One of my former co-workers was a former Olympic skier; her parents managed a ski resort in France for most of her childhood, and she reckoned the majority of kids competing nationally were in a similar situation. In fact, I remember her saying that it really wasn’t about how good the kids were, the entire selection process depended partly how much time you could spend on the slopes, but mainly on how far your parents were willing to take you to competitions.
As her parents thought having a serious competitor in the family and maybe helping teach some classes would be great for the image of the resort, they were willing to take her any distance required to compete. She reckoned that she wasn’t even the best regular in her age group on their slopes, but if the other kids’ parents weren’t willing to spend a half their weekends taking their 14 year old to competitions 500 miles away to improve their ranking, then they were never going to get anywhere. The team was wholly comprised of those with truly dedicated parents, actual skill was secondary, and they all knew it.
She had to be good enough to qualify, at least. So probably the time she spent skiing surely helped her times, she had ready made practice slopes that her family owned. Other atheletes could have had sponsers and patrons to offset costs.
I come from a figure-skating family. Both my sister and I figure-skated, and Mom produced skating shows for which Dad built sets. Sis and I practiced two hours a day after school on weekdays, and four hours a day on weekends. We liked it. I picked up my share of Club Championships, as did Sis.
But we both knew we’d never be Olympians. To us, skating was fun (to me, as a 15-year-old heterosexual boy, I actually got to touch and hold girls who wore little more than leotards, which is more than my hockey-playing contemporaries at high school could ever claim. As a 15 or 16-year-old boy, too scared to ask one of my female classmates to the high-school dance, I thought it was great that I got matched up with a girl to do ice dancing). But school was more important, according to our parents, so no matter how good Sis and I got (and we got pretty good), school trumped everything.
Not so from some parents at the skating club. They were bound and determined that their kids would make it to Nationals, and then, the Olympics. And their kids trained, incessantly, and with the best coaches. I don’t know about school (really, we’re talking about 13-17-year-olds, who should have been in school during the day), but they trained. And trained, and trained.
And they never made it. Yes, I know some Olympians who skated for Canada; but no, none of them were those who shared the ice with me after school in 1973.
Sis and I eventually let skating fall away in adulthood, but I’ve never forgotten the other skaters who were supposed to be champions, trained incessantly, and never made it.
Yes. As a parent, if you realize your kid is a missile, you want to see what you can do to make them a guided missile ;).
Kids with drive and ambition present their own share of challenges. Channeling it positively while valuing a balanced life is hard. The “prep and grooming” must come from mutual drive. Trust me, a kid really can’t become an Eagle Scout unless they want to 
The trick is to anchor the kid’s self esteem to a moral/balanced view of themselves, and putting any academic/athletic/musical/etc. achievement within that context. My oldest is, yes, a business/genetics double-major at an Ivy, but he’s a *good, driven *kid, not a machine we programmed correctly.
Kids is hard.
Nor will they spend 9 hours a day practicing gymnastics if they don’t want to.
Even without talent and drive, any organized activity a child does has to be a mutual desire. My son said when he was in high school “I would have liked to play hockey, why didn’t you put me in hockey.” “Well, to play hockey you need to really want to play hockey - you really didn’t. And you need to have hockey parents - parents who are willing to get you to the rink for a 6am on Sunday ice time. You don’t have those parents.” He was a really good park and rec baseball player - and a decent high school baseball player.
When I was in high school (in the 80s), I had swim practice for 2+ hours every morning before school, and for 3-4 hours after school on weekdays; one 5-hour practice on Saturdays. Some of my teammates were aiming for the Olympics, but there was no risk of that for me. I didn’t even end up competing in college (probably should have).
My teammates who got to the Olympics ended up spending even more time of daily practice at that level. Swimmers peak much later than women gymnasts do, and so don’t reach those super-long practice hours until they’re older. I can absolutely see young girls aiming for the Olympics reaching 9 hours of practice while still very young. I think the sport is kind of abusive, because girls peak so young in gymnastics that it probably really messes them up. But I don’t necessarily think the girl’s parents weren’t going along with stuff that any other Olympic hopeful in women’s gymnastics were allowing.
