A high school athlete's varsity letter jacket was once the ideal, worn with pride in hallways and admired from afar.
But many of today's young athletes are trading in that nostalgic notion -- and perhaps altering a traditional sense of community -- in the hopes of landing another type of letter: a college scholarship.
Increasingly, travel teams and club sports are becoming a priority, with kids now just as likely to wear their Little Caesars hockey jacket as they are their school colors. Their parents, meanwhile, spend thousands of dollars annually to provide everything from coaching and instruction to equipment, travel and site fees.
Schools still report record sports participation levels, but it's clear a price is being paid.
"There's no question that community sports teams have seen a growth explosion during the last generation," said Jack Roberts, executive director of the Michigan High School Athletic Association. "And this does affect school sports. It causes kids to be pulled in multiple directions at the same time. It causes coaches to fight over 'Whose kid is this?' "
As a result, the three-sport schoolboy idol of a generation ago is becoming a novelty. As kids dive headfirst into Olympic-style development programs or year-round, sport-specific training, they and their parents sacrifice time and money -- and plenty more -- chasing an elusive goal.
"These kids are looking down the road at college scholarship opportunities," Mike Johnson said of his daughter, Katherine, a sophomore at Rochester Adams High, and her teammates with the Oakland Live Y'ers Swim Club, one of the nation's top age-group programs.
"You just want your kid to get the best training."
Numbers games
And so they do. But at what cost?
Clearly, that's a question parents should be asking -- and not just for financial reasons.
Reliable data is scarce about the kinds of choices kids are making these days in the largely unregulated arena of youth sports. But with at least half the children 6 to 17 in the United States competing for at least one organized sports team -- more than 26 million kids, according to a recent national study -- parenting has become America's new competitive sport.
That, in turn, has created a whole new set of problems in youth sports: frightening episodes of parent violence, over-use injuries that once were seen only in adults, and countless cases of burnout, often the result of a growing trend toward kids' year-round specialization in a single sport.
"I think the real issue is, 'How much is enough?' " said Marty Ewing, director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University. "Parents are afraid to put the brakes on for fear that their kids will fall behind somehow."
And for many, nonschool sports leagues -- beginning with pre-elementary age groups and advancing from recreational to elite levels -- are viewed as a way to get a leg up on the competition. That's particularly true in middle- to upper-class suburbia, where parents have the motive and the means.
Mary Catherine Steiner, a sophomore at Rochester Adams, also swims with the Oakland Live Y'ers (OLY) club, which was awarded the Silver Medal of Excellence by USA Swimming, the national governing body, as one of its top 30 competitive programs nationwide.
Steiner, a Mississauga, Ontario, native who hopes to one day compete in the Canadian Olympic trials, quit her high school team in order to train full-time with the club at Oakland University this fall.
"OLY helps me with my training to reach my goals for national competition," said Steiner, who finished fifth in the 200 freestyle at the Division I high school state meet last year. "I'm a distance freestyle swimmer, and they don't offer those events (800, 1,000) in high school. Scouts go to bigger (USA Swimming) sanctioned meets, and I would like to get a college scholarship."
The same is true for Katherine Johnson, whose father figures he spends $150 a month, not including travel expenses for out-of-town meets, for her to train 20 to 25 hours per week.
"When you go to the big-time (USA Swimming) meets you have to be in great condition," Mike Johnson said. "Katherine competed in high school last year and, as a result, her fitness level dropped off and she got out of shape. She's now swimming 6,000 to 7,000 yards a day instead of half that in high school.
"It's a big commitment. They train six days a week and sometimes 12 sessions a week beginning at 5:30 a.m."
Beating the odds
Still, the reality is, aiming for a college scholarship is a shot in the dark for most aspiring young athletes.
National Collegiate Athletic Association research shows barely 1 in 330 high school students will earn a college scholarship for athletics, and less than 3 percent of Michigan high school athletes will play any college sports at all, even briefly. The success rates may be higher among elite-level youth programs, but most experts agree the odds are as long as the hours many kids are putting in.
"If parents only knew that there were 30 times more dollars available for financial aid based on academics rather than athletics, maybe they'd have their child at home reading to them," Roberts said. "That would make a great deal more financial sense than this fantasy of securing a college athletic scholarship."
Hockey scholarships are scarce at the college level, and pro contracts no less rare, but that hasn't slowed the growth of youth hockey in Michigan, ranked No. 1 nationally in participation, according to USA Hockey.
The Michigan Amateur Hockey Association, which created an uproar when it voted last year to eliminate travel hockey for children 5 to 8, boasts 40,000 under-18 participants and as many as 5,000 registered teams.
