A few years ago, a Boston-based real-estate developer sent his then-11-year-old daughter to a lacrosse camp at Florida’s IMG Academy, one of the premier sports boarding schools in the country. Shannon O’Neil, the school’s lacrosse director, quickly took note of the young talent. “She said, ‘I don’t have a middle-school program, but if I’m gonna start one, I’m gonna start one around you,’ ” the dad tells me, requesting anonymity for privacy reasons. “I watched the hair stand up on my daughter’s arms and the tears come over her eyes, and, as a parent, you can’t stop that.”

Soon after, his daughter left for IMG, where 150 alumni have been drafted into professional sports leagues over the past decade. The commitment is considerable: Tuition for the girls’ lacrosse program in the 2026–27 academic year ranges from $75,400 for a middle-school day student to $99,900 for high- schoolers who live on campus. “It’s super scary to send your 11-year-old away to a boarding school, but she had the right stuff,” the dad says. Now a high-school sophomore, she boarded at IMG for three years before moving off the Bradenton campus—her family bought a second home in nearby Longboat Key and now splits time between Boston and Florida. Her younger brother is an eighth grader in the boys’ lacrosse program, and once he decided to attend as well, the family made a more permanent base in the area.

Across youth sports, affluent families are making enormous financial and logistical bets on their children’s athletic futures—relocating across state lines, buying second homes near top-tier academies, and spending well into six figures annually on tuition, private coaching, travel, and club teams. The era of the multisport student-athlete is largely over; children are now asked to choose a specialization before they even hit high school. And the pursuit of that edge has never been more expensive. Of the roughly 8 million high-school athletes in the United States, only about 530,000 will go on to compete at the college level, according to data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (N.C.A.A.). Yet the spending continues to rise: In 2024, the average American sports family spent 46 percent more on their child’s primary sport than five years earlier, according to an Aspen Institute study on the topic.

If you’re looking for an R.O.I., then you’re throwing your money away.

Parents have long invested heavily in youth sports, but in the past two decades the economics have intensified, says Linda Flanagan, a journalist and the author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—And Why It Matters. In just the past five years, private equity has moved aggressively into the space, snapping up youth-sports organizations and “recognizing that parents will spend an irrational amount of money on their kids’ athletic careers,” Flanagan explains. IMG’s parent company, Endeavor Group, was acquired in 2023 by BPEA EQT for almost $1.25 billion. And the billionaires Josh Harris and David Blitzer have been building Unrivaled Sports into one of the largest youth-sports conglomerates in the country.

The IMG dad is clear-eyed about all of this. He voices concern about youth sports becoming as much about resources as about talent, though he acknowledges the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Still, he’s happy to pay—tuition, private coaching, club teams, travel, and everything else required to keep his children competing at the highest level. “I’ve worked my tail off for my entire life to put myself in this position to provide it,” he says. “So, if that’s what my kids want, and we believe philosophically that’s the right thing for them, then we’re gonna pursue it.” Over the summer, his daughter trained one-on-one with Casey Powell, a National Lacrosse Hall of Fame inductee widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the sport’s history.

The trend extends well beyond the United States. Knightsbridge Circle, a U.K.-based luxury-lifestyle- management service with 100 member families has seen more clients reorganizing their lives around their children’s athletic ambitions. Stuart McNeill, the company’s C.E.O., told me about a family who recently relocated from the Cayman Islands to England because their 12-year-old son was told that he has real potential in soccer. They’ve rented a home outside London and are homeschooling him for a year while he waits to see which academies and clubs extend invitations. Once they know where he’s headed, they’ll buy a property there and enroll him in a permanent school. Knightsbridge has handled everything from furnishing the rental to securing a gym membership to sourcing wine for the family’s collection.

Another Knightsbridge client, based in North America, has sent their 17-year-old son to the La Manga region of Spain for tennis coaching. In the country’s southeast, the area has long attracted elite players such as Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray. The teen moved on his own and he has been there for about 18 months. While his family visits often, Knightsbridge helps manage things in their absence, coordinating Christmas gifts for his tennis friends, stocking the house with groceries, and arranging leisure activities through Europe. “If something is required urgently, our office in London can be there in two hours, whereas the family are 10 hours away,” McNeill says. “Fortunately, this hasn’t happened, but if the child is unsettled, we can be in there much quicker, so that gives the family that peace of mind.”

Families like the ones served by Knightsbridge may be operating at a different scale, but the underlying pattern—uprooting a household, splitting a family across time zones, reorganizing daily life around one child’s athletic trajectory—is hardly confined to the ultra-wealthy. And the costs aren’t only financial.

Jim Taylor, a sports psychologist, has lived some version of the phenomenon from nearly every angle: As a teenager, he trained as a ski racer at Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, the first full-time ski academy in the United States. Three-time Olympic gold medalist Mikaela Shiffrin would later attend the school. His two daughters followed a similar path, attending Sugar Bowl Academy in Northern California. His wife at the time stayed in the Bay Area for work while Taylor spent the winters—and one full year—at Sugar Bowl with the kids. As they approached high school, both girls realized they didn’t want a full-time ski education and opted instead for a more traditional experience at home in the Bay Area.

“[They] didn’t follow the path that I did, but it was a massive win,” Taylor tells me, “having the early experience, being able to make an informed decision, and then really being respectful of what their passions and their interests are.” Despite forgoing ski racing in high school, both daughters have continued the sport in college.

Connor Movalli, in contrast, was far more single-minded. Currently a forward on the hockey team at Wilkes University, a Division III school in Pennsylvania, the 21-year-old says it was always his goal to play at the N.C.A.A. level. When he was just 13, his family relocated from Texas to Connecticut so he could train more intensely. He stayed enrolled at his high school in Texas, attending remotely—several years before that became the pandemic norm—and flying back down to the Lone Star State for a couple months after the hockey season ended to finish his classes in person.

