Anyone pay more than $6000 per year for your teen to participate in an expensive sport?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We are between $25-30K yearly for figure skating, so it sounds like a bargain to me! The majority goes to coaching as it’s all individually coached. She does around four half hour lessons a week and coaches are $100/hr. Ice time and travel make up the majority of the rest.

What is your annual household income? Lobbyist?

Interestingly, in my experience in figure skating (where we spend $6000 per year on our 8 year old DD), many of the families involved in figure skating are definitely NOT wealthy (or at least live in very modest homes, have modest clothing, modest cars, etc). Many of the parents are first-generation in the US (often from Russia or China), and really like the sport of figure skating for its discipline, etc. It seems these parents make huge financial sacrifices for their kids to do figure skating.

In my experience, the wealthy parents tend to be in sports like lacrosse, tennis, and golf.

[Anonymous]

These numbers are astounding - what does travel ice hockey cost per year? Anyone know!?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Squash for my oldest is easily $2k+/month. The “elite” squash players are paying $4500/month. I wish we could do that for our DC but just not in the cards. We

Good God! What is that for? Daily private coaching?

[Anonymous]

I know this thread is about sports, but is anyone shelling out a lot of money on stuff like music lessons, art, acting, dance, etc? Just curious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:These numbers are astounding - what does travel ice hockey cost per year? Anyone know!?

Yeah, I can answer this one. I have two who play travel, and have played since the age of 5. Started at 2 and 4 with skating. Oldest is headed to college to play now, having gone to boarding school in New England to play (which is the highest level of play after "travel"). Top tier travel hockey is Tier 1 AAA, in this area Little Capitols or Team MD. But I digress.

It starts off with travel as a Mite, around age 5. Usually playing at A or AA level. That's relatively cheap, you're paying under $8k/yr per child then. It escalates up from there as the expenses get higher, trips longer, equipment more costly, etc. The last year we tracked expenses, we hit roughly $30k for oldest child.

Kids are both in private schools, so we pay over $200k/yr for the kids sports + school alone.

Ok, now I'm a little queasy....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:swimming is cheap, ice skating is not. I think you can go slowly and just do the group classes for awhile.

My niece's volleyball was around 1k/mo between club fees and travel, and you basically had to be on the club team to get the experience to keep up with the high school team.

All of the sports add up, but I think horseback riding and skating are the highest.

Riding puts it all to shame. Tens of thousands without even considering how much it costs to buy a horse, truck, trailer.

I was talking to my old coach recently and asking casually for a friend about buying a Children’s Hunter for their 12 yo. He said you need to spend in the six figures to get something competitive now. It is insane.

You can spend an infinite amount of money on riding. I saw an article a few years back about the top riders in the U.S., and I think Bruce Springsteen's daughter was the poorest person on the list. The rest were mostly the children of billionaires. It's difficult to compete if you're just a plain old 1%er.

That's for Hunters and Equitation. If you're an Eventer it's different. Still very expensive, but you don't quite buy your way up like that. As an aside, John Mellencamp's daughter is also a phenomenal rider, as are the Hadid sisters (Bella and Gigi, the models). All obviously have uber wealthy fathers.

I'm the PP who posted about the hockey playing sons. I used to show dressage and eventers, both of my kids rode for a bit but fortunatly preferred hockey. Don't think we'd be up for paying for both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Go look at a swim tech suit. They are about :490-$500: these suits generally have a recommended life span of about 4-8 swims and then they are considered worn out. Meet fees, swim parka, praxtice suit, club fees, summer pool membership, lessons, equipment fees (fins, goggles, snorkel, kickboard, buoy, hand equipment), two swim bags, swim caps (high end ones for meets are $40 or so each), etc.

It’s not the most expensive sport but it is expensive.

It does seem like you are exaggerating. Tech suits should get you more swims than that - like 20 which is maybe only a couple of meets but you should only be wearing them at championship meets. There are so many kids wearing tech suits who don’t need to be.
Most of the other equipment doesn’t need to be replaced very often.

