Posted by: Curt | Under: Children/fit, General Fitness, Youth/fit | (0) Comments
This is a really interesting trend- professional training for kids. Like just about everything in our culture, youth and children’s sports are incredibly competitive. So the market has adjusted and pro training facilities have popped up to gobble up the cash that parents are willing to spend to make their kids the best. I have mixed emotions about this. One the one hand, it is great that kids are taking sports seriously and willing to put the time into being really good at something. On the other hand, it really favors kids from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. The world has never been a fair place, but something about this just bugs me… From the NY Times linked over at MPF.
BRACE yourselves, parents. Besides shuttling the kids to cello lessons, algebra tutoring, soccer matches and basketball practice, there’s one more activity emerging to give prepubescent go-getters a leg up these days: sports performance training.
Because many team coaches don’t have the time or the expertise in exercise science to make their troops faster and stronger, specialty programs — part gym, part pro-training camp — have stepped in to fill the need. For roughly $35 a session, they provide rigorous conditioning for any aspiring child, regardless of ability, using the kinds of practices that have set apart athletes like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters.
Velocity, at more than 75 locations, had almost 47,000 children participate in 2006, four times the enrollment in 2004. Athletic Republic, until recently known as Frappier Acceleration Sports Training, worked with roughly 36,000 children last year, up from 27,000 in 2005. CATZ, a chain in four states, trained 6,500 youngsters for the year ending June 2007, up 150 percent from the same period in 2006.
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