The Cost of the Sports Kid

Ask a parent what their child’s hockey season costs and they will tell you the club fee. It is a real number, it is on an invoice, and in our eleven families it was 29 percent of the total.

The median season cost $4,380 and took 214 hours.

Where the money is

Travel: $1,610, and 68 percent of that is hotels and food. This is the line that separates a manageable season from an unmanageable one, and it turns almost entirely on distance thresholds. A tournament within about two hours is a long day. A tournament beyond it is a hotel, two restaurant meals for four people, and — in six of our families — a second night, because the schedule came out late and the Sunday game was at eight in the morning.

Equipment: $740, and the word doing the work is replacement. Nobody in this reporting was surprised by the cost of a first pair of skates. Several were surprised by the third pair in two years, and by a growth spurt in February that cost $210 in the middle of a season.

The remaining categories are small individually and add up to about a quarter of the total: kit, a camp, photographs, the fundraising shortfall that gets quietly covered when the cookie dough does not sell.

The 214 hours

Four hours a week, averaged, and no week is average. It arrives in weekend blocks.

The families were explicit that most of those hours are not spent watching a child play sport, which is the part they signed up for and mostly enjoy. They are spent driving, waiting, and sitting in a facility with bad wifi and no natural light. One father, hockey, logged his hours and then wrote in the sheet’s notes column: watched 11 hours of hockey, sat in a rink for 63.

Three families said the real cost of the season was the sibling. The 214 hours belong to a parent, and in a two-child household with one competitive athlete, the arithmetic of where that parent is on a Saturday is not subtle to the other child.

What happened when they counted

Six of eleven had never totalled it. Four of those six changed something for the following season. (What the child is handed directly is a separate system, and a broken one in most houses: see Allowance in a House With No Cash In It.)

Not one of them quit. That is worth stating clearly, because the shape of a piece like this implies that the counting is the first step towards stopping, and it was not. What they changed was a tournament — declining one out-of-state weekend — or a second sport, or the private coaching, which in two families had been running for a year and had never been examined against anything.

The father who logged 63 hours in a rink and 11 hours of hockey renewed for the next season and booked one fewer tournament.

“It’s not that it’s not worth it,” he said. “It’s that I’d never once looked at it as a whole thing. You get asked about it one weekend at a time.”

That is the shape of most household spending that gets out of hand — subscriptions and groceries included: nobody ever decides on the total, because the total is never presented. It arrives as a series of individually reasonable weekends, and the only way to see it as one decision is to add it up once, in one place, in August, before the season starts asking.