Ask your middle-class or wealthy friends with children between the ages of eight and 18 to do something fun on a weekend in the spring or fall. I would bet that at least half of them are busy, off in some exurban wasteland, logging in to apps like TeamSnap and SportsEngine and GameChanger as they shuttle their kids back and forth between a $200-a-night room at the Marriott, a Chipotle, and a sports field.
I am an unlikely sports parent. I was never on any kind of team; I spent my high school afternoons working at a health food store, creating self-bound books of poetry, and experimenting with various methods of mind expansion. Yoga and a few shuffles around the track are the closest I get to playing a sport these days. When I was a new parent and heard friends with older kids talking about the hectic swirl of tryouts and tournaments, I silently pledged that would never be me.
And yet.
Rec sports for grade-school children were the gateway. There were no tryouts. For $100, my husband and I could sit in a local park for eight weekends in a row and watch our children play softball and soccer. Some of the kids on their teams, forced by their parents to participate, stood forlornly on the field; others exerted themselves in earnest. A few seasons of this uneven patchwork made it clear that my children wanted something more intense. Both had inherited athleticism, apparently from other family members: My daughter was a fast baserunner good at catching softballs, and my son was scoring most of the goals on his soccer team. If we wanted them to have a chance at making their high school squads, friends counseled, we would need to get them on competitive teams.
Thus I was initiated into the vast network of private sports teams that, in a narrowing funnel, direct children into high school, college, and professional sports. These “travel teams” are fueled by families’ labor and cash; many coaches are minimally compensated parents. When my husband told me we’d have to pay $1,500 to the softball team our daughter had just qualified for to cover tournament entry fees, I was shocked. And that didn’t cover the uniforms, equipment, hotels, and ubiquitous gear that families haul in and out of their SUVs each weekend: canopies, WeatherPods, GCI Outdoor chairs, coolers, and double-decker collapsible wagons to trundle it all to and from the fields.
Let me pause here to say that I love what competitive sports have done for my kids, now 11 and 13 years old. All the platitudes I scoffed at as a teenager—that sports teach hard work, perseverance, and collaboration; that they can be inspiring, ennobling, and transcendent—are true. My children have built their confidence, learned how to lose graciously, and bonded with their teammates. Their coaches have mentored them into more capable and compassionate people.
Not only that, I love their teams. The first time I leapt from my seat screaming when my son scored a goal, my husband looked at me with wonderment. Hadn’t I been the one questioning whether the kids should even do this? Soon enough, I had bought team T-shirts that I, like other parents, wore to each event. When they won tournaments, I cried with joy.
Yet I’m willing to bet that most parents whose children play competitive sports have seen the darker side, too. Kids’ sports can be ugly, vicious, and elitist. I’ve watched parents throw things at umpires. I’ve heard coaches scream obscenities at their players. I’ve seen kids hurt each other on purpose. And I’ve witnessed friendships torn apart and parents divided over who gets how much playing time at what position. There are placards on each field at the softball complex in our local park that say something like, “I’m just a kid. It’s just a game. My coach is a volunteer. The umpires are humans. No college scholarships will be handed out today.”
Even when all parties are on their best behavior, travel-team competition is grueling. For outdoor sports in our slice of the Midwest, tournaments and games are mostly in the spring and fall. Frequency and travel time depend on the level of play—“C teams” play several weekends a month and travel one to three hours from home; “B teams” travel farther and play more frequently. “A teams” travel out of state and play every weekend. With even one kid on a C team, much less two or three at higher levels, this schedule would be extremely difficult for a low-wage worker or single parent to manage. Research shows that many working-class kids are structurally excluded, and my own work with refugee and immigrant teens indicates that without significant family resources, sports opportunities and college scholarships are often out of reach. A two-parent household with a comfortable income is practically required for travel-team participation. In fact, my husband and I sometimes jokingly observe, parents should divorce and then partner with childless people so that four adult drivers are available. But if the new partners have kids who also play competitive sports, it could be a total mess. Dating apps should catch up and offer filtering options.
The tournament schedules are not announced until several days beforehand, so you have to block off an entire weekend and be prepared to leave work early to get your kid to a Friday evening game. Tournaments could go through Sunday evening, or your team could be eliminated early on, making nonrefundable hotel reservations perilous. Or the games could be rained out—tournaments are rarely canceled because then the organizers have to offer refunds, so they delay or cancel games one by one. Oh, and unless your kids are among the best on the team, they may not even play that much.
This lifestyle is easily parodied and ripe for exposé journalism. David Gauvey Herbert’s article about Varsity Spirit, a conglomerate that has a stranglehold on competitive cheerleading, confirmed my suspicion that some people were making a lot of money off all this, and a New York Times article from 2025 expanded those findings to other sports. The uniform companies, hotels, and tournament organizers are all linked in a network that, whether through careful orchestration or happenstance, relieves families of their disposable income. “Stay to play” arrangements are common: All team families, for example, are required to patronize a certain hotel. As a result of these opportunities for profit, billions of dollars in private equity investment have begun flowing into youth sports over the past several years, and the Unrivaled Sports corporation has been buying up leagues and venues in hopes of establishing a youth sports empire. But to most parents, the economic links remain obscure, and they are easy to overlook when your kids are enjoying themselves while doing what all their friends are doing.