Back when Ivygirl was a wee slip, I got her into ballet. It was one Saturday a week, with a recital at the end of the school year.
One girl in the class was also taking jazz, tap, and hiphop dance classes, in addition to soccer. Her mother was talking about her daughter’s activities and how one evening her daughter didn’t want to go out to dinner, can you imagine? She wanted to order pizza and stay home. To me it seemed like the mothers were trying to one up each other with how many classes they could get their kids involved in.
All I could think was, “When does she have time to do her homework?”
My wife teaches at the Performing Arts Magnet school in the county in which we reside. My youngest daughter decided to audition there and is a technical theater major.
Some of the students are called triple threats, they sing, dance and act. They spend so much time not only at the school doing these things (the do a lot of their academic classes online), but they also have outside singing, dancing, and acting classes and coaches.
People have moved their families across the US to be in the county just to go to school there. Why? Dreams of Broadway. To date, they have 62 different Broadway shows that have had at least one former student in them (not necessarily the leads, but in the cast). They have had countless graduates doing the shows on cruise ships and in the traveling shows.
The most ‘famous’ graduate is the guy that plays Cisco Ramon on the CW show ‘The Flash’.
When they do performances, it is not like going to a HS play or muscial, it is like going to an actual off Broadway production.
I have a co-worker that he and his wife spent EVERY weekend traveling somewhere for swim meets, or soccer tournaments, or softball tournaments, or baseball tournaments. I am guessing as much as they spent for hotels and fees and equipment, college is actually cheaper for them.
I told my girls that their parents are much too lazy to take them to endless practices and competitions, so they better be fine with being a regular kid.
I know the type - and then whine about how they have no free time. :smack:
This 1995 book is obviously selling well right now, and could use an update. I read it, and it was very disturbing.
As we know, the stories often don’t have happy endings. Here’s an excellent example. 
The next link on Google is for a Gofundme that she’s had since 2014. It still hasn’t met its goal.
I’m not sure I would help my kid in an obsessive pursuit of sports; I think it’s robbing a kid of a typical childhood when essentially she “works” 60+ hours a week. The home schooling further isolates a kid.
I don’t have kids, maybe it’s why these pieces of the interview bother me.
I accidentally shot my million dollar horse! :smack:
One of my co-workers was a “promising” gymnast in her childhood. She was at a full-time gymnastics residential school from age 8. She would go home most weekends, which involved a four hour drive each way, Friday night and Sunday afternoon.
Her relationship with her father is non-existent. She realized later that he was at least emotionally abusive. Her mother was a completely submissive partner, a Chinese woman in a rural area of the upper Midwest that had no other Chinese people. She was “forbidden” to ever speak to the kids in Chinese.
My coworker got injured freshman year of high school and was booted from the gymnastics school. She was a superstar in her regular high school and even got a partial scholarship to college. But after she was no longer on the Olympics track her father lost all interest in her life. He had “invested” everything in her gymnastics, and felt like she had pissed it all away.
I can assure you that if she was sexually abused at the “academy” she wasn’t going to tell her father, and if she told her mother, nothing would be done.
So yes, there is at least one case of parents monomaniacally pursuing a sports career for their kids from a fairly young age.
In China several kids from the village my wife grew up in were taken at age 6 by the Government in the early 1970s to go full time into volleyball, gymnastics, badminton, etc. Some came back a few years later having failed to make the cut. At age 9 or 10 they could at least catch up academically. The village school standards were low anyway.
And certainly Anna Kournikova was pretty much a full time tennis player at age 8. She was at a tennis academy for a couple of years BEFORE that.
No offense, but I find this kinda sad.
and you need a lot of money to buy equipment, which they’ll grow out of every 8 months. and no, they’re not likely to be the next Sidney Crosby.
