s/o How do kids on travel teams get everything done

[Anonymous]

I've had two kids play travel throughout some of all of the high school years. My oldest is a very academically motivated kid who is a good, but not great athlete. She has never struggled much with balancing soccer, her other ECs and school at her highly competitive (but not magnet) public high school. Until high school she practiced 2 or 3 days a week at most and never had to travel far for tournaments or league games. High school soccer is every day, but most clubs cut way back on club soccer during the high school season, so that wasn't a problem. She loves playing, and soccer has been a huge stress reliever. She has sometimes stayed up late with homework, but rarely past 11:30 until the hell that was junior year (but junior year is awful whether you are playing sports or not).

My other player is on a much more intense team. His schedule has been much more challenging, because he takes longer to get his work done and has had practice 4 times a week for most of the year since 8th grade, plus significant travel for games. When things started to ramp up in 7th grade, we had a lot of battles about why we thought he needed to strive for all As (our answer: because he was capable of getting As without too much difficulty so long as he put the work in). He constantly mentioned that most of his friends got a lot of Bs and their parents were fine with that. In 8th grade, one of the older players at his club got recruited to play at a great academic and soccer school, and he had a conversation with my son about how important grades were for the recruiting process. It was an amazing light bulb moment, and he has killed himself to maintain a good GPA ever since with no pressure from us. Getting the work done is brutal though, and he's frequently up past midnight. Sometimes he doesn't even get home from practice until 10:00.

In terms of supports, we have a full-time babysitter for our younger children, and my inlaws are nearby and willing to help with driving. My husband and I both work full time, but have fairly flexible schedules, and we arrange our time in the office around driving commitments. We relied heavily on carpools before my older child could drive, and have definitely worked to recruit families we like into teams with an eye to both social and carpool opportunities. We eat staggered dinners a lot of nights, but I always stay up to eat with whoever is home latest. We would never have done all this if we didn't love soccer or didn't consider weekend soccer trips a fun family event.

[Anonymous]

My DS is on the crew team and practices are 4 days per week plus Sat. mornings. My mom is retired so she can drop him off at practice and I pick him up. He does HW when he first gets to the boathouse since he arrives 30ish minutes early. On the way home, he studies vocab on Quizlet on my phone, eats dinner and then does the bulk of his HW. If he didn't do any after school activities, he would finish his HW and then want to spend the rest of his night playing video games. He has made a lot of good friends on crew outside of school and he enjoys going to regattas and spending the day with his teammates. I am thankful he has made such good friends and he is wasting his free time playing video games.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've had two kids play travel throughout some of all of the high school years. My oldest is a very academically motivated kid who is a good, but not great athlete. She has never struggled much with balancing soccer, her other ECs and school at her highly competitive (but not magnet) public high school. Until high school she practiced 2 or 3 days a week at most and never had to travel far for tournaments or league games. High school soccer is every day, but most clubs cut way back on club soccer during the high school season, so that wasn't a problem. She loves playing, and soccer has been a huge stress reliever. She has sometimes stayed up late with homework, but rarely past 11:30 until the hell that was junior year (but junior year is awful whether you are playing sports or not).

My other player is on a much more intense team. His schedule has been much more challenging, because he takes longer to get his work done and has had practice 4 times a week for most of the year since 8th grade, plus significant travel for games. When things started to ramp up in 7th grade, we had a lot of battles about why we thought he needed to strive for all As (our answer: because he was capable of getting As without too much difficulty so long as he put the work in). He constantly mentioned that most of his friends got a lot of Bs and their parents were fine with that. In 8th grade, one of the older players at his club got recruited to play at a great academic and soccer school, and he had a conversation with my son about how important grades were for the recruiting process. It was an amazing light bulb moment, and he has killed himself to maintain a good GPA ever since with no pressure from us. Getting the work done is brutal though, and he's frequently up past midnight. Sometimes he doesn't even get home from practice until 10:00.

