The Cubes Fan is back to tell you something you are not gonna like and this time I’m moving away from entertainment into something that should be entertainment, but people treat it like a fucking job: Youth Sports.
What you are not going to like is this: Your kid is not going pro. I’m sorry to tell you this, but statistically, it’s not going to happen. I love using statistics because sports people are so into statistics, but they actually have no idea how stats actually work. Doesn’t stop them from saying dumb shit like WRC+ and WAR and xERA as if those were real things and not just filters for which players are evaluated, often incorrectly, by stuffed suits from Ivy Obsequious University, the Fighting IOUs.
First off, let’s talk about what sport your kid is currently spending 5 hours a day training for at the age of fucking 8-10 years old instead of enjoying summer. If your kid is into wrestling, swimming, gymnastics, or some other sport that DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE, then your kid is not going pro.
What the fuck are you doing spending a shit ton of money paying for travel, paying for teams, paying for lessons, when there’s not even a place for your kid to go make that money back? I’m not even talking to you people because that’s a waste of money and time that has no logical explanation. I should know, I put in my 10,000+ hours as a wrestler when I was a kid, and in case you were wondering, no, I am not a professional wrestler.
If your kid wants to be a professional wrestler, get them acting classes and NON-COMPETITION gymnastics. I feel like that would probably be much more beneficial to the professional wrestling world than not eating for three weeks so that you can go up against Chute in the state championship, Louden Swain. BTW, there’s no way you beat Chute with a lat drop.
I’m only going to talk about the big three American sports in which people can play professionally as adults because, unfortunately, a lot of the issues around youth sports involve money and that money is NEVER coming back to you if your kid doesn’t make it to the professional level. Also, this would be way too long if I did any more sports.
Let’s get into some of those statistics I was talking about earlier.
Baseball: Estimated 3.4 million kids play little league baseball. There are about 6,200 professional baseball players in the United States. 5000 minor league players and 1200 major league players. Taking those numbers and doing some quick math, we find that from those 3.4 million kids playing baseball, about 0.18 percent chance your kid will make it to the minor leagues and 0.035 percent chance they will make it to the major leagues.
Obviously those numbers are insanely small, but you are probably saying, but yeah, 3 million of those 3.4 million kids suck at baseball and my kid is awesome at baseball. I agree with you. Not that your kid is awesome at baseball, but that 3 million little leaguers do suck at baseball.
Also, that statistic is misleading. People use statistics to make their point, but it doesn’t mean those are good numbers, so you should call bullshit. Let’s look at just high school players, because let’s face it, if you can’t make the high school team, you can’t make it. Even high school players aren’t going to make it, but at least they are the ones with a chance.
There are approximately 455,000 high school players and still just 6200 pros, so that comes out to 1.3 percent chance of a high school player becoming a professional player. Much better than the last stat, but that still sucks.
Football: For football, there are over 1 million kids that play on the high school level across the U.S. There are about 2,200 NFL players, which includes the practice squads. That is a 0.22 percent chance of getting to the NFL. That’s even worse than baseball. The odds of a high school player becoming Billy Bob from Varsity Blues with a head injury is way higher than one of them becoming Mr. Irrelevant in the NFL draft.
Basketball: It is estimated there are about 500,000 boys and 400,000 girls playing high school basketball in the U.S.
The NBA has 760 slots for players between the NBA and the G-League. That means there is a 0.15 percent chance of your kid playing professionally in the states.
The WNBA has 144 slots for players, so that means your daughter has a 0.036 percent chance of playing professionally.
What this all means is that when you spend what is estimated to be about $5000 each year on average for your kid to play on a travel team in their sport, that’s $5000 thrown in the trash.
By the way, $5000 is an average that I have seen for many of these sports across the board, but here’s the secret about averages, they are used to hide the true costs. If we have 3.4 million kids playing baseball, and 2.4 million of them pay the least amount they can to play baseball which seems to be around $250, then the 1 million kids who are paying to play are spending WAAAAAY more than $5000/yr. Statistics baby.
Now, although I call bullshit on the $5k number, I’ll use it because math is really easy if you are using the number 5.
