Kids sports

I'd rather take the kids camping than have them in sports. I rather dislike the school year based sports that detract from the kids studies. We already do BSA during the school year and that is a distraction enough. My 7 year old may start golf though.

We never had this problem, as our kids were never into participating in sports, And would much rather go camping and fishing,any day.

We stopped camping when our children were the age to take part in summer sports. Between baseball, softball and 10,000 K races there was not much time to fit in camping.
We returned when they were grown. Now we take grandchildren when they have a few days off during the summer or fall.

We are lucky in many ways with our coach.
He played for our Canadian National team...and he understands summer vacation.
We are going to miss one game due to a site we booked in Feb and he is cool with that.
He also makes sure we have two weeks in the summer with NO games.

But again, still doesn't allow us to camp as much as we want.

We did take the trailer to one tourney (due to some issues), but normally it is required to stay in the hotel for tournaments. And my son wants to be with his buddies in the rooms anyway....

Our boys were heavily involved with Marching Band then into Drum Corps. It pretty much wiped out some of our late summer & fall camping, so we reserved our Memorial & Labor Day weekends, and went on a few 3 day trips. We also started taking the RV to the shows; meant no hotels and we could watch the shows and relax or help out with the Band.

Having worked around Youth Sports for 30+ years I've seen many families struggle with the balance; coaches push hard then have no flexibility for family vacations. Kids are punished if they miss a few games. I've also ready to many articles on young kids, particularly pitchers, damaging their arms by the age of 12 and requiring surgery.

Kids are only young once, family first. Find the balance in participating, that's my best advice.