The practice hours thread got me thinking. With 10 to 20 hours a week put towards soccer + travel, is your player finding enough time for school work? Does the qualities acquired from playing carry over or provide incentive for your child to stay focused on academics? Are you helping with the homework or hiring tutors, etc? I'm expecting school to get a lot busier in a couple of years for my oldest kid.
Replying to myself, lol. Just thinking maybe it's the other way around. Working hard in school leads to working hard in soccer.
I'm sure this varies a lot, but I definitely see the same qualities that make my son a good soccer player also make him a good student. He's a bit of a perfectionist and very competitive with himself. In soccer, this looks like putting in a lot of time to perfect his game and working hard in practices and games to play his best. In school, he is unhappy with anything lower than an A and will do whatever is required to achieve that. So far he hasn't had trouble getting his school work done, but that's partially because his practices are not until 8 p.m. so there is plenty of time after school to get homework done, and partially because his school skews in the direction of the Montessori model and he doesn't get a ton of homework. This may change once he gets to high school. My older son is a three sport high school athlete, and in all AP/Honors classes. His schedule is crazy, but he still manages to get everything done on his own. Again, I'm sure it's unique to each kid.
Definitely an issue in our house. My soccer-playing son (u13) also plays trumpet in a school jazz band that's all outside school hours (two to three practices a week after school, plus two or three performances a month, some out of town) that he loves almost as much a soccer. And his homework load is pretty big, enough that a few times a month he'll have a day where school, trumpet and soccer collide in a way that he's up till 11 or 12. It's a problem that, if it continues, my wife and I will have to address with some kind of change. I have a son in high school who plays two sports (both school sports, no club) who actually has a slightly lighter homework load and, even with practices/meets almost every day except Sunday for most of the school year, often finishes his day earlier than his brother does. We do have a music tutor (30 minutes once every two weeks) for our younger son, which he likes and gets a good bit out of. But otherwise, no. Our older son had a math tutor for a couple of years, but I'm not sure it helped.