will go through!”
Rebecca Leigh also feels strain from the financial cost of having young athletes. Her three children, Jake, Mia and Lucas, all play different sports. In addition to unforms, shoes and more for her growing kids, Leigh says her family started to exceed their original budget because of unanticipated expenses such as coaching sessions.
“The cost of our sports activities exceeded what we had originally set as our budget limitations,” Leigh says. These “unexpected expenses force us to shift funds for existing budget areas to keep regular payments of track.”
Travel in particular can really strain a budget, Konowe says. “Once you get outside a 50-mile radius, now you’re thinking about hotels, you’re thinking about airfare,” he says. “You’re [also] thinking about juggling work and your other commitments, and you’re having to almost re-architect your life a fair amount.”
In an effort to keep the costs down, Leigh recommends setting up carpools to save on gas, purchasing used equipment where possible, setting up structured payments when allowed and working with local businesses to provide team sponsorships to ease some of the financial burden.
Scheduling dinner and life between soccer and cheerleading
Snik also feels the pressure to rearrange her life around her kid’s full and active schedule, saying it’s like having a second full-time job. It’s “every single night of the week, except for Thursdays, we have something, and that includes Saturdays and Sundays.”
Calendars all over the house play a huge part in keeping everyone up to date and ready to go. “We’ve got calendars in every room,” she says with a laugh. “We have calendars on the phones, on the computer. We even have one of those skylight calendars that the kids look at every single morning before they leave for school.”
An additional unexpected expense for Snik and her family is drivers to ferry kids back and forth to practice and home. “We had to pay someone to bring them to their practices on days that it was too early for us…to leave work. So, that’s another $200 a week,” she says ruefully.
Snik’s daughter is also flyer for her cheer squad, “which means they toss her up into the air, [which] requires more practices.” Being a two-sport kid like Lindy isn’t just draining on the wallet; it can be draining for the child, too. “Lindy has practice until 9 p.m. on Friday nights,” she says.
Wear and tear on young bodies can lead to early injuries
Another potential expense every parent hopes to avoid is the cost of injury. Whether they require surgical intervention or not, both the financial and emotional costs of injury can be significant. Physical therapy sessions for strains, pains and discomfort add right up.
Back to Life Physical Therapy’s founder Tarik Chase, in Washington, D.C., knows this all too well. “All of these sports are year-round now,” Chase says. “People are doing their sport five days a week, six days a week throughout the year, with no variability in training.”
That narrowing of sports focus can put increased and repeated strains on body parts without the needed time to rest and recover. “If you’re using the same group of muscles in the same way all the time, you’re just overexposing your body to a specific type of stress,” Chase says. “And because you don’t have that variability in training, it’s thought the incidences [of injury] are increasing.”
The pressure to get better and better from a younger age tends to push kids to a single sport sooner. In addition to overuse of the same muscles and motions, younger sports specialization means more years of exposure.
To keep injury chances lower, Chase recommends checking in with a physical therapist several times a year. “Physical therapists are movement experts,” he says. “We’re the people to go to if there’s concerns about movement. Whether it’s pain with movement or some kind of instability with movement, a physical therapist will be the expert that you want to check in with to address any concerns you may have, both after injury or prophylactically.”
Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
As much as they would like to see a change, both Snik and Konowe considered what it would mean to take their kids out of sports. They’d be giving up skills that have helped their kids beyond their games, a healthy social outlet and an opportunity to support something their kids really love.
“I think the whole team culture is wonderful and competitiveness is wonderful,” Konowe says. “I think what it brings out in school is great, and it gets them outside and away from a computer.”
Another advantage is you are “subsidizing some version of entertainment for yourself [and] some version of entertainment for the kids, because now they have a group of friends that’s outside of school,” he continues.
Despite the financial burden, the schedule stress and even the threat of injury, both parents agree they would want to keep their kids in sports.
“I think you have to weigh the pros versus the cons,” Snik says. “If your kid’s really good and really passionate and you can do it, that’s great.” Her son Quinn “is obsessed. He’s completely in it.”
With her children’s athletic ability and passion, Snik figures she’s completely in it, too.
Katie Schubert has not one speck of athletic ability and is deeply impressed at her young daughter’s athletic ability (which she clearly got from her father).
