I don’t know much about sports as my kid didn’t play past rec leagues, but several of her friends were extremely devoted to school athletics (I don’t live in a place where there is the level of outside club sports you are talking about, although there is some. But these kids were very devoted year-round). The only friend who was recruited (she has committed to the process (as per the wording in the other thread) at a very selective LAC Div III) was recruited for her secondary sport - something she started kind of casually to stay in shape in her main sport’s off season. Had she devoted herself year round to her main sport she would most likely not have been recruited (she’s good, but not that good). Other friends, all of whom are quite good in their respective sports, did not end up recruited, though several have been told they could most likely walk on to the team. But it won’t help them get admitted. I agree with the person upthread who suggested listening to your kid. What does he want to do? Then decide if it’s too much of a sacrifice for your family. It’s unlikely to help him get into college, so only do it if he wants to & it makes sense for your family.
Hi @Lindagaf
Thank you for remembering me 
Actually I never drive my child to anything specific up to this point. I can be really proud and confident to say my kid had nice childhood, enjoyed a lot of things. This summer things have changed after my kid starts middle school. Academically and sports are getting demanding. What I found exhausting is, the drive are mostly parents from school or parents from the sport team.
Academically
2-3 months after my prior thread, my child has discovered and shared with me how often kids would “compare” grades or “dig” into others after school activities (such as after school academic programs or private tutors).
I honestly don’t think kids at 11 or 12 years old would care about this… I suspect parental influence
Sport
Lot of helicopter parents yelling at their own kids or others’ kids just so there is winning chance or scoring chance for their children. Team sport is good, collaboration is good but not from parents’ sideline coaching. This is really annoying to me. Or implicitly forcing team families to buy in lot of out of town tournaments or training. Not everyone in the competitive sport or clue is “settled” in one activity but without participation, it is deemed “little commitment” to success.
In order to protect my child, I am considering pulling out but fortunate or unfortunate my child really enjoys it which makes it challenging to me.
As others have mentioned here - sports in middle school is iffy because the kids haven yet one or even two growth spurt left. Extreme training during middle school is more likely to result in injuries than in top athletes.
The problem is that many parents seems to believe that “top middle school athlete” leads to “top high school athlete”, which leads to athletic scholarships or recruitment to an “elite” college. It doesn’t
My kid is a dancer, not an athlete, however dance is an activity which requires years of training. However, dance schools which train middle schoolers at the same intensity that they train high school students end up with dancers (mostly girls) who have messed up knees and hips by 16, who have problems walking, not to mention dancing.
That’s not even being focused on college while still in middle school, it’s parents who are toxic. Parents who yell at their kids for making mistakes or not doing better are not “helicopter parents” but awful, toxic human beings, and the farther away you keep yourself and your kids from them, the happier you and your kids will be.
I am really sorry - it seems that there are a large number of toxic families in your kid’s school. It’s pretty difficult to get your kids not to care about it, especially when it’s common among their friends.
Really I think that the only way that you can deal with this is to avoid being onw of those parents, keep on repeating to your kid that they do not need to play that game (however much they will listen - they’re in middle school, after all).
True, but the point there should not be “if your kid wants to get into a good college, they need to take Calc in high school, so they should take algebra in middle school”. The point should be if your kid should be taking the most advanced math which the are capable of taking, and that should start in middle school. Same with science, English, history, etc. Middle school is there to transition kids from elementary to high school, not to prepare them for college.
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Algebra is usually the highest level math available in middle school. You don’t need to take Algebra in middle school, though. My kid did take it in middle school, but she did Calc by 11th grade.
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I feel so fortunate that the parents where I live are not like that. Oh sure, there are the crazy sports parents that think their kid is absolutely the best player ever. Some of them are right. My son knows one guy that’s been drafted by an NHL team and a few others that are playing D1 basketball. It does happen, but its rare and nothing you can count on in middle school.
Both my kids were heavily involved in middle school sports. Maybe I’m oblivious but I never heard any talk of the sports helping with college and certainly never any mention of GPAs. It sounds like you are surrounded by many toxic families. I’m not sure what you can do. Your kid will still want to play sports and hang out with friends. Maybe try to change the subject if one of the other parents starts talking like this.
@me29034 One of the policy in the top team is to have good GPA 
and so seems like they will discuss their academic result every now and then in the team
My D22 is not an athlete but @emi722’s experience has parallels with the intense academic and music competitions in our community. The first thing to say is that we (her parents) bear some responsibility for this predicament - by sending D22 to a highly academic school at age 11 and a highly competitive Saturday music program even earlier. But both were done not with an eye to a tippy top college but because we thought it was the right environment for her.
The pressure to keep up with the Jones is very real. In our case, it pertained mostly to music - additional lessons to prepare for competitions, participation in further enrichment activities and, most costly of all, upgrading to better instruments.
