Lucy Ferriss

Supporting an elite athlete is expensive. At the level of national and international competition, the level where it becomes understandable that a young athlete would concentrate on one sport, we are a nation of elites, and the phenomenon is fueled by private coaches, private clubs, corporate sponsorship, and parental sacrifice. How can you manage it financially?

A visit to China raises questions about training very young children for acrobatics and high-level sports competition. Do the Chinese offer a model Western sports parents want to imitate?  How are their choices different from ours?

Appearances Can Be Deceptive

Today I ran into two of Dan’s opponents from USTA days, both named Jeff, at the local club where I’d gone to test the limits of my strained knee ligament by playing doubles. Both Jeffs come from middle-class families that made steep sacrifices for them to play elite sports through high school. Both have done well in school and on the court, and both are headed for elite universities—Brown and Georgetown—where they will play Division 1 tennis. I suspect scholarship money accompanied the offers of admission.

Jeff and Jeff are pretty happy campers. They are also growing into polite and engaging young men who seem genuinely happy to see me and who have kept in touch with Dan’s fledgling career as a college tennis player. Their fierce battles on the court, with each other and with my son, seem to have forged ties that no other activity, particularly in our culture that discourages emotional closeness among boys, could match.

The Jeffs are also, in significant ways, different, and it will be interesting to see how that difference plays out as they come into their own.

"They're All Our Kids"

Jeff A. is the youngest of four boys whose father runs a college art gallery while his mother works in insurance. His parents were relatively old among the spectators at the matches, and although they took their son’s sport seriously, their acquaintance with the ups and downs of adolescence ran deep, making them also relatively relaxed and genial. We laughed together at our own and our kids’ follies.

Most memorable, for me, will be the generosity Jeff A.'s parents showed one night when, for complicated reasons, Dan was stranded at a tournament on Cape Cod with nowhere to spend the night. They waited two hours after Jeff’s match and then took Dan home with them and brought him back to the tournament (Jeff had lost) early the next morning. When I tried to thank them, Jeff’s father waved me off. “They’re all our kids, in a way,” he said. “We’re very fond of Dan. Call on us any time.”

Fanatical Focus

Jeff B. is the second child and only son of a part-time special-needs teacher and an accountant. The parents’ fanatical focus on their son’s career displayed itself, in the mother, as nonstop commenting on the ways in which Jeff was falling down on the job; and in the father, as a tight-lipped attention to every move on the court. Though this family lived six miles from us, they never accepted my offers to take Jeff along to tournaments 150 miles away, because they didn’t trust another parent to be sure Jeff would eat the right breakfast or take the appropriate warm-up time. Similarly, they were unwilling to the point of hostility to offer Dan any such rides, even though they knew I was a single working parent with another child at home.

Most memorable for me will be the championship match where Dan came from behind to beat Jeff B. Dan’s high-school coach was present and allowed to coach him at changeovers; Jeff’s coach was unable to be there. Though Jeff’s father received permission to coach him instead, he cried out that there was unfair advantage, that the choice of courts had been influenced by Dan’s coach—in essence, that the match was rigged.

At the end of the match, Jeff refused to shake Dan’s hand. His father supported him in that choice, and from that point on also refused to speak to me, though I had done nothing but sit on the bleachers. The boys, of course, made up within days.

Looking to the Future

I suspect that, as the Jeffs move toward independence, it will be not just the logistical support they received, but also their families’ larger response, both to the boys’ ambitions and to others in the world, that will make their paths smoother or steeper. The Institute for the Study of Youth Sports recently completed a study for the USTA demonstrating the difference parental behaviors make to the attitudes of young tennis players, and their conclusions apply to other sports as well.

The cliché about “how you play the game” applies far beyond the game itself. One hopes these young men will go off into the world playing their most generous and open-hearted game, which is where the true wins lie.

Supporting an elite athlete is expensive. At the level of national and international competition, the level where it becomes understandable that a young athlete would concentrate on one sport, we are a nation of elites, and the phenomenon is fueled by private coaches, private clubs, corporate sponsorship, and parental sacrifice. How can you manage it financially?

Parents of elite athletes face special challenges. No matter what sport they play, elite athletes' goals require a commitment that is by its very nature all-consuming, and parents' involvement is ratcheted up to the point of often swamping other concerns or projects involving their child. Parents needs answers to questions such as is the financial sacrifice worth the outcome, and what is the effect, positive and negative, of allowing a young athlete to aspire to elite status on the athlete, her parents, and her family?

Sooner or later, as the parent of a star athlete, you are going to hear about the "edge" your child supposedly has over the competition for college admission. Whether the end of the rainbow holds a pot-of-gold scholarship from a Division I school or admission to an Ivy League college, sports success carries more weight, on average, in college admissions and non-need-based scholarship awards than being the son or daughter of an alumnus/ae or a member of a minority.