Seattle Times staff reporter

Tom Farrey, investigative reporter and father of three, spent years examining kids' sports in America and has a two-word description: "runaway train."

"Youth sport is the most important institution of all our sports, because it is where the magic begins," he writes. "It is where we learn to love sports, picking up fitness habits and rooting interests that can last a lifetime. But it's an institution at a historic crossroads, one in which performance often matters more than participation does.

"It's less and less accessible to the late bloomer, the genetically ordinary, the economically disadvantaged, the child of a one-parent household, and the kid who needs exercise more than any other — the clinically obese."

Farrey, a former Seattle Times sports reporter, is now a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine, and an on-air journalist on ESPN's E:60 newsmagazine. His work has won two Emmys for outstanding sports journalism. This, his first book, is an important work in that it touches almost every American home with kids.

Some of the information in the book is startling: college athletes being paid for their sperm by women or couples who want athletic children; a "world championship" golf tournament for 6-year-olds; fourth-graders getting letters of interest from college basketball coaches; a national ranking for fourth-grade basketball players; 6-year-olds with personal trainers; and a New England couple that spends an estimated $100,000 a year on sports for its five kids who aren't yet in high school.

But this isn't a book that is out to bash people.

"I must say, I came to like nearly everyone I met," he writes. "The stereotype of the abusive parent pushing the reluctant kid usually doesn't apply. Most want their kids to be champions in life, not just sports. And when parents go to extremes in prepping their kid for athletic stardom, it never springs from a lack of love."

As a father — his infant son Kellen is on the cover — he knows parental impulses and dilemmas firsthand. He deftly weaves his kids, all under 12 years old, and their situations into his story.

He writes that he and his wife, Christine, reluctantly let their son Cole play "travel" (select team) soccer at age 8 because they were concerned that "if he doesn't catch the bullet train now, he might lose the chance to play soccer in high school. The other kids would be too tactically advanced."

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