For the past decade, Lou Schmidt has coached one such team, the Honeybaked Midget Major hockey club, a Detroit-area AAA travel team that has sent dozens of players to junior, college and pro hockey.
Although the sport has grown among Michigan's high school ranks -- more than 150 schools are offering hockey in late fall and early winter this year -- it is still largely an out-of-school activity.
The Honeybaked team, with a roster of 15- and 16-year-olds, some from as far away as California, competes from September through May. Michigan is one of a handful of states that doesn't allow players to play both high school and age-group hockey at the same time.
"I never gave it (playing for high school team) a thought," said Asher Hirshberg, a Honeybaked player and sophomore at Birmingham Brother Rice. "In midget majors, it's a business. Playing here, you want to get to the juniors or play in college. High school hockey is more laid-back."
Hirshberg and his teammates will play as many as 80 games this season, more than twice as many as a high school team, with weekend trips beginning Thursday evenings and often ending late Sunday nights or early Monday mornings. Players receive homework assignments in advance to cover for the school time they miss.
"Some say these kids can go through the high schools and then go on to (junior hockey)," Schmidt said. "But you can count those on one hand, the ones that do that. The junior scouts are scouting the AAA clubs, like Compuware, Little Caesars and Honeybaked. Given the choice of watching the AAA or high school, they'll choose AAA."
But although Schmidt admits travel hockey may be the best route for advancement for top players, even at an annual cost of $7,500 or more per family, he is leaving it behind for high school hockey. Next week, he'll begin his first season as varsity coach at Birmingham Brother Rice, where his son will play.
Choosing sides
Carlos Briggs grew up playing basketball both in high school, at Detroit Benedictine, and with Amateur Athletic Union teams. Now he's the coach at Schoolcraft College, one of the top men's junior college basketball programs. And although he still talks to high school coaches first when recruiting a player, he's aware times have changed.
"Those AAU coaches who've had the kids since 10 or 11 years old will have more of an influence (on the kids)," Briggs said.
No one need remind Benny White of that. White, the boys basketball coach at Detroit Martin Luther King, has seen first-hand the inroads AAU basketball has made on the high school game.
This winter, White says he'll be without one of his best players, Tracy Smith, a 6-foot-7 sophomore who played this summer for The Family, a Nike-sponsored AAU travel team. Smith has since transferred from King to Mt. Zion (N.C.) Christian Academy, where the basketball program, also sponsored by Nike, is perhaps best known for sending current NBA star Tracy McGrady directly from high school to the pros.
"I'm disappointed -- not because he transferred, but how," White said. "I thought we had a good relationship. Whoever got to him was able to convince him that this was his in his best interest (for college). And who am I to say that it isn't?"
White almost lost his other star, Ramar Smith, to Oak Hill (Va.) Academy, another prep basketball powerhouse.
"I did think seriously about leaving," Smith said. "But I stayed because I love my coach, and I love my family."
He loves football, too, and became a starter for King's varsity team this fall, bucking the trend toward specialization.
Still, what once was the norm, a two- or three-sport athlete like author Clair Bee's fictional Chip Hilton character from the 1950s, is now becoming something of a rarity.
Sports participation among the more than 1,200 MHSAA member schools rose 2.2 percent last year, reaching record levels, but that doesn't paint the full picture.
"At least in large schools, the multisport athlete is much rarer than it was a generation ago," Roberts said.
Back to school
Seventeen-year-old Matt Terman, then, is a survivor.
The Fraser High senior has played youth soccer since the age of 4 and organized baseball since he was 9. He still manages to find time for both in his busy schedule, but it hasn't been easy.
The high school boys soccer season in Michigan runs from early August to early November, while baseball begins in mid-March and ends in mid-June. Yet, for students like Terman, there's more youth soccer in the fall, hitting leagues and indoor soccer in the winter, and travel baseball and soccer in the spring.
Terman hopes to play baseball in college and has received letters from coaches at Kalamazoo College and Adrian. So he chose high school baseball over travel soccer last spring and plans to do the same this season.
"It's difficult to do both," said Terman, who also maintains a 3.68 grade-point average. "Some coaches want you to specialize in one sport. I was fortunate: None of my coaches put any pressure on me to play one sport (over the other)."
If only others were as lucky, said Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, a noted psychiatrist who gave the keynote speech at last month's International Youth Sports Conference in Atlanta.
"Children's athletics are being professionalized," Rosenfeld said. "We put so much energy into organized kids' sports, we end up devaluing true play. Parents need to let kids be kids again, to give them back their lives."
You can reach John Niyo at (313) 223-4646 or jniyo@detnews.com.
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