I could probably write a couple of books about this. Let's just say sports now are nothing like they were when I was a kid. When I was a kid, you played a fall sport, a winter sport and a spring sport. For me, the spring sport was baseball, and that morphed by the time I reached aged 9 into March-September. We played about 100 games per summer from age 9-15 or so. The only reason we did was because we had a coach in my small town who loved baseball, had no kids and would enter his "all star" teams (he coached probably 8-10 different teams and age groups in town per year) into every tournament, league, etc. he could find. By the time I was 12, my parents would drop me off in the morning at the field, we'd get onto the bus (he bought a bus that was solely dedicated to little league, and was painted in our town's colors) and whenever we got home after playing 3-4 games around the state, our parents would pick us up. There is a very well known little league here in Eastern Mass. that is now named after him.
When my son turned 7, and was playing baseball, it was made very clear that if you didn't start committing year round to a sport, you'd never have a chance to play varsity at high school. I live in Andover, which has a massive D1 sports program in almost every sport, and if the town didn't have about 1,000 high school aged students who left for private schools (including mine now), they'd dominate everything. Instead, we now have kids that get recruited by private schools starting in middle school and by the time they get to high school, they leave.
But it was shocking to me. I decided early on that I wouldn't be a "manager." I got sucked in year after year to be an "assistant coach" in which I was basically just a cheerleader and the guy who kept the book on Gameday, mostly because I was one of the most knowledgeable parents about the sport. I loved being involved and going to games (my son was/is pretty good, which made it a bit more palatable) within the town, and some of the local summer travel stuff, but for a couple of years, we also had him playing club baseball, throughout the year. That was miserable, for him and me, because you basically paid a ton of money to spend 6-7 months practicing baseball indoors and then when the spring came, it was always "Matt can't pitch for his town team tonight, we need him on Friday for the club team and vice versa..."
My son turned 13 this past February, and that's when he was supposed to make the move to the big diamond. I told him it was time to hang them up. He's a swimmer, he swims 6x's a week, 2 hours a day and just got a varsity letter as a 7th grader. He loves the meets, hates the practices, but he's really good at it. He also loves golf, and is now playing 2-3 tournaments a week through the state Junior PGA program, and then practicing at the range, etc. every chance he gets (which is walking distance from our house). We had to cut something out, and whereas baseball is my first love when it comes to sports, it was an easy decision. His swim practices are local and my wife handles all of that, his meets can be upwards of 2 hours away, but they are only once a month or so. I take him to all of his golf stuff.
My 10 year old daughter is a synchronized swimmer. That's it, year round, 4x's a week, 3 hours a day, but she's on a plane on a monthly basis once the pandemic is over. Don't even get me started.
