Homeschool World Forum

One of the biggest challenges that I'm facing is managing my kids sports careers.

They want to play, but how much is too much?

Where do they need to play in order to get seen by college coaches for a potential college scholarship?

These are just a few of the questions that I have.

I'm putting together an article for my Home School Advisor magazine and would love your feedback on this.

What ages are we talking about? I ask because if they're under 12 then I'd say it's a bit early to think about scholarships or pro careers. I mean, the purpose of home school is 'education', right? Otherwise we'd call it 'home-coaching'

To answer your question, sports are too much when:
-Educational learning suffers from too many practices/exhaustion
-Kids complain and don't want to participate in the sport for any number of reasons: bored, too much pressure to win vs. playing, not fun, etc.

As far as where to play? If your kid is the one scoring 10 goals a game in [soccer/hockey/lacrosse/] or hitting 3 home runs a game in baseball in the rec leagues, consider joining your local 'travel teams'. If still too good for 'local travel', find the larger-market (Nashville, etc.) travel teams. If your kid's that good even at this level then scouts/colleges will know about him/her just from word-of-mouth.

I find a ton of parents who really believe that their child (at whatever age) is the next NBA, NFL, MLB or any other pro sports star.

Often times their child is the one that is an early maturing child. They are dominating...until the other kids catch up.

Managing a sports career is giving your child the best opportunity to make the most of the skills and talents that God gave them.

If you don't have a plan or strategy, the result is doing what the kid wants to do which results in 200 game baseball seasons at age 10-11 or 100 game summer AAU basketball programs.

Managing your child's sports keeps the crazy from taking over.

I played basketball at a Division 1 level. The cold hard reality is that the majority of kids (both public, private and home educated) are not going to play college sports with a scholarship.

The problem is in how the parents can realistically evaluate their child's skill set so they can find what the child is good at and let them work on the thing that they have the most likelihood of having the most success.

I'm kind of tired, so I hope this is making sense.