In terms of supports, we have a full-time babysitter for our younger children, and my inlaws are nearby and willing to help with driving. My husband and I both work full time, but have fairly flexible schedules, and we arrange our time in the office around driving commitments. We relied heavily on carpools before my older child could drive, and have definitely worked to recruit families we like into teams with an eye to both social and carpool opportunities. We eat staggered dinners a lot of nights, but I always stay up to eat with whoever is home latest. We would never have done all this if we didn't love soccer or didn't consider weekend soccer trips a fun family event.

Do you think the bolded is a positive? No kid should be at practice until 10pm and no kid should be up past midnight doing homework. He is either taking classes too hard for him to get the work done efficiently or you his extra curriculars are too much for him to maintain normalcy. You are drinking the kook-aid from one kid and taking your son on a not so fun ride.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've had two kids play travel throughout some of all of the high school years. My oldest is a very academically motivated kid who is a good, but not great athlete. She has never struggled much with balancing soccer, her other ECs and school at her highly competitive (but not magnet) public high school. Until high school she practiced 2 or 3 days a week at most and never had to travel far for tournaments or league games. High school soccer is every day, but most clubs cut way back on club soccer during the high school season, so that wasn't a problem. She loves playing, and soccer has been a huge stress reliever. She has sometimes stayed up late with homework, but rarely past 11:30 until the hell that was junior year (but junior year is awful whether you are playing sports or not).

My other player is on a much more intense team. His schedule has been much more challenging, because he takes longer to get his work done and has had practice 4 times a week for most of the year since 8th grade, plus significant travel for games. When things started to ramp up in 7th grade, we had a lot of battles about why we thought he needed to strive for all As (our answer: because he was capable of getting As without too much difficulty so long as he put the work in). He constantly mentioned that most of his friends got a lot of Bs and their parents were fine with that. In 8th grade, one of the older players at his club got recruited to play at a great academic and soccer school, and he had a conversation with my son about how important grades were for the recruiting process. It was an amazing light bulb moment, and he has killed himself to maintain a good GPA ever since with no pressure from us. Getting the work done is brutal though, and he's frequently up past midnight. Sometimes he doesn't even get home from practice until 10:00.

In terms of supports, we have a full-time babysitter for our younger children, and my inlaws are nearby and willing to help with driving. My husband and I both work full time, but have fairly flexible schedules, and we arrange our time in the office around driving commitments. We relied heavily on carpools before my older child could drive, and have definitely worked to recruit families we like into teams with an eye to both social and carpool opportunities. We eat staggered dinners a lot of nights, but I always stay up to eat with whoever is home latest. We would never have done all this if we didn't love soccer or didn't consider weekend soccer trips a fun family event.

Do you think the bolded is a positive? No kid should be at practice until 10pm and no kid should be up past midnight doing homework. He is either taking classes too hard for him to get the work done efficiently or you his extra curriculars are too much for him to maintain normalcy. You are drinking the kook-aid from one kid and taking your son on a not so fun ride.

You make a lot of assumptions for someone who doesn't know anything about this particular kid or his family. If your goal is "maintaining normalcy," whatever that means, then by all means you should not combine a heavy academic load with a time consuming EC. In general, striving to be a top achiever at most anything is not consistent with being your average every day person. For us, if he's happy, which he is, despite what I view as an unpleasant workload, then we are happy. No clue what you mean by kook-aid, but we are not the ones driving our kid's sports ambitions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:IME, the kids tend to be very organized and self motivated. They are the type of kids who are doing their homework before anything else. They don't procrastinate. They take big projects and break them down into small manageable pieces. As a parent, I am completely uninvolved in school matters because I'm not needed.

this. Mine also sacrifice social (his choice) time to get everything done. He is heading to HS so will have to give up one of sports

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've had two kids play travel throughout some of all of the high school years. My oldest is a very academically motivated kid who is a good, but not great athlete. She has never struggled much with balancing soccer, her other ECs and school at her highly competitive (but not magnet) public high school. Until high school she practiced 2 or 3 days a week at most and never had to travel far for tournaments or league games. High school soccer is every day, but most clubs cut way back on club soccer during the high school season, so that wasn't a problem. She loves playing, and soccer has been a huge stress reliever. She has sometimes stayed up late with homework, but rarely past 11:30 until the hell that was junior year (but junior year is awful whether you are playing sports or not).

