Where Is All of This Going?

Somebody will ask you this at Christmas.

Usually it's kind. Usually it's your mother, or an aunt, or a friend whose kids don't play. They've heard about the weekend in Fresno and the 5am alarm and the hotel with the waffle machine, and they'll tilt their head slightly and say:

So where is all of this going?

And the honest answer, the one you don't give at Christmas, is nowhere in particular.

About eight million kids play high school sports in America. Around 560,000 of them go on to compete at an NCAA school. That's roughly seven percent — and "NCAA school" includes Division III, where nobody is on an athletic scholarship at all. Whatever picture is in your head when someone says "college athlete," the real number for that picture is a fraction of a fraction.

So if the honest answer is "probably nowhere," what are we doing in the car at 4:55 in the morning?

The Two Answers I Don't Believe

There are two standard responses and I don't like either of them.

The first is denial. She might! And she might. Somebody's kid does. But building a decade of family life on a seven percent chance while telling yourself that's not what you're doing is how you end up with a sixteen-year-old who suspects your love is contingent on a scholarship.

The second is the one people reach for after they've done the arithmetic and it frightened them: it's not about that, it's about having fun. Which is lovely, and isn't true. Nobody drives four hours for fun. Fun is a park.

The Question Is Wrong

"Where is this going" assumes the value is in the destination — that the years are a down payment and the thing they're buying is a roster spot.

Follow that logic honestly and it says every family that doesn't get one wasted the money. That's ninety-three percent of us. And the seven percent who did get one only got value if it kept going: a starting spot, then a contract, then what?

Something that only pays out for seven percent isn't an investment. It's a lottery. And we don't organise a decade of weekends around lotteries.

A Number I Keep Coming Back To

In 2014, EY and espnW surveyed 400 women executives. Ninety-four percent of the ones in C-suite roles had played sport. Fifty-two percent had played at university level.

That figure gets passed around as proof. It isn't. It's four hundred women, self-reported, over a decade ago, and it shows a correlation, not a cause. Plenty of things could explain a number like that — money, access, the kind of family that produces both an athlete and an executive.

But something is in there. And I'm fairly confident it isn't the trophies.

Whatever those women carried into their thirties, they did not carry a medal. They carried something they learned on a Tuesday, badly, in front of people.

The Question I Ask Instead

Not where is this going. But: what are we actually getting?

We know the cost precisely. I can tell you the entry fee, the hotel, the gas, the ninety minutes of a Saturday spent watching a team that isn't even hers. The cost is the easy half. It's itemised.

The return is the half nobody counts, and it's the only half that still exists in twenty years.

Some of it is obvious once you say it out loud. She has been corrected in public by someone who isn't me, and kept working. She has been the worst person in the gym and come back the following week. She has wanted something badly, out loud, in front of people, and not got it.

Some of it has nothing to do with sport at all. It's a hotel hallway at eleven at night and eight girls who are now the reason she wants to go to practice.

And some of it may turn out to be nothing. That's allowed. Sometimes the honest return on a season is she found out she doesn't want this — which isn't a failure, it's information. Expensive information, but information.

I'm not going to pretend I know what any of it adds up to. My daughter isn't a case study and neither is yours.

But I've stopped answering the Christmas question with a projection.

We know what youth sports cost. This newsletter is about working out what they're worth.

We do the math. They do the hard things.

Sources

• NCAA, Probability of Competing Beyond High School: ~8 million US high school athletes, ~560,000 at NCAA schools, ~7%. Drawn from the NFHS 2024–25 participation survey and NCAA participation data.
• EY Women Athletes Business Network + espnW, "Making the connection: women, sport and leadership," 2014. 400 women executives surveyed by Longitude Research. 94% of C-suite respondents had played sport; 52% at university level.