From Connecticut, Movalli and his mother moved to Omaha, Neb., while his father stayed in Dallas. Eventually, his parents decided to have him live with host families rather than continue to relocate—something his older brother had also done. This arrangement is common for young hockey players: Elite hockey development largely runs parallel to the standard educational system, with kids leaving home at around age 16 to join junior teams and live with local families who can provide access to ice time and structured training.

I watched the hair stand up on my daughter’s arms and the tears come over her eyes, and, as a parent, you can’t stop that. 

Movalli shuttled from Connecticut to Minnesota to North Carolina to New Jersey, where he ended up staying for three and a half years. “My most recent host family… took care of me like my own parents. They were some of the best people I’ve ever met,” he tells me. “They come to my games now that I’m in college…. They’re very involved in my life now that I’m not living there, and I think that’s wonderful.”

Movalli’s experience was, in some ways, a best-case version of the arrangement. For many families who go down this road, the trade-offs are far more difficult. Investing so heavily in one child’s athletic ambitions can strain marriages, alienate siblings, and shift the balance of family life. Several of the people I spoke with pointed to the toll taken on non-sporty siblings and on the parents’ relationship. Taylor’s arrangement, in which one parent moves with the athlete while the other stays behind for work, has in other cases led to divorce—though Taylor notes that it wasn’t a factor in the end of his own marriage, and Movalli believes all the moving actually brought his family closer together.

Taylor has also worked with families where the child didn’t have much say in the decision—the parents simply relocated to give them more opportunities. A naturally gifted athlete might go on to succeed, but could just as easily resent parents for denying them a normal adolescence. In at least two cases Taylor has seen, the relationship between the child and parent suffered lasting damage. “Your sports career lasts, if you’re lucky, 15 years; if you’re normal, five or six,” he says. “But the parent-child relationship? That, for me, is sacrosanct. Nothing—nothing—is worth that.”

Taylor describes one family he counseled in which the father moved with their daughter to a sports academy while the mother stayed behind with two other children. After a year, the father and daughter moved back home. The costs had become a burden: The daughter realized she wasn’t good enough to play professionally, she found the all-consuming intensity constraining, and the parents’ relationship with each other and their other kids was fraying. Things improved when the family was back together—and the daughter still went on to play at a D-III college program.

Kids give up a lot to attend these programs, and much of the cost is harder to quantify. The IMG dad recalls that when his daughter first arrived at the academy, O’Neil, the lacrosse director, took her trick-or-treating. Most of the other kids in her program were older, some by six or seven years, and they had already aged out of the Halloween ritual. She started traveling alone at 12. At 16, she still doesn’t have her driver’s license, in part because the family has spent years splitting time between Colorado, Florida, and Massachusetts. (She and her brother grew up in Boulder, Colo., and her club lacrosse team is based in Denver.) She’s “a rare breed,” her dad tells me. “At 11 she said, ‘I want to do this,’ and she decided to leave home—all her friends. Some of the social things have taken a bit longer for her to develop, but E.Q. and physical ability on the field? Her coaches will say she’s one of the best we’ve got.”

For the families who make this kind of investment, the long game often ends after high school. In sports such as men’s basketball and women’s volleyball, fewer than 4 percent of high-school athletes go on to compete at the N.C.A.A. level. The share who make it to the professional ranks or the Olympics is smaller still. “If you’re looking for an R.O.I.,” Taylor says, “you’re throwing your money away.” Put another way, almost no one becomes the next LeBron James or A’ja Wilson. Very few even get on the same court. 

So why spend so much on a pursuit that may amount to little more than a story these kids tell at office parties decades from now? For the IMG dad, the answer is partly strategic. “If we can do all this work and get into an Ivy, then it’s worth it for us,” he says. Lacrosse can offer one of the more attainable recruit- ing paths into the Ivy League. For families with access to top club teams, there’s a viable route from elite youth competition to admission at such universities. At the same time, the dad is not going to force his son to stay at IMG through high school. The eighth grader has committed to sticking around until his older sister graduates, and then he can go wherever he wants. As with Taylor’s daughters, these kids are largely in the driver’s seat.

Even without a financial return, the decision might still feel worthwhile. But “it depends on how you define it paying off,” Flanagan says. “If you get divorced because of it… I don’t think that’s a great outcome. If the rest of the kids in the family feel neglected, or their interests don’t matter, and mom and dad only care about the jock in the family? Or if there’s multiple jocks in the family, and the parents are constantly serving their children only, and they’re a family in name only because they spend every weekend apart?… I don’t think that’s necessarily what most would consider successful.”

The idea of “making it,” though, is always there. Movalli, in many ways, already has—he achieved his goal of playing hockey for an N.C.A.A. program. Yet he still wants to play professionally for a year or two after graduation, “to fully fulfill my hockey career,” he says, “and look back on it and say I was successful enough to get an opportunity to make money at a sport that I love and rest my head on the pillow at night knowing that I made the right choices.”

For the IMG lacrosse player, it all comes down to this summer, when most of the recruiting for her college career will take place. Her entire family is invested in making it happen. But beyond lacrosse itself, attending IMG has expanded her sense of what’s possible in ways that wouldn’t have been available had she stayed home. “I said to her at one point…‘ You’re gonna come back to Boulder, and you’re gonna go to your old school. You’re gonna hang out with your old friends, and at some point in time it’s gonna feel small to you,’ ” her dad says. “And she said to me a few years back, she’s like, ‘Dad, you were right. I feel like I have a so much bigger sphere of opportunity than I had before.’ ”