![]() Others hand their children over entirely. That pales beside one Springfield, Mo., mom, who this summer regularly made a seven-hour round-trip journey to ferry her 10- and 11-year-old sons to travel basketball practice. A volleyball dad from upstate New York spent $20,000 one year on his daughter’s club team, including plenty on gas: up to four nights a week she commuted 2½ hours round-trip for practice, not getting home until 11:30 p.m. Joe Erace, who owns a salon and spas in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, says Joey’s budding baseball career has cost north of $30,000. At the high end, families can spend more than 10% of their income on registration fees, travel, camps and equipment. Others are elite in name only, siphoning expensive participation fees from parents of kids with little hope of making the high school varsity, let alone the pros. The most competitive teams vie for talent and travel to national tournaments. These local leagues have been nudged aside by private club teams, a loosely governed constellation that includes everything from development academies affiliated with professional sports franchises to regional squads run by moonlighting coaches with little experience. Little League participation, for example, is down 20% from its turn-of-the-century peak. Neighborhood Little Leagues, town soccer associations and church basketball squads that bonded kids in a community–and didn’t cost as much as a rent check–have largely lost their luster. Across the nation, kids of all skill levels, in virtually every team sport, are getting swept up by a youth-sports economy that increasingly resembles the pros at increasingly early ages. Joey Erace is an extreme example of what has become a new reality for America’s aspiring young athletes and their families. But Joey Baseball has yet to learn cursive. On a rare family vacation in Florida, a boy approached Joey in a restaurant and asked for his autograph. Jewelry and apparel companies have asked him to hawk their stuff. “As long as he keeps putting in this work, he’s going to be a really, really solid baseball player at a really, really high level.”Īlready, Joey has a neon-ready nickname–Joey Baseball–and more than 24,000 followers on Instagram. “He has a real swagger,” says Joey’s hitting coach, Dan Hennigan, a former minor leaguer. But Joey has talents that scouts covet, including lightning quickness with a rare knack for making slight adjustments at the plate–lowering a shoulder angle, turning a hip–to drive the ball. Relentless training is essential for a top player who suits up for nationally ranked teams based in Texas and California, thousands of miles from home. He’s accustomed to such focused instruction: the evening batting practice followed a one-on-one fielding lesson in Philadelphia earlier in the day, which cost another $100. ![]() His private hitting coach, who’s charging $100 for this hour-long session, tells Joey to shorten his stride. Joey Erace knocks pitch after pitch into the netting of his $15,000 backyard batting cage, the pings from his metal bat filling the air in the south New Jersey cul-de-sac. How your child's rec league turned into a $15 billion industry SHARE Finlay MacKay for TIME Joey Erace, 10, is photographed at home in Mullica Hill, New Jersey where his father set up a batting cage in their yard where he practices with a hitting coach, on Aug.
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