Skiing - most expensive sport?

As a hockey dad I can tell you it ain't cheap.
Especially if you're raising a kid who wants to be a goalie.
My dream was to produce a lefty-one-out-guy to pitch 46 1/3 innings and make $1.2 million a year.
I got two little dudes who want to be fucking goalies.

 

Great 2 days though; spending time on slopes with the kids was amazing though with blue skies (and 28 degrees)

 

I actually just sold my and my wife's skis a week ago today.
We used to ski enough that owning our own gear was a solid investment. We saved on rentals and lines.
Yes, lift tickets are more expensive than it's worth to me, plus the time investment really doesn't play out.
It takes a couple of hours to get there; the lines and wait times are terrible; you want to put in as many runs as you can to get bang for your buck; you get exhausted and have the return trip home; if it's Sunday, the next day at work is hell.
We haven't been in years, so I just put the stuff up for sell and made $400.

My golf clubs go on the market as soon as it gets spring weather.

 

My eldest was a goalie and once she got to be 14 or so she didn’t need any equipment upgrades. But I was lucky because a girl is less likely to have a 10 inch growth spurt.

I got the impression that goalies rarely want to upgrade for the sake of upgrading - a trapper or pads, even the chest protector, is better worn in and familiar. Sticks break less often. But the buy in was hefty.

My happiest day may have been when she was 15 and had a couple thousand of McDonalds money in her bank account and hadn’t spent a dime. I took her to the hockey shop and told her to use her money to buy the coolest looking stick she could find. She dropped $200 on a black True.

 

Kinda wish I had gotten into it. But I was probably a compound fracture of the femur waiting to happen.

 

About 25 years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to get involved in an "adult recreation" league at the Ice Chalet in Knoxville just off Kingston Pike. Our ice time was 11 p.m. Wednesday night. I'd get home at 2 a.m. and have to get up 5 to go to work. After having my ass slammed hard into the boards by 2-3 of the Knoxville Cherokee players who stayed in town over the summer, I decided really quick that wasn't my idea of fun.

 

When I was 22 or 23 I thought it'd be fun to join our town's flag football league. I'd never played organized football, but had played plenty of backyard ball growing up and figured it wouldn't be much different.
Wrong. Oh, so, so wrong.
I'd been put on one of the league's better teams, where most of the guys had played together for a couple of years and knew what to do. Plenty of them had been solid high school players, and a few had played college ball. I thought I was reasonably athletic, but these are all guys who ran about 4.6 40s. On my best day I was somewhere in the 5's.
The first practice I'm running around with my head in a fog while they're calling out defenses. I knew "hey, cover that guy," not, "Hey, we're playing a Cover 2 here, you go play linebacker." I could get close to guys on defense, but totally sucked at grabbing their flag, so my calling card was rushing the QB and leaving him a hole to run for 40 yards.

They treated me OK and I had my chances to show if I could contribute anything, but I was not in the same league as these guys. After a half-dozen preseason practices, the last of which I sat on the sideline for two hours, I realized it. They had 30 guys and 25 jerseys, the coach said, but anyone who wanted to stick with the team could buy a jersey and sort of hang out or maybe play special teams. That didn't sound like much fun so I told the coach thanks but no thanks.
He tried to shame me into sticking around, saying, "You know this makes you a quitter, right!?"
Yes, it does. But I'm out here to run around and have some fun, not pay $50 to sit on the sideline and be the water boy.

 

In my 20s, I was a pretty solid soccer player on the local level. We had a competitive adult league that featured former paid professionals, former college players, and veterans. It was a hell of a league. We had a great time playing, and people actually came out to watch.
By the time I was 35, life was changing, and things needed to slow down. The league started fracturing along age lines.
By age 40, the older group started asking for a league just for us. We had jobs and families. We didn't want to play against 19-20-21 year olds who came in studs up on tackles. We wanted to kick around, laugh, slap each other on the backs, have a good time, and go have a couple of beers together after a match. Where everyone was going to eat was far more important than the result.
The powers that be wouldn't hear of it. I personally haven't played in nearly a decade, and from what I understand, the entire adult league has folded.

 

Same thing happened to me. After college, I played in the local La Liga. I wound up in goal for a few years - mainly because I was the only player taller than 6-feet on the roster. Not speaking a lick of Spanish didn’t help either. When I hit 30, the physicality of it was getting to be too much. But at least I learned how to cuss in Spanish.

 

I've had a bunch of student-athletes in my classes over the years, and the ones that appear to come from the most money are those who compete in equestrian. (But we have a bunch of from-money students at our university.)

 

We had a local girl sign with a big-time equestrian program a couple of years ago. We're in an area with a decent horse and rodeo culture, but equestrian is kind of an oddity. She said she constantly had friends asking her why she was doing equestrian instead of barrel racing or other rodeo events. Hearing her tell it, it would have seemed more normal for her to play football.