If you have one kid who plays on a travel team for 5 years, that is $25,000 that you will not get back. That’s one kid. Most people have at least two kids and if they are into sports with one, they probably have the other doing it too.
That’s $50k over those 5 years and I’m being very conservative with these numbers because kids play more than 5 years, things cost more than $5000, and people have more than one or two kids. The industrial youth sports complex have turned our families into golden geese and we are all sucking eggs because they know that we might spend $100k (often more) over the decade or so from the ages of 8 to 18 for the elusive shot at not having to spend $100k for them to go to college, or even worse for baseball players, go straight to the pros and make $11,000 a year to play in the minors.
HOLY SHIT! Your kid, who you just dropped $100k to get into baseball, will now, if they are lucky and work their way up to Triple A in about 4 years, will make about $20k a year. They would have to play 5 years in AAA just to earn the amount you dropped on them to play baseball.
What would that get them? If they’ve been in AAA for 5 years, you are about 27 years old and probably never hitting the jack pot of a minimum professional contract. On the plus side, they are pushing 30, have no education, no life skills, and no savings, so they’re probably going to be fine.
But let’s talk about the real cost. While it is always about the money, it shouldn’t be about the money. In fact, many parents say the cost is worth it because it’s for their kids to go out and play sports, but the reality is, the money it costs turns it from a fun thing for a kid to do into a shitty thing for a kid to do. Mom and Dad are stressing out, yelling at the coaches, yelling at the refs, and then hanging out with the “good players” parents talking shit about the kids that aren’t as good. The kids end up hating their parents, hating their coaches, and much more often than you would think, hating the “fun” sport they were playing.
Is that the environment we were hoping to bring our kids up in? How about when we force our kids to go to practices when it is too damn hot, or too damn cold? Or skip a friend’s birthday party because they have a tournament all weekend? Or don’t get to participate in school events because they are preparing for a career they will never have?
Oh, but it builds character. Wrong. What kind of character do they build by being yelled at constantly by coaches and parents? Watching coaches and parents yell at refs? Hearing that every game they lose was because of some reason other than they weren’t good that day? Or worse, hearing that they are terrible?
What kind of character do they build seeing Joe and Jane Jock dominate the team in every way while Ralph and Rita Roleplayer get ignored unless it’s to blame them for something? And Joe and Jane Jock end up being assholes, by the way, because everyone sucks up to them for being good at a game. Most of them get an inflated sense of who they actually are in the world, which means, their character sucks.
What are they learning when we put an insane amount of importance on sports for their entire childhood? When they graduate from high school and they aren’t one of the minute amounts of kids who has a chance to go pro, what are they going to do? Sit at a computer and write about how big a mistake it was to spend 10 years being a wrestler instead of learning to play an instrument or something they could do later in life? Probably.
But here’s the thing: I did it a long time ago and it is 100 times worse than when I was a kid. And it’s not like I didn’t almost get sucked into that shit with my kids too.
I was a brainwashed American sports fan who had two sons, so I too thought maybe they would be professional sports guys. I realized very early on though that sports was no longer about having any fun whatsoever. By the time my kids were 8, teams were being built with coaches and kids making sure to stay together season after season in rec leagues so they could be winners when they were 9 or 10.
Then they turned those teams into travel teams and it just continued on. It was disgusting. So, I became a rec league coach and each season I took all the kids who were being locked out of leagues because they hadn’t had the foresight to join a team when they were 7. We were never great, but we had fun. That was supposed to be the point. I think it would have been fun to win a few more games, but you do what you can, I guess.
We did look into some travel teams for my kids, but decided against it due to cost, and my kids did play sports up until COVID ended things. By the time sports was back, my kids had moved on and I let them. We saved that money and now there is a very real possibility that because we did not spend $10k a year on average for our kids to play a game, that we will be able to pay for them to go to college without having to take out loans.
Also, neither one of them hates me because I put too much pressure on them to play a stupid fucking sport they statistically had no chance of turning into a career. Who knows, your kid might be the outlier, but I’d be willing to bet money he/she isn’t. Maybe it’s time to save some money for their college and have them learn to do something that they can use later in life whether they make it a career or not?
Well that is it for me, I’m done telling you shit you won’t like…for now.
