Be the Mom Who Doesn't Panic at Fall Sign-Ups

Five things to look for before you pay for a single fall activity, plus how my kid who skipped youth club sports turned out.

It was mid July in 2016 and I was sitting on the beach in one of those parent circles that form naturally as the kids get a little bigger and the parents can finally sit and watch them (closely) from a beach chair.

My youngest, three at the time, was playing in the middle of the circle, dropping her Paw Patrol pups into a bucket of sea water and burying them in the sand. As I reached into an open bag of salty Cape Cod potato chips, the first one landed...

“Time to go. Jack has a soccer clinic to prep him for fall tryouts.”

Jack was seven. He whined, he threw a plastic shovel, and his mom eventually cajoled him off the beach with the promise of extra screen time after clinic if he cooperated.

Over the next few beach days, as the kids dug holes in the sand and chased the gulls, the fall sign-up chatter seeped into almost every conversation.

Who’s doing lacrosse this year?

Is this club coach better, or the other one?

The field hockey coach is super strict, and yes, she’s accepting six-year-olds this year in her “High Performance Skill for Elite Athletes” clinic.

Everyone was doing that self-deprecating eye roll, pretending not to take it all so seriously, while simultaneously tapping logins, and punching in credit card numbers and calendars like fall sign-ups were a life or death situation.

At first, it didn’t really affect me, because my kids were not doing any of that. Mine would each do one activity of their choice, and other than that, we would mostly be playing at home, riding bikes to the library, and meeting friends for afternoons in the woods, like every other year.

But as I looked out at the water where my seven and nine year olds were scaling a rock wall and gleefully leaping off into the ocean below, I started to wonder if I was fucking this whole thing up. The other moms kept saying that without these clinics, their kids would never play competitively in high school, and I felt anxious almost to the point of nausea. TBH, I think “play competitively in high school” meant “be popular in high school,” but, same. same.

That was ten summers ago. My Paw Patrol kid is now thirteen. And this month, the same conversation is starting up in group texts and registration emails everywhere, each one with a deadline attached. If your stomach tightens a little when it starts, this one is for you.

To be clear, I’m not anti sign-up. Families have real childcare needs, plenty of kids beg for the team and mean it, and there’s no gold star for opting out. But somewhere between our childhood and theirs, a kid’s schedule became a report card for the moms. A packed fall calendar reads like a mom who’s on top of things. Open afternoons? Somehow those read like you forgot to plan. No wonder we end up registering from our beach chairs.

My kids are 18, 16, and 13 now. What I’m about to hand you is what I couldn’t find anywhere ten summers ago.

The rock wall kid

That nine-year-old leaping off the rocks is my oldest. Team sports never stuck. When he wanted to walk away from them, we let him.

Paid subs, the rest is yours: what those open afternoons cost him, what they built, and the five things I’d watch for this week before paying for a single fall activity.

This next part is for my paid subs. (My free posts shift how you think. Behind the paywall is where I show you exactly what to do about it.)