Increasing cost of youth sports forcing kids to choose between one or the other at early age

Isadora Merraro-Sinclair is moving full-speed toward a decision that could affect her for decades.

She’s a strong student with a long and diverse list of outside-the-classroom interests. Her schedule includes music lessons, as well as track and basketball practice. She excels at all three pursuits, but they each consume a lot of hours and dollars, straining her parents’s ability to budget money and time. 

Three years ago Isadora’s older sister, Georgia, faced the same crossroads, and dropped out of martial arts classes to focus on volleyball. And by this summer, Isadora’s parents say they’ll likely have to sit down with her to figure out which activity to specialize in.

At age 11.

If that seems like an early age to foreclose on extracurricular options, it’s also par for the modern youth sports course, where rising costs make pursuing multiple disciplines difficult. In response, some families, like the Merraro-Sinclairs, make big decisions about sports specialization fairly in their kids’ careers, hoping to save time and stretch their youth sports dollars.

“At the end of this year we’ll have to make some decisions about time and money, about what she’s going to dig deep on,” says Bridget Sinclair, Isadora and Georgia’s mom.

A New Game Plan: How high a price is pay to play sports?

But if dollar figures illustrate the price of youth sports, the Merraro-Sinclair family also represents some of the hidden costs. Where focusing on one sport as a pre-teen boosts short-term development, experts say sampling different sports yields greater long-range results. And early specialization doesn’t account for intangibles, like whether an athlete’s preferred sport might change, or, crucially, what kind of athlete that child will become