As more parents are pushing their kids into sports for the college scholarship dream, the market is getting tighter. The New York Time is running an article series that is very interesting. The link to the article is below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/sports/10scholarships.html
I don’t want to give away the WHOLE article, but it ends with this:
Ten thousand per kid per year is not an unreasonable estimate, he said. But we never looked at it as a financial transaction. You are misguided if you do it for that reason. You cannot recoup what you put in if you think of it that way. It was their passion — still is — and we wanted to indulge that.
So what if we didn’t take vacations for a few years.
Pat Taylor, who started playing soccer at 4, said it took him about a month to accept that his dream of playing varsity soccer on scholarship in college would not happen. He looks back fondly on his youth career but also wishes he knew at the start what he knows now about the process.
The whole thing really is a crapshoot, but no one ever says that out loud, he said. On every team I played on, every single person there thought for sure that they would play in college. I thought so, too. Just by the numbers, it’s completely unrealistic.
And if I had it to do over, I would have skipped a practice every now and then to go to a concert or a movie with my friends. I missed out on a lot of things for soccer. I wish I could have some of that time back.
Our Advice: Keep in mind that most kids playing in your soccer tournament will never be good enough or lucky enough to play in college. The least you (and their parents!) can give them is weekend of fun.