Can We Talk About The Hypocrisy School Sports Fees Please?

When my youngest son decided he didn’t want to play football anymore after his first season, I nearly wept with relief. It’s over, I thought, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My three older sons all played football every year of their high school career. They also played rugby, and the oldest two played basketball. I was always so impressed with how dedicated they were, so different from me. I halfheartedly played T-ball for two weeks one summer when I was around 8 and quit when I realized it might get in the way of swimming in my grandparents’ pool. Not my sons. They organized off-season practice in the summer for football and rugby, shot hoops in our driveway for so long after dinner every night I am triggered to this day by the rhythmic “thump, thump” of a ball on pavement. I loved watching them play. I never learned a single rule of any sport but showed up to every game, a mug of coffee in my hand, a crockpot of stew simmering for our return home afterwards.

I wish that was enough. But of course, there were those school sports fees. And of course, I could never, ever afford them.

I used to look at the other parents and imagine their kids were playing sports with all of their fees paid up and just hate myself. Because when my oldest son made the football team in the fall, then the basketball team in winter, and rugby in spring, his fees wrecked me. They were more than my rent payment, which I was already struggling to pay, and kept getting higher. Then his brother joined him on the teams the next year, then his younger brother joined them both two years later. And I was sunk.

I know now that I was not the only one. I know now that school sports fees have gotten out of control across the country. There are schools charging a fee to simply try out for the team and then asking parents to pay thousands of dollars for their kids to play. I know now that the average cost for a kid to play sports at a public school is around $1,000 per child in this country. And that’s just to get out on the field; that doesn’t even include the travel fees or uniforms.

I know now that the other parents in the stands were probably just as stressed out and guilty as me, that their big proud smiles were probably hiding sleepless nights of worrying about how they would ever keep up.

I was told there were subsidized programs for school fees to help out. I swallowed around the big lump of shame and applied for them early in the fall. These subsidies covered the basic school sports fee and nothing else. Which meant I had to find a way to cough up for uniforms and travel costs on my own, plus the extra fees for the specific sports they were paying. I sold old clothes on Facebook Marketplace to pay fees. My sons got after school jobs to help, every evening taken up with practice or work or homework or a combination of all three.

I was late with the fees every year and almost never got it together to pay the entire amount. My sons paid, in their own ways, for our poverty. They were outfitted in the bottom-of-the-barrel uniforms. Always dirty and grass-stained from whoever wore it the year before, always ill-fitting. Their equipment was never quite right, their cleats and shoes not exactly what they should be. A Scarlet Letter on their back, their punishment for having a poor mother.

Their coaches were worse. They called my sons out in front of their teammates for being late with fees. I could always tell when it had happened when my sons came home from practice. They wouldn’t look at me for a little while, mad at me for not getting it right and mad at themselves because they knew I was trying my hardest. When they finally told me, they begged me not to call their football coach and say what I wanted to say. “Just call me and yell at me,” is what I wanted to say. “Don’t humiliate them in front of their teammates. It’s not their fault.”

They told me I would make it worse, the classic trick of all bullies forever. And so I said nothing. My kids made it through, but they were not unscathed. They were captains of their teams, leaders of their teammates. They dug deep to get better, practicing in the rain and the snow, on weekends and in the early morning. They scored the winning touchdown at the big game more than once, ran in the final try in rugby, were written about in the local newspaper several times. If this were a movie, they would have been carried out on the shoulders of teammates, celebrated for their grit and determination.

Instead, they just handed in their uniforms and were told they would not be invited to the final awards ceremony because they were behind on their fees. At the end of the day, money mattered more than anything they did on the field.