Help Your Family Run the Numbers

By Kathy Palmer / $martPath Forward

It often starts with a flyer on social media or a text from another parent: tryouts for a travel sports team. Your 10-year-old is thrilled. The coach talks about exposure, showcases and college scouts. And before long, your family has quietly signed up for one of the biggest purchases it will make over the next decade.

A decade of travel baseball can easily cost $40,000 or more. Families often justify it as an investment in a future scholarship. But is it? That’s the question behind our newest Family Finances lesson, Travel Baseball: What Does It Cost, and What Are the Odds? It gives parents and kids the same tools economists use to size up any big decision.

The team fee is just the beginning

Ask a travel-ball family what they spend, and they’ll probably name the team fee. The real bill is much bigger. Once tournaments, travel, gear and lessons are added, families report spending anywhere from about $2,000 to $15,000 a year per player. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that $10,000 a year is common for club families, even for 6-year-olds.

The lesson walks through where the money goes:

• Tournaments. Entry fees are often passed on to families. One weeklong event at a Cooperstown baseball resort runs about $25,000 per team.
• Gear. Youth bats can cost up to $500, gloves $400 and catcher’s gear $600.
• Travel. Gas, hotels and meals can double or triple a family’s club fees.
• Lessons and training. Private coaches charge up to $200 an hour, and training facilities $300 to $1,000 a month.

Then there are costs that never appear on an invoice. The average travel player plays about 47 games and 45 practices a year, and about 40% get two or fewer months off. Tournaments fill most weekends for the whole family. A pediatric sports surgeon reports more elbow and shoulder injuries in players as young as 8. And year-round baseball leaves less room for other sports, a job, or simply being a kid.

Cost also shapes who gets to play. Since 2014, frequent baseball participation has fallen 28% among families earning under $100,000 and risen 21% among families earning more.

Long odds at every step

The lesson follows 1,000 high school baseball players to see how many make it to each level:

Stage	Out of 1,000 high school players
Play NCAA baseball, any division	88
Play NCAA Division I baseball	27
Get drafted by an MLB team	5
Reach the major leagues	1

And playing in college isn’t the same as getting a scholarship. Division III, the largest group of college players, offers no athletic scholarships at all. For decades, Division I teams could split only 11.7 scholarships across rosters of 35 or more players, so most awards covered about a third of the cost. New rules since 2025 let schools fund more scholarships, but many can’t afford to, and rosters are now capped at 34 players.

Many parents expect better odds. In one survey of about 700 travel-ball parents, roughly 43% said their child would “definitely” or “probably” play college baseball. That’s about five times the national rate.

Even the best case loses money

Here’s the part of the lesson that surprises families most. A Samford University sports-analytics analysis looked at a family whose child does earn a typical Division I baseball scholarship. They still lose money.

The math is simple enough to do at the kitchen table. Ten years of travel ball at $4,000 a year costs $40,000. A typical scholarship covering a third of tuition is worth about $37,100 over four years. That’s a return on investment of about −7%, and that’s if the scholarship comes through.

The lesson then introduces an idea economists use all the time: expected value, or the size of a payoff times the chance it happens. A 5% chance at a $37,100 scholarship isn’t worth $37,100. On average, it’s worth less than $2,000. Weighed by the real odds, families get back roughly 5 to 15 cents in scholarship money for every dollar spent.

Finally, there’s opportunity cost: what you give up by choosing one option over another. If a family saved that same $4,000 a year from age 9 to 18, it would have about $48,000 at a 4% return. That money would be there for college or anything else, whether or not a scholarship ever arrives.

The lesson’s interactive Travel Ball Calculator lets families plug in their own team’s prices, the colleges they’re considering and their own odds to see what the numbers say for them.

An investment or a purchase?

None of this means travel ball is a bad choice. It means it’s usually a purchase, not an investment. An investment is judged by its future payoff. A purchase is judged by whether it’s worth the price to you today.

And there’s a lot to buy: skill and coaching for a child who loves the game, friendships, teamwork, learning to handle failure, and time together on the road. The lesson helps families spot the difference between a healthy purchase and a lottery ticket. Is your child driving the decision, or is it fear of falling behind? Does it fit the budget without cutting savings or borrowing? Would you be fine if your child stopped at 12 or 15?

It also shares ways to keep playing for less, from Little League (a four-month season averages $110 to $170) and school teams to used gear and fewer out-of-state tournaments.

Designed for parents and kids ages 10 and up to work through together in 45 to 60 minutes, the lesson includes:

• Real costs and odds from the NCAA, the Wall Street Journal, the Aspen Institute and more
• A step-by-step case study on return on investment
• The Travel Ball Calculator
• Dinner-table discussion questions for kids, parents and everyone
• A family checklist for deciding together
• Standards alignment for teachers, including Ohio’s Learning Standards for Financial Literacy

Start the conversation tonight

Before the next tryout or registration deadline, try asking your child: “If our family had $4,000 to spend on you this year, what would you choose?” Then explore the answer together.

Try the free lesson: Travel Baseball: What Does It Cost, and What Are the Odds? →

It’s the newest addition to SmartPath Family Finances, our free collection of lessons on budgeting, credit, car loans, teens and gambling and more, created by the Alpaugh Family Economics Center at the University of Cincinnati.