Kids Can’t Quit Playing Travel Sports, Because ‘a Lot of People Made a Lot of Sacrifices’

Writing a book takes a long time. By the time you finish it, you become so comfortable with the point of view that it expresses that you start to worry that maybe everyone shares it.

Say that book is called Soccer Dad, and though it’s a memoir of your own jangled journey through youth sports parenting from peewee fun through Division I, you hope it amounts to a detailed and colorful and ultimately edifying exploration of the true nature of youth soccer, youth sports—and any highly intensive and expensive youth activity, really—for the kids, and for the parents.

So, with the book in final editing stages and coming out in less than a year, you want to see how the book squares with how other parents feel. So you go out to online groups of soccer parents, where tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them are discussing and debating, teeth-gnashing and agonizing, about their children’s ups and downs in the byzantine world of travel sports—and about what, if anything, they, the parents can do to help.

And you find lots of sensible people out there. Maybe some of these folks are little too intense for your taste, maybe a little too anxious, maybe a little too eager, maybe a little too strident or smug. But then you remember that you’re often too much of those things, too. So you forgive. And you start to wonder: Do these folks need to hear what I have to say, really?

And then, on one of these forums, an anonymous parent posts that her high school-age daughter is quitting soccer. The parent posts a crying emoji, and adds, “Her coach is devastated as she was a key player but we saw it coming and we support her decision.”

And then a soccer dad replies: 

I know it’s hard to have intelligent conversations with youth, but my kids would know before even getting into travel sports—we’re not spending all this money and time so that you can just have fun and quit whenever you “feel” like. If we’re doing this, it’s a commitment we’re all making together.

If it doesn’t work out and they aren’t recruited [for college soccer], that’s one thing. It’s another thing to just quit. A lot of people made a lot of sacrifices and there are more people affected by this decision than just the player. That too, is a life lesson. 

This has to be communicated on the front end though.

The “front end”! When the kid is 10? Eleven? Twelve? They have to decide then and there that they’re going to play through junior high and high school and college whether they still like it or not, because “a lot of people” (how many, exactly?) “made a lot of sacrifices” (of their own adult volition) and Uncle Larry has a hat with the travel club logo and Aunt Nancy just bought a deluxe folding chair with a drink holder for the sideline?

I told this dad: “You should be sending your kids the opposite message, every single week: You can quit this whenever you want to. We support this only as long as it matters to you. My kid is a rising senior playing Division I and I told her every semester she could quit—and I also kept money set aside in case she quit and lost her scholarship. Cuz it’s her life. My God, dude: I know parents feel and sometimes act the way you do … but can’t imagine people actually *think* the way you do!”

When I say I know that parents sometimes forget it’s the kid’s life and not theirs, I do mean it. In the book, I recall my daughter once telling her mother and me that she wanted to stop playing soccer. 

“Well,” I heard myself telling her solemnly. “We’ve all invested a lot of years in your soccer.”

Then I heard myself burst out laughing. How many years could we have invested? She was six. 

I’m reassured that lots of parents might benefit from reading this book. Yes, the tiger parents … and also the opposite kind—the self-righteously hands-off parents, who don’t spend a lot of time in online soccer discussions partly because they don’t pay enough attention to the really complicated and often problematic system their kids are in, in travel sports. (That was also me, some of the time.)

But mostly, I think the book might benefit all the parents in between: the ones who draw joy and inspiration and sneaky pride from their child’s exploits, but who also see all the sacrifices the kid is making (whether the kid fully realizes it or not). They want that kid to be free to explore the whole world of possibilities and not just the next level of club soccer. They want to guide their kid without steering, motivate without driving, support without obligating. They want to be great parents, not just great soccer parents.

As I eventually told The Great Soccer Santini: Just about every year, I found a moment to ask my daughter straight up: Despite all the pressure, do you ever find yourself out there on the field in the middle of a game, realizing how wonderful it is to do this? Her unequivocal “yes” was good enough for me, because it had to be. But the older she got and the more soccer became a part of her young identity, the more I realized how difficult all this becomes at times—for the best-intentioned parents, and the healthiest young athletes. As I write in the book: Giving up the thing that makes you special is giving up being special, and who wants to do that, at any age?

So congratulations to the daughter who quit soccer—and also to the sad mom (and dad) who supported her. And praise to all parents who are trying, and often failing, to sanely navigate the part of child-raising that was supposed to be fun!