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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There is only this frenzy in certain sports and in over-populated 'super zip code' metros. Move to the exurbs or flyover country and youth sports are still chill. It's because these wacko striver parents are all living through their kids. And no matter how much dough they blow and summers and weekends wasted carting kids everywhere, they still won't go D1. These arrogant sports-obsessed parents think they're hot s*** when they're really literally being scammed and coerced out of their money...and 99% chance the kid will end up at the same college anyone else can go to with the same CV.[/quote]

+1. This is the blunt reason.  Parents have lost all perspective about what youth sports should be and the experience their kids should have playing them.  City rec league sports used to be a way for neighborhood kids to build friendships, get exercise, stay in shape and learn sportsmanship.  Now it's all about parents paying a fortune for some travel league headquartered hundreds of miles away so they can spending every weekend driving 100-200 miles to play baseball.  The parents hope that maybe this will help their kid stand out well enough to maybe get recognized for a scholarship, but the odds of this are firmly stacked against them.  Kids would be better off if sports reverted back to how they were 20+ years ago and academics became the focus once again for getting into a good college.[/quote]

Pretty sure athletic college recruiting was a thing 20 years ago.  I don’t think you realize it’s always been a thing going back to the early 1900s.

The difference is back then the Ivy schools were actually best in the country in sports like football but they still just took kids from Andover or other elite private schools who were white and Protestant.  Not the best athletes or students.

The current system ramped up in the 1980s…and went to another level in just the last 5 years with the transfer portal, NIL $$$s and soon paying athletes directly to play.[/quote]

There aren't any more slots for college recruiting in 2024 than there were in 2004, so when youth travel sports apparatus goes 10x, there are still the same handful of winners (college recruits) at the top. For the bottom 99%, it remains a time and money sink. What's astonishing is every local community has these "super star" local athlete kids who were high school graduates recently in say 2014-2020, so parents ought to reference them to see pointless it all was. Either they didn't go to great colleges, or they went D1 and rode the bench and quit, or maybe they did play all four years of college...and now they have a unremarkable 9-5 corporate job paying them $75,000 a year. Nobody cares they were some amazing swimmer or field hockey player or whether they were some obscure player at D1 Maryland or DIII Emerson College in Boston. They're just a dime a dozen washed up athlete. People care what career your kid has after college and who they marry. Are they good people. Do they visit you (parents) often. That's the real scoreboard.[/quote]

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