$70,000

Coaching money. Some years ago now, maybe 13, I was president of a competitive youth club. We had made the decision to step up to a full time director of coaching. I placed a blind ad in Soccer America. I was amazed at the applicants I got. Two guys had coached at the World Cup. A D1 college coach talked to me about the position and his plan to was semi-retire by stepping down from the college level but we couldn't do the money. He was making over $100,000, net, just on his camps, never mind his coaching salary and shoe/equipment deal. The guy I hired is a FIFA Futsal coach that knows everybody important in youth soccer, and I do mean everybody. There was a D1 coach around here, now deceased, who had a major camp program with a youth club attached to it. The daughter of a shoe company VP was playing for the club and the VP called the coach and asked him what it would take to get the club and college to wear their gear. (So his daughter wouldn't have to wear the competition's stuff!) "I want D1 men's basketball coach money!" He got it. We're talking very, very high six figures a year and that was just the shoe/uniform/equipment deal. Six figures all to the left of the decimal.


At least around here, we've moved beyond thinking that an English accent means you automatically know more about soccer than any Yank.

 

On-topic: I make five figures (not high) a year reffing youth sports. Do you have any idea how wrong that is? And that's not including the adult games and NCAA games, which kicks my total up, but they don't beat youth sports.

Cost of youth sports is a major issue. And these people have it in their head that little Johnny and Debbie are going to pay-off with a full ride to somewhere. And people are more than happy to sell that dream to them. When I found out that club coaches were making six figures doing this, it explained why they get so into U12 matches.

The mortgage is literally on the line if Lil'Timmy and his friends aren't doing Maradonna's and scissor kick-goals by the end of the season.

Off-topic: I don't give a damn about my university's sports teams. The entire 4-years I was there, they lost consistently. Basketball, football, men's soccer, etc. They were godawful.

But I'll you something, people love going to nowhere VA to watch them. And the amount of expansion that they were able to pull off through donor money and getting to bowl games justify the costs.

And I'll fight every user in here to the death over removing women's college volleyball. Free seating, tight uniforms, and the best thing to watch on a Wednesday night in August.

 

The solution here is obvious. We need more bribes.

 

I dunno - raising kids costs. As things go, does deep involvement in soccer cost more than a lot of other activities? Certainly it costs much less than having a kid who does golf, gymnastics, horseback riding, competitive dance. Music? A half hour lesson might be $30 if a college grad is the teacher- Easily can be 3 or 4 times that if you get a faculty. And a stringed instrument for an accomplished youth can cost anywhere from a Hyundai to a bmw.

As for college, private schools at the top of the pyramid cost $70k per year. So if you think your kid is going to such a place, $70k over their older childhood is a minor amount in comparison.

The madness is that people often believe they are investing in their child for the sake of getting athletic scholarships in return.

But if they are investing in their child so that he or she will be a confident, fit, well rounded, competitive person whose activities might enhance their chances of getting into an elite college? Well, that seems worth it to me.

Elite colleges want deep involvement in whatever extracurricular activity an applicant does, and you don’t have to be a recruited athlete for a sport to enhance an application. (Yes, the Ivies do bend admission requirements for recruited athletes- they are division 1 but don’t give athletic scholarships. I understand that at one school (begins with a Y) the coach has a number of “golden tickets” which makes sense given the recent bribery scandals.)

And non- scholarship college athletics is far from pointless. I have a friend who is a lawyer in a major firm. He played for a bit at watford (and yes did meet sir Elton). He says he is much more likely to hire a young attorney who has been a collegiate athlete: they are good at time management, know how to suffer for a goal, and will sacrifice for their team.

As for the refereeing bit, when the investments are high, yes, people expect the refs to be good. I recall my son’s team had a u17 region iii weekend where we flew to Tampa. The referee made (or rather didn’t make) a match critical call in the box while standing in the center circle. To say that was frustrating would be an understatement- I don’t know what the call should have been, but I did want the referee’s effort and energy to be higher than for a local state league game, and I don’t think that’s wrong. And if a higher game fee would have meant that a more skilled and better referee would have been available, I and every other parent there would have been happy to have paid it.