Where we have managed to shield ourselves a bit is that we don’t live near D22’s school (many families move closer to the school once their children are in) and thus are less exposed to the exhaustingly intense parents (of course, this means D22 has a longer commute to school).
The pandemic has, in a way, helped reduce the competitive pressure for D22 because, with much of school online until this term, there were fewer opportunities to constantly compare (some of it came from overhearing that someone got this grade or someone else won that prize). At the same time, D22 has found an academic passion (or at least an area of deepening interest) that is not shared by her classmates - so less opportunities to directly compare and, more positively, D22 is now driven more by curiosity about this field than simply competing with her peers. Lastly, although D22 still has high expectations, I think she is more accepting of her limitations (e.g., she recently told me she will never excel in Olympiad-style math competitions and seemed fine with it).
Recruited athletes yes, but they are a relatively small number.
Otherwise, sports are considered an extracurricular, though it may be a more important extracurricular at some schools (perhaps service academies and small LACs will full teams that need potential walk ons out of a small student base).
But unless the student is already at the point where more effort on academics yields minimal improvement in achievement, spending time on academics is likely to yield more improvement in eventual college results than spending time on sports.
However, overall personal growth is important also; better college results are not the only factor to consider.
This is annoying (and extremely disturbing) to most of us. It seemed to peter out after middle school. More and more coaches adopted explicit rules that parents were to be silent on the sidelines unless cheering for the team. My husband coaches at our middle school and that is his #1 rule. Also, kids get older and bolder in challenging belligerent parents. I’ve seen many parents who were unable to do that, relegate themselves to a distant location where they can rant to their heart’s content out of earshot.
This should be stated upfront. If you don’t want to commit to the buy-in then don’t sign up with that team.
Club/competitive/tournament sports is a rocky road. When people ask me if I miss watching my daughter play her sport, it’s a complicated answer for me. I miss watching her play on those rare occasions when she was playing with pure joy and love of the game, but most of the time it was laced with stress of performing and not losing her place in the line up. I’m more relieved than sad that it’s over. It definitely affected her love of the game and that makes me sad. I hope someday she will play again, just for the fun of it. I wonder if this overall experience will affect the sports-related decisions she makes for her own kids.
It is possible to have balance but there needs to be a willingness to buck the system and potentially walk away.
D left her piano teacher in 10th grade because she was too rigid and was constantly berating her for not practicing enough even though she was always scoring top marks in competition. New piano teacher was all about creating a life long love of music. She practiced c more after the shift because the joy of playing blossomed again.
D stopped playing her sport after JV because the coach told her she needed to play year round to be considered for varsity. She had other interests that she didn’t want to give up. We supported her decisions.
If she had wanted to continue, we would have supported that too.
momofboiler: we are similar with this: D23 did dance and piano all through elementary school and early middle school. she left piano to concentrate on dance in jr. high. Fast forward a few years and covid: and she’s now back to piano, playing in her school’s band; and is really enjoying this. I’m glad our D’s have seen that joy again, and piano is such a lifelong skill.
@emi722 - competitive sports certainly are exhausting; your situation sounds hard. I don’t have advice. but i will say, we did really enjoy watching our older kids do their competitive/club sports and seeing their skills develop; and having roles on their high school teams. both our sons quit their club sports while in high school, but still were able to participate in the high school sport season. and then . . . it stopped cold turkey once college hit.
So the team has a requirement of “good gpa”. What is good? My kids didn’t have any requirements in middle school, but to be on the high school team there was a cutoff. I don’t remember what it was because it was never an issue with my kids, but I think it was pretty low. Once each marking period the kids had to take a form around and have each teacher fill it out with their current grade. It was handed into the coach and never discussed unless a kid was suspended because of it, which happened a couple times. I think anything above a C was ok, because my son had a few of those and he never had a problem.
Could rec clubs - without the sideline pressure and, perhaps, being a top player- be as much fun? Especially if it means more time on weekends and more money for other things…
Oh I couldn’t agree more.
I held the position as the team rep in my children’s sports, for 13 years, at a high school.
I had a daughter who was recruited athlete. Yes she had private tournament experience but it was only because she wanted to play. It wasn’t a team sport-tennis and was reasonable (less than $30 entry fee which covered the cost of the facility and the employees). I want to say we spent less than $400 a summer, if that, for just one summer.
She had a natural ability. She also had excellent high school coaches who were tennis pros.
The sad part: those parents don’t understand that if they put all of that money, from their club expenses, into a 529 account, that’s the best athletic scholarship they could give to their child.
In the end, she had an injury in her senior year, very unrelated to her sport, and she had to decline the offer.
I saw a lot of wild parent behavior that was unacceptable. Yes, it came from the new entering freshmen parents.