What do you find sad about it ? The fact that hockey required parents willing to get him to the rink at 6 am Sunday morning or the fact that he didn’t have those parents?
If it’s the latter, I don’t find it sad at all. My son had the parents who would get him to the rink at 7am Sunday morning (and I absolutely wouldn’t have done 6 am) - but not the ones who would spend the entire summer dragging the whole family around the country for him to play baseball. Every family is going to have different limits , but as a general rule it’s not a great thing for a family’s life to revolve around one member’s interests. And getting to the rink at 6am is going to impact everyone’s life , even if only one child and one parent have to wake up at 4:30 am to get there.
I had dance lessons, tap, ballet and jazz, as a child. Pre K thru 12grade. Me and my sisters took piano k-12. My brothers were in all sports available. My youngest brother was a highschool star quarterback. 2 of my sisters were cheerleaders. My Daddy was running allover the place getting us to all these extracurricular activities. The one he hated the most was cheerleading. The Moms and sponsers were horrid and unorganized. He abhorred dealing with them. If you saw all of us together you wouldn’t know we had $1000s spent on lessons and practices, and alot of road time and all the gear wasn’t cheap, either. I think it was probably a big waste.
It is.
One of the kids on my street played hockey in some youth league in Toronto. He was bound to be–according to his parents–an NHL superstar. They attended practices at 6 AM on Saturdays, games on weekend afternoons, and yet more practices on some other day of the week, at weird hours for an 8-year-old. (Bedtime at 8 PM? No problem if practice is Wednesday at 10PM!) It should be stated that his Dad was a failed hockey player who was bound and determined that his son was going to be an NHL player. Their family’s life revolved around Kid’s hockey practice schedules and games. Kid couldn’t play with us other kids if it was football or baseball or even hide-and-seek–he could only play if it was road hockey. So we played a lot of road hockey, just so we could all play together.
Thankfully, Kid and his parents eventually realized that Kid just wasn’t going to be a hockey star. Kid turned out pretty normal, attending high school with the rest of us, getting a degree from a respected Canadian university, and working in a respected field.
But thinking about my figure skating days–some kids turned out pretty warped, mainly because neither they, nor their parents, could even entertain the fact that their kid wasn’t championship material. Thankfully, Kid’s parents realized that, and he grew up pretty normally. And he got crunched in our pick-up games of tackle football. 
My daughter is a competitive gymnast and a very good one. She doesn’t train 9 hours a day because that would be almost impossible most of the time but 4 - 5 hours a day, 5 days a week is the minimum required plus school. It is longer before major meets and all-consuming before national and international meets.
No one ever forced her to do it. I even tried to gently talk her out of it because it is mortgage payment expensive and extremely disruptive to the family schedule but that is what she wants to do and she works extremely hard on it so I support her.
I know plenty of other gymnastics parents that pushed their daughters into it and that doesn’t work out well at all. All of the really successful ones that I know including former Olympians were completely self-motivated and their parents just helped facilitate and support their dreams. I always told my daughter that she could quit or drop down to the exhibition level at any time as long as she thought it through but she wants to keep going.
The thing that I worry about is that she is going high enough in skills that the serious injury rate is close to 100% and I make sure that she understands that. I am also worried about the various abuse scandals in the sport and I make sure that she knows what to do if she encounters anything like it. She has female Chinese and Russian coaches that can be verbally abusive but nothing too over the top. Her male coach is American and someone that I trust almost completely. I depend on him to watch over her and the rest of her team when I am not around so that nothing bad happens.
If that’s a dig against Dangerosa’s decision not to be a hockey parent, I disagree with you strongly. It’s totally reasonable for a family to make decisions as to how much time, effort, & resources they’re willing to put into a kid’s pursuits. And hockey is particularly tough - lots of very early mornings, lots of expensive equipment that needs to be replaced annually. I see nothing wrong with saying stick with baseball.