Sports360AZ
The Unknown Parent is a series of musings for Sports360AZ.com from an anonymous parent of athletes. The parent is an Arizona high school sports fan from their time involved in education, coaching and athletics. Want to have your questions or comments featured in future articles? Email TheUnknownParentAZ@gmail.com.
For this week and next, Brad Cesmat, the founder of Sports360AZ, submitted some questions. While I don’t speak for all parents of athletes, I do have a lot of opinions. Hopefully you all find some of them worthwhile…
Brad Cesmat: What is your view of personal trainers for high school athletes? Is it a money grab for former NFL players, or is there value to it?
Unknown Parent: There is absolutely value in personal, private trainers. Even when the trainer in question is solely motivated by money, my local grocery store is motivated by profit, but I still shop there for the things I need.
I think the two critical things to think about when you’re getting a personal trainer for your young athlete is your child’s end goal, as well as the overall value proposition involved. To me, it’s no different than getting a tutor- and I’m not talking about a tutor to help your child develop and execute strategies to meet basic grade-level benchmarks- I’m talking about the ones that help your student chase their highest ACT and/or SAT potential, or the ones that help them pass end of course AP exams… or even tutors that help with band, choral, and orchestral proficiency.
However, just as with academic performance, there must be an expressed desire to excel from the child themselves. You can’t out-desire your own child. You can try, but the second they’re out from under your thumb, they’ll adjust in a way that, for them, feels like relieving pressure, and for you, will probably feel like rebellion or rejection. If your kid wants to be more precise, more accurate, more agile, more flexible, and more prepared for the challenges ahead, you should absolutely find a reputable, specialized trainer to help them achieve that goal.
Full disclosure, one of my kids gets extracurricular training every week from someone who has done what they’re trying to do at the highest level. I’ve offered those resources to my other kids in their sports and areas of interest, and none of them have taken me up on it. I pay $60 a week to the trainer for one hour of one-on-one attention, and my child attends the training an average of 40 weeks a year. That’s $2,400 annually, and they’ve been seeing this trainer for 3.5 years.
That’s around $8,000 and counting. Is that a worthwhile investment when that amount of money could potentially cover a year of college tuition? No. Because it’s not an investment at all. I hate it when parents use the word ‘investment’ when they’re talking about resources spent on their own child. Investments are made with the hope of a payoff. Feeding my kids is not an investment. Spending time with my kids is not an investment. Shuttling my kids from activity to activity is not an investment. And paying someone to train one of them is also, as I said, not an investment. I don’t have a stake in how this all turns out. I’m just hoping to stoke the fires of interest in the kids I have been blessed to shepherd.
Never send your kid to a position-specific trainer for your own pride or glory, or to keep up with the other players their age. It’s dumb. And that trainer isn’t going to stop you from sending that Venmo payment over, even if they know your kid’s heart isn’t in it.
The only thing dumber than pushing your kid in a direction they don’t want to go, is not knowing when to pull the plug when things at home fall out of balance. Are they getting their homework done? If not, training has to be the first thing to go. Is your family spending enough activity-free time around the dinner table to make sure you’re all connecting and on the same page? If not, ditch the trainer for a week or two.
This is a long answer, but to shorten it and reinforce my point, just know what it is you’re getting into when you start giving away time and money to someone else- but also, don’t write off the potential good of the discipleship of a skilled teacher for a child that expresses a desire to be extraordinary.
BC: What is your view of paying for a recruiting service to market your kid in any sport?
UP: I think I have the same view on paying for a recruiting service that I do on yard work. It feels good to do everything myself, but sometimes there’s just no time or bandwidth, and you have to bring in the landscaper.
If you’re raising an athlete in Arizona, there’s a 90-plus percent chance they’re going to need to leave the state to play their sport collegiately. And if they’re not a clear power conference talent with recruiting attention and scholarship interest heading into the spring of their junior year, every resource on earth is available for you to spearhead that process as a parent or guardian.
But it’s time consuming, and it’s hard to know where to start. You have to identify where they might be willing to live, the cost of traveling back and forth, identify players and parents involved with any interested programs and seek guidance on their pros and cons, organize college visits, monitor assistant coach employment status (since their opportunities can move along with those coaches), and figure out how to negotiate what types of money is available to your student, as many D2 and D3 programs have partial scholarships or academic-based funding.
It’s a lot, but it’s doable. But if you don’t have the time, and it ends up being the difference between your child receiving an opportunity and not receiving an opportunity, a recruiting service might be necessary.
BC: What about parents operating the kids’ social media? Should we do it, or should the player handle it themselves? Does social media really matter when it comes to recruiting attention?
UP: Social media does matter quite a bit in recruiting, unfortunately. I’m stricter than most parents. I have my kids’ social passwords, and monitor their DM conversations without interfering. I don’t call them out for specific things that I see them send or receive that I don’t like- I just take a note on what values to reinforce in our conversations.
I will say, I don’t think kids should be on X. It’s filled with pornography, bots, scammers, and complete loser adults that conceal their identity to be able to troll other people’s children directly from behind an anonymous account (Yes I’m aware that I’m also anonymous). And all that was before it got relentlessly political. That being said, that’s where the coaches are. And most of the media is based on X. So why send our kids into an unnecessarily toxic jungle when we could just operate their X account until they reach the right age for them to take over?
Pretending to be your kid and spamming coaches is objectively lame, and I understand why people are against it. Coaches need to know that the person they’re communicating with can advocate for themselves. You also can’t out-want something for your child. It’ll get exposed eventually.
But I go back and forth on how much access we should allow other adults to have our children. Let me find out a coach or any grown man is contacting my kids on a private Instagram, or encouraging them to be on Snapchat, or any other non-X avenue… I’d be livid!
In an ideal world, there would be an NCAA-specific social feed that all contact between coaches and prospective athletes took place on. Until we have that, I’d encourage parents to stay involved in helping operate their X account. As far as the rest of the social networks, I have no advice. You’re on your own there.
-The Unknown Parent
