Reply to Does anyone hate how competitive the world has become?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s just the dc area. Move to the south or Midwest [/quote]

THIS - or mountains.  East Coast metro is the worst for rat race competitiveness.[/quote]

If you’re speaking about sports, the DC area isn’t exactly known as a sports hub.   It’s also not an area where a lot of pro athletes come from.   The travel sports are similar to cheerleaders traveling to compete.   It can be a fun activity for the whole family to involved in.    But there might be a handful that can play in college, maybe 1-2%.  Same with grades, 1% of students will get SATs greater than 1500.

So is it really competitive?  You can’t give your child the genetics necessary to be a super athlete.  He can only be the best he can be with what he has to work with. Same with academics.  So students aren’t really competing against other students, they are just working on being the best that they can be.  Parents need to be happy with that. [/quote]

There are enough pro athletes and Olympians from this area to create a pretty intense culture around it but not enough to create an infrastructure that really creates a pipeline. An interesting thing to me is that despite this area having a decent number of pro athletes and Olympians you don't see any of them really helping raise up another generation of athletes. Sure some of them work with youth in this area sometimes but you don't see the same outreach you see other places.

It's also expensive to participate in sports in this area and the cost of other things (especially housing) makes it harder for families to afford to raise seriously competitive athletes. We have friends who live in suburbs of cities with much lower cost of living and they can afford travel sports and private coaching and pricy club sports more easily because if you can get a mortgage on a 4-5 bedroom house in a good school district for less than $1500 a month (totally feasible in places like St Louis and Cleveland and Indianapolis) then just your average college educated professional can afford a lot more spending on sports.

In DC you have to be truly wealthy to do that. Also people we know in lower COL cities are way more likely to have either a sahm or local family who can help with the logistics side of athletics whereas both COL and the culture in the DC area pushes a lot more people to be dual income and many people here are transplants with no local family support.[/quote]

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