My other player is on a much more intense team. His schedule has been much more challenging, because he takes longer to get his work done and has had practice 4 times a week for most of the year since 8th grade, plus significant travel for games. When things started to ramp up in 7th grade, we had a lot of battles about why we thought he needed to strive for all As (our answer: because he was capable of getting As without too much difficulty so long as he put the work in). He constantly mentioned that most of his friends got a lot of Bs and their parents were fine with that. In 8th grade, one of the older players at his club got recruited to play at a great academic and soccer school, and he had a conversation with my son about how important grades were for the recruiting process. It was an amazing light bulb moment, and he has killed himself to maintain a good GPA ever since with no pressure from us. Getting the work done is brutal though, and he's frequently up past midnight. Sometimes he doesn't even get home from practice until 10:00.

In terms of supports, we have a full-time babysitter for our younger children, and my inlaws are nearby and willing to help with driving. My husband and I both work full time, but have fairly flexible schedules, and we arrange our time in the office around driving commitments. We relied heavily on carpools before my older child could drive, and have definitely worked to recruit families we like into teams with an eye to both social and carpool opportunities. We eat staggered dinners a lot of nights, but I always stay up to eat with whoever is home latest. We would never have done all this if we didn't love soccer or didn't consider weekend soccer trips a fun family event.

Do you think the bolded is a positive? No kid should be at practice until 10pm and no kid should be up past midnight doing homework. He is either taking classes too hard for him to get the work done efficiently or you his extra curriculars are too much for him to maintain normalcy. You are drinking the kook-aid from one kid and taking your son on a not so fun ride.

You make a lot of assumptions for someone who doesn't know anything about this particular kid or his family. If your goal is "maintaining normalcy," whatever that means, then by all means you should not combine a heavy academic load with a time consuming EC. In general, striving to be a top achiever at most anything is not consistent with being your average every day person. For us, if he's happy, which he is, despite what I view as an unpleasant workload, then we are happy. No clue what you mean by kook-aid, but we are not the ones driving our kid's sports ambitions.

No one made assumptions. They read your post. It is sad.

[Anonymous]

My kids don't play travel sports, but a lot of their friends do. I agree with the above poster who said that the kids who do travel sports and excel in academics are highly self-motivated and organized - neither of those terms describe my kids LOL. The kid who plays travel sports needs to be prepared to come home from school and immediately crank out their HW, hop in the car, deal with likely a long car carpool, play said sport, eat dinner and shower late and possibly finish off hw, and get to bed right away after that/fall asleep quickly because it is late at this point. I truly admire kids/adults who are that efficient.

My kids, on the other hand, want to relax and not tackle HW immediately upon getting home from school, dawdle through HW, need a lot of reminders, want more "chill" time after dinner/before bed, and take awhile to fall asleep at night (even after hard exercise, they just toss and turn alot before drifting off) - they hate to be rushed from thing to thing, and feel stressed if it is bedtime and they haven't had time on ther own to just relax. Also, my kids do not use carpool time efficiently - when other kids are in the car, they don't want to do HW or eat dinner, they want to chat with the other kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My son is very smart and it doesn't take him long to do homework as he doesn't put forth much effort. Math takes him a few minutes, writing takes 30 minutes at most, he never studies for tests. Since he won't spend more time on his homework, travel sports fill the time that he would normally bury himself in videos.

