So I had the pleasure of experiencing organized youth sports in 3 different states, Texas, Ohio, and in Maine. The majority of my experience is in Maine. In Texas my sisters were involved in "elite" level gymnastics in San Antonio and spent literally 3 to 4 hours at night 5 days out of the week in the gym. They traveled all throughout Texas during this time. They were in late elementary and middle school at the time. They all competed on their high school teams, even after moving to Maryland from Texas (we were Air Force brats). When I went back to Texas for residency, my youngest son, much to my dismay, went to the same gym that my sisters went to. My wife at the time was a gymnast when she was a kid and thought it would be "a really good idea" to get my son into. Needless to say we were spending for $500 a month, and this was in the mid 90s, for him to be on a traveling gymnastics team at the age of 6! It was ridiculous but, as a resident, I did not have the energy to fight that battle. When we move to Ohio, he got out of gymnastics and began to play year-round soccer. He played for his middle school. He played for the town team. He played for a "select" team in the Miami Valley area. It was about $1000 annually for this, the select team, and somewhere between $150 and $200 apiece for the town travel and middle school teams. My 2 younger children were doing gymnastics at the same time, but not anything of consequence, more of a "mommy and me" kind of thing. When he moved to Maine, it was a completely different story. My daughter was involved in high-level gymnastics on a team and we were right back at the $500 a month plus a $3000 a week long camp in the woods of Canada every summer, plus meet fees, easily dropping $7000 or $8000 a year on gymnastics. This was in addition to her playing town travel soccer and me organizing a hybrid sort of "Premier team" through the club my son was playing for and coaching that team with one of the British guys who was associated with the club so that kids doing other sports but wanted to play soccer at a higher level could do so. For her, at least, there was some return on investment as after turning one of her sesamoid bones into pixie dust from gymnastics, and then turning her focus to soccer, she was able to play at the collegiate level, D3, but was able to secure an academic scholarship well beyond her actual academic performance level. She played with a premier club and for her high school team and was quite accomplished, for Maine at least, in soccer. During these years, it was $3000 or more for registration and uniforms for her Premier team, and this does not count any of the money spent on tournament travel and the like. We would travel routinely in the Northeast region, all over New England and into New York and New Jersey as well. Then there were out of pocket costs for ID camps, usually run at specific schools, but also a few "clearing house" locations where a number of schools would attend a camp at some site to scout kids. Never a cheap endeavor. My middle son played premier soccer as well, again about $3000 a year. His team was quite good and represented Maine in the USYS D1 regional tournament several years running. This included trips to West Virginia and Rhode Island for the regional tournaments. He had a chance to play in college, the college coach at Bentley was quite close with his last premier coach, they both played on the same team when they were in college, and he was offered a position after the usual recruiting timeframe based on the recommendation of his coach. He never really took the recruiting process seriously as he was not sure if he wanted to play in college or not. Ultimately, he decided against that and took to beer drinking as a sport. He is probably a better person for it! All told, I cringe at the amount of money that we spent on youth sports for the kids, but I think they got something good out of it. There are a number of life lessons that they would not have gotten in any other arena, it just cost quite a bit of money for that to occur. Ultimately, I think it is money well spent as it kept them from getting involved, to a potentially hazardous degree, with other, less productive habits during high school ("falling in with the wrong crowd" if you will), and this is a good thing.
edited for talk-to-text errors
edited for talk-to-text errors
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