The ridiculousness of youth sports chasing non-existent college dollars

The New York Times has an excellent, in-depth (three web pages) investigation of how many pre-college athletes and their parents are often clueless they are chasing so few college scholarship dollars.

Here’s one parent, and one who actually gets it, still talking about the money outlay:

“Ten thousand per kid per year is not an unreasonable estimate,” (Chris Taylor) said. “But we never looked at it as a financial transaction. You are misguided if you do it for that reason. You cannot recoup what you put in if you think of it that way. It was their passion — still is — and we wanted to indulge that.

$10Gs per kid, per year? Hell, what if I had a kid who said Montecristo cigars, single-malt Scotch, or high-grade cocaine was a “passion”?

You’re an enabler for a vampiric system, Mr. Taylor, even if you do get it that it’s not a financial transaction. (The story explains that in most NCAA sports, there’s only about one scholarship per 100 high-school level athletes, and that these scholarships, due to rampant inflation in college costs, often fall far short of being “full rides.”)

As long as sports in America remain at the intersection of hypercompetitiveness and hypercapitalism, though, nothing will change.