Our school administration did not “encourage” parents, who had a reputation for unacceptable behavior, to be team reps. All of the 28 sports teams met together monthly, with the athletic Director, through the team reps. We all got along very well. The school required a “training”, of sorts, for parents who wanted to be a team rep. Our district also required that our students achieve “victory with honor”.
Much of the parent training dealt with building self-esteem of the students, both the school’s athletes and the other competing high schools athletes. The other part dealt with the business of a team-legalities, paperwork etc…
That meant lots of personal time, from the parent, during the week, which most of these “berating” persons didn’t want to deal with; they had no patience so they would quit.
OP please understand that these awful parents are living through their children they don’t want the child to win for the child, they want the child to win for the parent. These parents had unachievable dreams for themselves and they’re angry and they take it out on their kids and everyone else.
There are other activities and other family events that you can have your child participate in with “normal” behaving families. If your child is in a toxic environment, take him out. You’re exposing your child to really bad behaviors and it is really unnecessary.
You seem to be easily swayed by social pressure. Why? You are an adult. I have to agree with @Lindagaf. Do things with your child, and your family, that are comfortable and safe for you. Don’t do things based on here-say and what others do. You shouldn’t copy or mimic what other parents do with their kids. If it’s not fun and pleasant, then why bother?
My daughter played rec Bball after a few years on a competitive team that was rife with problematic behaviors that she (and we) had no inclination or time for. The problem with rec level, at least in our city, was that by high school there weren’t enough girls joining to have a good tournament. She stopped playing in 10th grade. The boys teams didn’t seem to have that problem so I guess it would be city and gender specific. She had a great time while playing rec Bball.
@aunt_bea One parent literally screamed at my child: WHY DON’T YOU PASS THE BALL TO XYZ (His child). He does that pretty much to anyone who gets the ball. His kid happened to be the one constantly telling teammates about GPA and asking others GPA.
Oh I forgot to add, in my lengthy post, that at my kids high school, the teams took beginning players and athletes at all levels because the school’s position is, if any child wants to try a sport, he/she should be able to try a new experience.
Fortunately, our local school teams had great coaches with good experiences. The players were rotated. Those burned-out, middle school players, often didn’t get starting positions. Lots of injuries were noted on the required physical forms from their pediatricians. The HS coaches didn’t want to exacerbate those injuries, so a lot of those players never got to starting positions.
This is so true! My kids both played equivalency sports and while not at the $10k level, it was still several thousands of dollars a season plus all the windshield time driving to the next tournament. There were several families that I tried to run the numbers for (cost vs value of scholarship, if they got one). For many of the families, especially lower income and URM, I tried to convince them that if they spent just a portion of the time and money on test preparation or tutors, they would have a greater likelihood of getting academic scholarships and getting into wealthier schools with generous FA and better long term prospects from a solid education. For the most part, it was like talking to a wall. I suspect a lot of it was parents trying to relive their glory sports days through their kids and just a lack of value attributed to education. It is so sad to run across some of these kids today. Dropped out of juco/college because they could not handle the academics and/or had no playing time and now working menial jobs or are unemployed.
I remember a story about a parent who had her son in competitive ice hockey basically since the kid could stand. He was one of the best on his peewee league and did really well through elementary and most of middle school. Then the parent started complaining about how it “wasn’t fair” that a couple other kids joined the team who had never played organized hockey before and just because they were bigger and stronger, they got more playing time.
I could tell you other stories of the star Pop Warner players not going out for their school team in 8th grade or high school because they were either burned out or weren’t big enough to play even on the Modified team. Meanwhile, there were kids who never played competitive football who had all the size and the other athletic skills who were recruited or otherwise joined.
I guess the point is that those middle school parents who have stars in their eyes might find themselves disappointed.
I disagree with this. You could say ‘Oh just put the money into savings and skip the lessons’ but with no sports, piano, dancing, robotics club, scouts…there may be no college at all. Sports and all the other activities develop the kid.
My child got so much more out of her sport than just her athletic scholarship (which at $80k was more than saving the $400 in a 529). Her coaches (and the rules) did care about her grades. Even in 3rd grade there were players who couldn’t play that week because they didn’t do their homework or failed a test. In high school, there were kids who skipped a class or a day and they were out for that week’s game. Very strict rules that kept kids going to class. It also gave her leadership opportunities to be captain, to volunteer with the team for charities, to have an instant group of friends when she had to transfer schools. And yes, it gave her the opportunity to deal with insane parents.
I’m a big believer in sports. Even my child who didn’t get an athletic scholarship got a lot out of sports (and theater, Anime club, working a job). But to get the benefits, we didn’t have to pay for the elite club or travel teams. We did what was right for our family (and budget).