This particular type of family investment in kids’ sports is relatively new. The term “soccer mom” entered the lexicon during the 1996 presidential election to describe a voter demographic of mostly white, suburban, middle-class mothers. By 2010, writers such as Lorraine Duffy Merkl were proudly displaying their sports parent cred in The New York Times. Today, a quick Amazon search reveals T-shirts, mugs, and hats marketed to Softball Moms, Cheer Moms, Hockey Moms, Wrestling Moms, and in general, parents, siblings, and grandparents of players in any sport you can imagine. Sixty million kids in the United States currently play sports, and according to the Aspen Institute, the average American sports family spends a little more than $1,000 per child athlete per year—a 46 percent increase from 2019. There has been plenty of soul-searching about the costs and results of hyper-involved parenting, significant attention to the increase in youth sports injuries, and a bit of reflection on sports parenting in particular. But given how much space sports take up in my life and the lives of most parents I know, there is more to consider.
I graduated from high school the year “soccer mom” became a popular term; parental involvement in sports was different in my youth. This was confirmed by my mother’s surprise the first time I took her to a softball tournament. She looked around, confused. “You mean we just sit here for the whole weekend?” she asked. At first, she kept sneaking off to the car to listen to podcasts on her phone. Never, she alleged, had she spent a weekend watching my sister or me do anything. And my sister, unlike me, was sporty. She was on the track team and the soccer team—we think. Mom and I tried to remember, but it was hard, since we’d never attended any of her games or meets. She made her high school teams with no experience and went to the events with her classmates on a school bus.
By the end of my daughter’s softball tournament, Mom had learned all the kids’ names and was cheering them on from the sidelines. It doesn’t take long to be initiated into sports parenthood or grandparenthood (at least a quarter of the spectators are grandparents, some of whom attend every game). Once you commit to the lifestyle, it starts to feel inevitable. Sometimes, in the winter months, when the kids had no tournaments and only two practices a week, our lives felt empty, purposeless, and lonely.
Which raises the question: What would we be doing with our time if kids’ sports didn’t dominate our lives? Sometimes during a soccer game, I’ll look around at the hundreds of parents camped out in chairs lining multiple fields, and I’ll picture all the empty seats in city council meetings, houses of worship, community service organizations, and every other component of civil society. Kids’ sports are our volunteer work and our social life—and for the less religious, our Sunday service. Many families, including ours, try to “do it all,” chauffeuring children from serving at the soup kitchen to the church picnic to sports games to a neighborhood BBQ to music lessons. But often, the first priority, the immovable piece of the schedule, is sports.
Nonetheless, kids’ sports offer something unique: They may be the last great political melting pot in an increasingly polarized country. Friend groups, social media ecosystems, religious communities, and even workplaces tend to be politically segregated. Although I’d lived in a red state for more than a decade, working at a university and living in a college town, I had few conservative friends. Adults tend to avoid ideological tensions, and our kids’ friends were mostly our friends’ kids. In a world of “chosen families,” kids’ sports allowed me a rare chance to spend time with people outside my bubble.
Because who cares about political differences when you’re hugging on the sidelines after a brutal defeat? The team families care about my kids, and I care about theirs. After spending countless hours on the sidelines, huddled under awnings to avoid the broiling sun or an icy rain, I could see what people brought beyond their politics: generosity, encouragement, and maybe some nachos from the concession stand. I even found that if I remained open to human connection, weighty topics could be broached respectfully. In the hours-long breaks between games, I got into friendly conversations with the more conservative dads about immigration, government spending, and the state of universities under the current administration. Occasionally, we would find common ground. When I explained, for example, how a graduate student I knew had his visa canceled due to a traffic ticket, one father agreed that this was not what he envisioned when he supported deportations. I admitted that although I didn’t agree with federal cuts to university funding, higher education was desperately in need of financial reform and I could understand why people had lost faith in the system. Outside the team setting, we wouldn’t have had much opportunity to interact.
My children also benefited from building connections across ideological divides. The first time the softball team gathered for a prayer, my daughter—the child of a Buddhist Quaker (me) and a secular humanist (my husband)—had no idea what to do. But it was important for her to navigate that tension. Sometimes she joined the prayers; sometimes she hung back with others. But she became more sensitive to religious difference and gained respect for her teammates’ strong faith.
When friends with younger kids ask me what they’re getting into with kids’ sports, I try to be honest about the benefits but also the costs (tens of thousands of dollars and most of your weekends for the next decade). The kids miss a lot for practices and tournaments: lazy afternoons, afterschool jobs, family game nights, hobbies, community involvement. Travel-team sports don’t make sense unless the kids are really committed and the parents go in with open eyes.
Though the macro level continues to unsettle me, competitive sports have become so woven into our lives that I’ve found ways to rationalize my family’s participation. I have my own equivalent of the placards at our local softball fields, the ones that remind parents that the umpires are human and the coaches are volunteers. These are reminders only to myself: Your kids are only young once. Give them this gift, and don’t let them forget how lucky they are. Take one for the team.
