The Most Expensive Lottery Ticket in Texas
My friend Neal posted an image on Facebook over the weekend: a baby in a baseball uniform and wraparound sunglasses, under the headline, “1U Tryouts. National exposure. Builds mental toughness. 80-game schedule. $10,000 player fee.” I laughed but I also recognized the only part invented was the baby.
I won’t argue that families are foolish for participating in travel ball. I played baseball from four to 18, including travel ball, and I recognize the life lessons learned in the dugout. But I played it in high school, not from third grade, and it cost a fraction of what it costs now. An outfielder from my high school team, now an MLB scout, put the case plainly in a text: “Once your child is ready for more than Little League and physically developed enough to handle the number of games they cram into a small window, it can be beneficial.”
Once. That is the keyword.
What I object to is how it is sold, as an investment. By that standard, it fails badly.
Roughly one in 200 high school seniors who play baseball will ever be drafted, by any route. About one in 1,2220 will record a single day in the major leagues. The lottery payoff is enormous. The typical payoff is zero.
Take a family spending $8,000 a year for 10 years. That is $80,000 committed against a 0.08% chance. That is not an investment. It is a lottery ticket.
Consider what one season buys instead.
A MIG welder, helmet and gloves cost under a thousand dollars. A full mechanic’s set and a rolling box, about the same. Two thousand puts a rough truck in the driveway to tear down and put back together. Four hundred covers a soldering station, a multimeter, and enough Arduino and Raspberry Pit hardware to build whatever a fourteen-year-old imagines. Dual-credit hours through districts like Cuero ISD, low cost if not free.
Test prep costs nothing. Khan Academy’s digital SAT courses are the College Board’s Bluebook app are the official material, free. Mandarin and Arabic are growing in commercial use, and an hour of conversational tutoring runs about $20. My son and I are learning Arabic with a tutor who lives in Lebanon.
Even the scholarship math points the same direction. Counting colleges, government, and private funders, more than $100 billion in grant and scholarship money is awarded every year. Athletic scholarships, by the NCAA’s own accounting, total about $3 billion, and only about 2% of high school athletes ever see any of it, most as a partial award rather than a full ride. The scholarship parents chase at the tournament is a rounding error next to the money waiting in the library.
Add it up. Once season of elite travel ball buys a working shop, a project vehicle, a year of language instruction, and a college-credit head start, with money left over.
At twelve years old, you do not know which child you have. The tools work either way. The child who ends up an engineer needed the soldering iron. The child who ends up in medicine needed the SAT hours. A roster spot on the 12U select team works exactly one way, and only if a stranger with a clipboard agrees.
Now the balance sheet. That $8,000 a year for 10 years, compounding 6% in an investment account, is $105,446 the day he or she turns 18. In this hypothetical, guaranteed, with no coach’s opinion involved. Run the same contributions at 6% and leave the money alone until he or she is 60 and it reaches $1.22 million.
None of this is an argument against sports. It is an argument against a sales pitch. American youth sports is now a $40 billion industry, nearly twice the annual revenue of the NFL. 3STEP Sports, private-equity backed since 2019, controls more than 5,000 clubs across all 50 states. This is not an investment in children. It is a toll road, and the tolls are paid for by the parents.
The recent MLB drafted 613 players and will draft roughly 600 next year, no matter how many weekends we surrender to it. The demand for skilled people is not fixed. Welders are increasingly scarce; the American Welding Society projects 320,500 welding job openings by 2029. The Association of American Medical Colleges project a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.
Nobody runs a showcase tournament for a welding certificate. Nobody sells a $400 exposure package for the SAT. That is precisely why they are the better investment.
Joe Olive, CFP®, MPS, is a 10-year Air Force veteran who works as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® with Sather Financial Group, a fee-only strategic planning and investment management firm. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.