Let me go way out on a limb and suggest that he is either 1) in about the third grade; or 2) in a public school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DS is on the crew team and practices are 4 days per week plus Sat. mornings. My mom is retired so she can drop him off at practice and I pick him up. He does HW when he first gets to the boathouse since he arrives 30ish minutes early. On the way home, he studies vocab on Quizlet on my phone, eats dinner and then does the bulk of his HW. If he didn't do any after school activities, he would finish his HW and then want to spend the rest of his night playing video games. He has made a lot of good friends on crew outside of school and he enjoys going to regattas and spending the day with his teammates. I am thankful he has made such good friends and he is wasting his free time playing video games.

There is such a thing as travel crew?!?!

[Anonymous]

All our kids are in travel and relatively rigorous schools. All the kids do a little worse academically during off season - some it becomes a battle. Travel can be 2-3 day commitment during week and then large chunks during weekend. For our kids, it gives them a natural structure, physical activity, a great out of school social friend group and sometimes really blessed with a coach who became a good life mentor. Travel can vary a lot. There have many been times where we could have switched to more competitive teams - but we didn't want to either because leaving friend groups, coaches, and most critical, increased time commitment.

Most of my kids are NOT naturally organized - so travel has forced them to learn what works best for them. (Off season - they seem to drop some habits because its not as necessary). They don't do work in the car except occasional flash cards; they don't stay up late. They tend to do work right after school and sometimes mornings, bc they are morning people. They learn to break longer assignments apart into multiple steps. My oldest has learned to study ahead in mornings for tests/semester exams that would occur a few days later - that was huge.

During off season, they don't "feel" as good physically and miss social interaction, which puts them in more difficult moods, less motivated - another contributor to not doing as well.

The downside are less dinners/less family time together during busy season (which is a few months a year), - but they also have a shared experience amongst them where they support each other.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My kids don't play travel sports, but a lot of their friends do. I agree with the above poster who said that the kids who do travel sports and excel in academics are highly self-motivated and organized - neither of those terms describe my kids LOL. The kid who plays travel sports needs to be prepared to come home from school and immediately crank out their HW, hop in the car, deal with likely a long car carpool, play said sport, eat dinner and shower late and possibly finish off hw, and get to bed right away after that/fall asleep quickly because it is late at this point. I truly admire kids/adults who are that efficient.

My kids, on the other hand, want to relax and not tackle HW immediately upon getting home from school, dawdle through HW, need a lot of reminders, want more "chill" time after dinner/before bed, and take awhile to fall asleep at night (even after hard exercise, they just toss and turn alot before drifting off) - they hate to be rushed from thing to thing, and feel stressed if it is bedtime and they haven't had time on ther own to just relax. Also, my kids do not use carpool time efficiently - when other kids are in the car, they don't want to do HW or eat dinner, they want to chat with the other kids.

I'm the PP whose son's schedule is apparently making strangers on the internet sad, and what you describe about your kids' tendencies is the main thing he struggles with. He's naturally very organized, but definitely the sort who feels like he wants to relax and/or hang out with friends after school until practice. He's much better rested when he gets straight to his homework, but it goes against every instinct. My husband, who never procrastinated one a single thing in his life, is baffled by the idea that you wouldn't start homework as soon as you are home, but I have a lot of sympathy.

[Anonymous]

I work 7:30-4. My H does morning routine, drive to school 30 minutes. I work 15 minutes from their school.

My kids get out of school at 3, they chill until 3:30.

3:30-4:15ish: Homework in a classroom or library.
4:30: Pickup
5:00: arrive at practice location, we eat... picnic type food, fruit, salad, sub, yogurt, etcetc
5:30-7: practice
7:30-8: home eat dinner
8:00:

Homework is done: 30 minute drive in morning, 1 hour after class, 30 minute drive to practice, 30 minute drive home from practice, 30 minutes before practice, 8-10pm at night

That is 5 possible hours that my child could do homework. Normally he uses the 1 hour after school, either 30 minute drive to practice or home (not both) and at most 1 hour at night. That is 2.5 hours of homework. About once every other week he has 3 hours of homework.

