With decades of experience, Mary is conversant with the amateur athletic world (as well as the professional), so I value her wisdom in helping parents navigate the high-pressure, specialized world of youth sports. In anticipation of the upcoming spring and summer seasons, I asked Mary Kassian questions about the costs of team sports, the value of travel teams, and the tensions that come along with sports and church attendance.

Serious athletes surround Mary Kassian, a celebrated author and speaker, and co-founder of the True Woman Movement.

Her father-in-law played professional ice hockey for the Canadian National Team. Her three sons are all accomplished athletes, two in hockey and one in volleyball. One of her sons, Matt, is a former NHL hockey player. Mary’s husband, Brent, is a bi-vocational pastor and serves as an Athletes in Action chaplain for pro football and soccer teams in Canada. He also works as director of a physical therapy sports medicine rehab center. With so many sports connections, Mary says, “We have professional athletes through our home all the time.”

With decades of experience, Mary is conversant with the amateur athletic world (as well as the professional), so I value her wisdom in helping parents navigate the high-pressure, specialized world of youth sports. In anticipation of the upcoming spring and summer seasons, I asked Mary Kassian questions about the costs of team sports, the value of travel teams, and the tensions that come along with sports and church attendance.

Kid-Driven?

The first area of caution she offers is a check on parental drive. Are the athletic aspirations driven by the child? Or are they driven by mom and dad? She’s concerned about kids who carry the vicarious ambitions of parents who take amateur sports too far, too fast.

“I fear we push our children to be far too busy, and to specialize far too early, and to commit far too much time. And it can be parent-driven, rather than driven by a parent discerning a child’s natural bent and inclination and abilities.”

Before long, kids grow weary of the over-specialized sport.

“I’ve seen 13- and 14-year-old boys burned out by a sport, and sick of it. Or they feel that they need to excel at it in order to please their parents, and their parents have communicated that their worth and value are wrapped up in how well they do at a particular sport. They get to high school and they’ve already had so much of it, they don’t enjoy it anymore.”

But obviously a lot of sports are driven by the aspiration of the child, which raises questions about the cost of the sport on the family.

Weighing the Costs

As sports specialize and demand year-round practices or training, the costs add up quickly. The price tag is a huge consideration, an expense some families attempt to justify because of potential college scholarships. “Given all these team costs — training, registration, travel, hotels, equipment — the amount of money that you pour into sports to get to the level where you’re going to get a scholarship, you could have probably paid for a lot of college tuition by the time your child turns sixteen,” she says honestly. And that’s no exaggeration, especially compared to the small sliver of high school athletes who land major-college scholarships.

But the cost is not only a drain on the budget; it’s also a glut to the schedule. Serious amateur athletics come with intense practice schedules, training, and weekend competitions at distant places of various range. Travel sports is not just a question about Sundays (more on Sundays below); it also may cost a family its summer vacation time together and needed downtime. Summer-sports travel is hardly relaxing, especially when you add in the adrenaline — the wins and thrills, the losses and disappointments. A full schedule of sports tournaments can be a taxing abuse of the summer months.

Parents must weigh whether a summer without all these demands on their kids is better for everyone. “Whenever you say ‘yes’ to sports, you must say ‘no’ to other options,” she says. Sports commitments always come with a price. “Often that means saying ‘no’ to giving your child the time and space to simply run around in a field till their feet turn green, or time to kick back and enjoy a childhood that’s not regimented and scheduled.”

Team Travel on Mission

But good reasons remain to take up spring and summer athletics. Travel teams provide missional opportunities for us to enter the lives of other families and athletes in ways often not otherwise possible. Sitting in the stands with the same families offers new opportunities. “Everything we do is missional, or ought to be,” Mary says. “So when we’re sitting in the stands with parents, or doing team fundraisers, and the weekend travel — in all of this, you invest a concentrated amount of time with people in a way that you will not spend time with people again in your life.”

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