The mad-mad-mad-mad world of niche sports....

 I just wanted to share this article. There are some parents out there obsessed with getting their children into a top tier college. They're getting them ready early, but then do children not deserve their childhoods.

I don't have children but I don't mind they get involved with sports, however, my hope is that they enjoy playing and they should decide if they should do this for their livelihoods or to get into a top-tier school.

This quote kind of grinded my gears a tad:

On paper, Sloane, a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut, seems almost unbelievably well prepared to shepherd her three daughters through the roiling world of competitive youth sports. She played tennis and ran track in high school and has an advanced degree in behavioral medicine. She wrote her master’s thesis on the connection between increased aerobic activity and attention span. She is also versed in statistics, which comes in handy when she’s analyzing her eldest daughter’s junior-squash rating—and whiteboarding the consequences if she doesn’t step up her game. “She needs at least a 5.0 rating, or she’s going to Ohio State,” Sloane told me.

What's wrong with Ohio State? Why this pursuit of an Ivy League education? Don't get me wrong if you get in you're set, however, there are plenty of great schools to attend out there - like Morehouse for instance. :P

Another quote from this article I found:

In 1988, the University of California sociologist Harry Edwards published an indictment of the “single-minded pursuit of sports” in Black communities. The “tragic” overemphasis on athletics at the expense of school and family, he wrote in Ebony magazine, was leaving “thousands and thousands of Black youths in obsessive pursuit of sports goals foredoomed to elude the vast and overwhelming majority of them.” In a plea to his fellow Black people, Edwards declared, “We can simply no longer permit many among our most competitive and gifted youths to sacrifice a wealth of human potential on the altar of athletic aspiration.”

Thirty years later, in a twist worthy of a Jordan Peele movie, Fairfield County has come to resemble Compton in the monomaniacal focus on sports. “There’s no more school,” a parent from the town of Darien told me flatly. (She, like Sloane and several other parents, did not want to be identified for privacy and recruitment reasons.) “There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash.” She says she is working on a memoir that she intends to self-publish, titled Squashed.

This article went from obsessions of college admissions to obsessions with sports. I guess families have their obsessions with getting what's best for the young people. 

Parents, what's your read on this?

h/t Newsalert