Undefeated Champion of Tweeter

PLAY REC LEAGUE FOR $100, PLAY SCHOOL SPORTS DURING SEASON. There is zero need to play 50 games a year of any sport!!

Waking up to this as I’m going in to prep East Potomac for play today.

Waking up to this as I’m going in to prep East Potomac for play today.

Let me explain exactly why parents pay $25,000 a year for youth sports their kid will never play professionally, because the math is more interesting than the headlines suggest. The $25K is buying admissions arbitrage at elite colleges. Run it both ways. Scholarship math first. The US has 8 million high school athletes. Roughly 7% play in college, 2% at D1. Total NCAA athletic scholarship spend is $3.6 billion across about 175,000 D1 athletes, mostly partial aid in the low teens per year. A family putting in $25K annually from age 6 to 18 spends $300K chasing a maximum return of about $80K. The expected value is a lottery ticket. Admissions math second. The SFFA v. Harvard trial disclosed that recruited athletes get admitted at 86%. The non-athlete rate sits around 5%. Even academically weak applicants jump to a 98% admit probability if recruited. A non-athlete with a 1397 SAT has roughly 0.08% odds at Harvard. The same kid recruited for crew has 70%+. The athletic hook is the largest single advantage in elite admissions, bigger than legacy or dean's list. Ivies don't even offer athletic scholarships. The value is purely the admissions ticket. This is what $25K buys. Year-round travel ball is the qualifier round for an admissions process operating on different rules than the one your kid's classmates compete in. The "country club sports" pipeline (squash, lacrosse, crew, fencing, golf) is a feature. Barrier to entry is the product. 90% of Ivy League squash players come from $30K-a-year private high schools. The math works because the alternative pool is small. PE arrived after the demand existed. Unrivaled Sports, Perfect Game, regional travel-ball roll-ups. Upper-middle-class parents had already turned youth sports into a class transmission mechanism. PE consolidated the supply chain and raised prices because the buyers were already there at $25K. $300K to convert a 4% admit rate at an Ivy into an 86% one. Plus the alumni network and pre-professional sorting that follows. That's the actual equation. The trade is rational at the top of the income distribution. Brutal everywhere else.

It’s archaic for high school athletic associations to prohibit schools from playing in tournaments like this.

What radicalized you?   For me, it happened back in my freshman year of high school in the early 2000s. The head coach of our hockey team believed in getting the team home to our own beds after road games no matter what instead of staying in hotels. Hotels were a distraction. With no hotel costs, he wanted to use the money to upgrade our road meals. Nothing fancy, just basic meat and potatoes type places like Cracker Barrel or Perkins instead of cold Little Caesars on a dark January bus ride home across rural North Dakota. The athletic director and superintendent shut the idea down and basically just absorbed the savings from his no hotel policy into the athletics budget. So after that our coach, the other assistants, the parents, and us players started fundraising in the off‑season in hopes to get better meals on the road. The first year went great. We raised a ton and were easily able to have nicer sit down meals on every single trip. We all sat together at big tables, had actual food choices, ate healthier and built even more camaraderie. It was fantastic all around. But then other sports teams and parents caught wind. It was seen as unfair. The AD, principal, and superintendent demanded we stop, in order to keep things “equal” across all sports at our public school. They even tried to force our coach to hand over the privately raised money so it could be redistributed. Thankfully, our coach was an old‑school Canadian ex‑pro hockey player who didn’t take shit from anyone, and told them to F off, and we continued with our meatloaf road meals as planned. The principal and AD eventually backed off, but the superintendent had a vendetta against our team and probably mostly just our coach so he never stopped. He even went as low as instructing bus drivers not to take us to the restaurants we’d planned for on the road. Our coach always overrode it, once even driving the bus himself since he had the license from coaching cross‑country. Over the next few years we continued the fundraising for better meals. Some of the other teams, and other parents continued to badger the supt., our coach and even sometime us players about it instead of just joining us in fundraising. Watching peers and especially some of our own “leaders” work so hard to sabotage a positive thing for us was eye opening and really stuck with us. It gave us an early look at how petty and nefarious and systems and people can be, even at the local level. And honestly, in the end, all it did was radicalize about 30 teenage hockey players for the rest of their lives who walked away believing “equality” was the dirtiest word in the English language. 😂

The change to NCAA bylaws which allows schools to not enter athletes into the portal if a rev-share agreement releases the school from the obligation hasn’t gotten enough attention. Schools can now essentially prevent athletes from engaging with other schools during the portal.