Tech suits are recommended for one meet and that’s it. It will be around 6–12 swims and then it starts to degrade. If you are at monthly meets, that’s a huge investment (though we resell them on eBay). Equipment isn’t a frequent replacement but we outgrow fins yearly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Squash for my oldest is easily $2k+/month. The “elite” squash players are paying $4500/month. I wish we could do that for our DC but just not in the cards. We

Getting back to the squash question, what does this $2-5K a month go for?
How old is the kid??


I'm no stranger to paying $$ for sports but this even blows my mind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Squash for my oldest is easily $2k+/month. The “elite” squash players are paying $4500/month. I wish we could do that for our DC but just not in the cards. We

Getting back to the squash question, what does this $2-5K a month go for?
How old is the kid??


I'm no stranger to paying $$ for sports but this even blows my mind.

I asked about hockey. Thanks for the insight. I have a lot of insight into squash - you can do it for less but a huge focus now is private lessons - years ago it used to be group lessons - but someone spending 2k-4K is playing a lot of tournaments like the British open and at Stanford - camps are huge - and lots of kids play overseas in the summer because the squash is better - that’s for the elite players

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Squash for my oldest is easily $2k+/month. The “elite” squash players are paying $4500/month. I wish we could do that for our DC but just not in the cards. We

Getting back to the squash question, what does this $2-5K a month go for?
How old is the kid??


I'm no stranger to paying $$ for sports but this even blows my mind.

I asked about hockey. Thanks for the insight. I have a lot of insight into squash - you can do it for less but a huge focus now is private lessons - years ago it used to be group lessons - but someone spending 2k-4K is playing a lot of tournaments like the British open and at Stanford - camps are huge - and lots of kids play overseas in the summer because the squash is better - that’s for the elite players

I think you're responding to the wrong person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These numbers are astounding - what does travel ice hockey cost per year? Anyone know!?

Yeah, I can answer this one. I have two who play travel, and have played since the age of 5. Started at 2 and 4 with skating. Oldest is headed to college to play now, having gone to boarding school in New England to play (which is the highest level of play after "travel"). Top tier travel hockey is Tier 1 AAA, in this area Little Capitols or Team MD. But I digress.

It starts off with travel as a Mite, around age 5. Usually playing at A or AA level. That's relatively cheap, you're paying under $8k/yr per child then. It escalates up from there as the expenses get higher, trips longer, equipment more costly, etc. The last year we tracked expenses, we hit roughly $30k for oldest child.

Kids are both in private schools, so we pay over $200k/yr for the kids sports + school alone.

Ok, now I'm a little queasy....

Any insight into the path for girls? I have young ones playing - and we have no clue what the path is ...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Squash for my oldest is easily $2k+/month. The “elite” squash players are paying $4500/month. I wish we could do that for our DC but just not in the cards. We

Getting back to the squash question, what does this $2-5K a month go for?
How old is the kid??


I'm no stranger to paying $$ for sports but this even blows my mind.

DP. My kid plays squash since he was 7, 11 now. He gets private lessons from the pros at my DH’s private clubs, $35 for 1/2 hr and $50 for 1/2 hr at another club including court times, so not expensive. The pros are ranked in the top 100 in the world. But my kid plays recreationally mostly and I don’t count club fees since DH would be paying that whether or not DS plays squash.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know this thread is about sports, but is anyone shelling out a lot of money on stuff like music lessons, art, acting, dance, etc? Just curious.

Yes what does someone into piano or dance she’ll out per year??

[Anonymous]

Is there some ROI on all this outlandish squash spending that I don't know about? Ivy League athletic scholarships or something?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know this thread is about sports, but is anyone shelling out a lot of money on stuff like music lessons, art, acting, dance, etc? Just curious.

We pay about 2K/yr on private music lessons per child. And instruments, materials (string, reeds, etc), and music add on to that. Then one child attends a music based summer camp that runs around 2K/yr. We're probably close to 8K/yr for both kids music costs.

My children also take art and art classes run around 1K/yr per child. One of my children attends camps at the local art college, which run about another 1K/yr. Then there are materials, which as long as they're just sketching with pencils is trivial, but once they get picky about paints and colored pencils can skyrocket. We probably don't exceed 4K/yr there. OTOH, one of my children just discovered film photography (Thanksgiving with older relatives can be dangerous!) so our $ outlay for art may be about to increase.