Travel sports is 12 weeks in Fall, 12 weeks in Spring. That is 24 weeks out of 52 that leaves 20+ weeks of "just hanging out". He plays in winter/summer but it is less intense, less practice and no school.

We rarely had sports on a Friday. So he would hang out with friends on a Friday/Sunday. We are in 8 tournaments a year, 4 are "travel overnight" the rest are travel <1.5 hours from out house.

[Anonymous]

It's taught my son how to prioritize and have excellent time management skills. Those are the two key things I see among the kids on his team who excel both athletically and academically.

We hired a life coach who specialized in student athletes to help him once he reached 7th grade and the workload for school increased. He taught him to set a schedule and adhere to it to have the most success and least stress in both areas. The coach worked with him for 6 weeks and the changes we saw were well worth the money. Before, my son would come home and relax after school and before practice, which left him trying to cram in dinner + a shower + homework between 8-10.

Now, he has 30 minutes once he gets home from school to relax and eat a small dinner before he starts his homework. He has practice from 6-7:30 3 nights/week and does work with a personal strength & conditioning coach 1 morning/week from 6-7 AM. The first thing he does when he gets home from practice is eat because he's always starving, and then he heads off to shower. After that, he works on homework for 45 mins. and takes a 15 min. break. This repeats until he goes to bed at around 11. Many nights he's in bed before then. Having block scheduling helps because he has that extra day to study and complete assignments.

[Anonymous]

This whole thread makes me so sad for kids these days. No wonder suicide is the third leading cause of death in middle school kids. So much pressure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work 7:30-4. My H does morning routine, drive to school 30 minutes. I work 15 minutes from their school.

My kids get out of school at 3, they chill until 3:30.

3:30-4:15ish: Homework in a classroom or library.
4:30: Pickup
5:00: arrive at practice location, we eat... picnic type food, fruit, salad, sub, yogurt, etcetc
5:30-7: practice
7:30-8: home eat dinner
8:00:

Homework is done: 30 minute drive in morning, 1 hour after class, 30 minute drive to practice, 30 minute drive home from practice, 30 minutes before practice, 8-10pm at night

That is 5 possible hours that my child could do homework. Normally he uses the 1 hour after school, either 30 minute drive to practice or home (not both) and at most 1 hour at night. That is 2.5 hours of homework. About once every other week he has 3 hours of homework.

Travel sports is 12 weeks in Fall, 12 weeks in Spring. That is 24 weeks out of 52 that leaves 20+ weeks of "just hanging out". He plays in winter/summer but it is less intense, less practice and no school.

We rarely had sports on a Friday. So he would hang out with friends on a Friday/Sunday. We are in 8 tournaments a year, 4 are "travel overnight" the rest are travel <1.5 hours from out house.

I'm a pp who was admiring of people who make travel sports schedules work while still maintaining a strong commitment to academics. Your schedule sounds very organized and I'm really glad it works for your family. Maybe I am reading into your post, but it seems there is a vibe of "there is plenty of time in the day for all of this," yet only because yours is a highly regimented schedule, which isn't for all kids (or adults!). My kids would say they have no time to relax on that schedule (for them, relaxing is at home with a book or listening to music or whatever, not hanging in the hallways at school for 30 min once the end of day bell sounds) - maybe your kids don't need that time, or you as a family don't value it, but different people flourish in different ways. Also, a bulk of the time you describe as available for your kids' HW is broken into small chunks in the car - for my kids, that kind of time isn't conducive to quality writing and reading work, it would be most useful for say flashcard review time, which isn't the bulk of their HW esp in high school. I also don't think my family could get dinner on the table and eat it in the 30 min window on your schedule. The challenge most of us face with travel is during the school year, not summers - so the 24 weeks of travel comprise 2/3rds or more of the school year and that is when there are most time constraints.