When my son Macklin was 5 years old, my wife and I enrolled him in one of those summer sports camps for tots. You know the kind: A child is introduced to tennis one week, soccer the next, baseball the week after that, and so on. But after swinging a tennis racket during his first week at the camp, Macklin told us he didn’t want to play soccer or baseball; he wanted to stay with tennis. Despite our intermittent efforts to persuade him to try another sport, he stuck to his guns. So, tennis it was for the rest of the summer.
Here we are, 11 years later, and Macklin is a 16-year-old junior tennis player with a singular goal: to play high-level Division I college tennis. In other words, the big time. He plays a tournament at least twice a month. In January, he left an excellent high school, Fordham Prep, for an online school that would allow him to train for four or five hours a day instead of four or five hours a week. He has given up hamburgers, desserts, and lots of other foods most teenagers love. He doesn’t date (no time). He works out with a personal trainer a few times a week. He spends long stretches of time away from home at serious tennis academies in Spain, Florida, and Maryland. I find myself in awe of his dedication.
Then again, as his parents, my wife and I have become pretty dedicated ourselves. We call ourselves Team Mack. I can’t bring myself to calculate how much we’ve spent on tennis, but it has to be upward of $50,000 a year. It can be a struggle. My wife, Dawn, who ran marathons for years—and is thus attuned to what an athlete needs—takes the lead on ensuring Mack is in the right physical shape to handle the rigors of tournament tennis, which for a junior player can sometimes mean four matches a day: two singles and two doubles. I scour the tournament schedule, looking for options that will challenge him and help improve his rating, a critical measure for college coaches. And I’m the one who travels with him most of the time.
Tom Farrey, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, told me recently that his program conducted research a few years ago showing that the average sports parent spends almost three and a half hours a day on their kid’s sports. A day! My first reaction was, That’s not us! But then I thought about it some more. After factoring in everything from washing Mack’s tennis clothes to getting his rackets re-strung to spending a weekend at one of his tournaments, I had to concede that Dawn and I probably do spend that much of our lives on his tennis.
Read more
