Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids Are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession by Ken Campbell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Selling the Dream by Ken Campbell and Jim Parcels is a book about the costs of playing competitive hockey in Canada. It is mostly a book about the costs and sacrifices parents make in the hopes that their child will make it to the NHL. Readers learn details about the costs of time and money required to train a competitive hockey player. The book also implicitly questions the value of these costs.
I found Selling the Dream interesting from the perspective of a reader who enjoys playing hockey and following the NHL, but I didn’t learn anything new. I was already aware of the many sacrifices that hockey parents make and the long odds players face in their quest to play hockey professionally. Similar stories could be told about parents and children in many other sports. To compete at a professional level at any sport not only requires the support and dedication of an entire family, but it also requires hard dollars. Without either of these components, athletes won’t make it to the top.
The authors seem to imply that parents are spending too much money on hockey for their kids. But whether parents, families, and their kids are receiving value from their time and money expenditures on hockey is a question of relative value. Sure, hockey is expensive, but so are many other worthwhile expenditures. What else could parents spend their money on instead of hockey? Pay down their mortgage? Save for retirement? Go on a family vacation? The choices parents make about where to spend family resources depend on the individual values of each family. I don’t think hockey parents are massively deluded. They are making rational choices when they spend $15,000 a year on their child’s hockey. It’s conceivable that many parents would rather spend $15,000 per year on their child’s hockey than on their mortgage, and that makes sense to me. On their deathbed, will parents remember the joy of paying down their mortgage faster or will they remember the goal their child scored that one snowy night in Kitchener to beat their cross town rivals? Will their kids remember how their parents played a lot more golf in retirement or will they look at their own family and thank their parents for investing so much time and money in their own development thru sports?
I would have preferred that Selling the Dream spent less time describing what hockey families do and more time debating alternative choices and making recommendations to improve hockey in Canada. The authors touch briefly on the rising cost of ice time and the need to upgrade municipal areas, but I would have preferred if they went deeper into a discussion about how our aging rinks impact our culture as hockey becomes more out of reach for the average Canadian family. What role can/should municipalities play to help encourage and support the continued growth and development of hockey in our communities? Maybe it’s easier to describe the outrageous stories of hockey parents spending like mad than to dig deep into the changing face of hockey in Canada. The sensationalism of Selling the Dream probably helped the authors sell more copies, but this style offers less substantive content for readers.
