I Added Up Every Receipt From My Kid's Lacrosse Season. Then I Added Up the Hours.

I knew the tuition. I knew roughly what the gear cost. I knew hotels were coming and lots of practices.

What I did not know was that I would one day export a full year of credit card statements, sit at the kitchen table with a coffee, and tag every Bojangles stop on I-95 to a specific lacrosse tournament.

But here we are.

Back in the spring I wrote Is Travel Lacrosse Worth It? after our first year. This is the follow-up with actual receipts: what one season of club lacrosse cost our family, start to finish. One kid. One sport. He’s 10 and he plays every position in lacrosse. The season ran from tryouts in the summer of 2025 through the last tournament in June 2026.

First, who we are (so you can adjust the math)

We were not trying to do this cheap. This is just us.

We don’t hunt for the cheapest hotel in the county. We look at hotels and Airbnbs, and if we go the Airbnb route we try to at least find somewhere interesting. We overspend on food. We treat a travel weekend like a mini vacation, stop at random places on the way there and back, and sometimes stay an extra day.

So if you’re a pack-the-cooler, cheapest-room-off-the-exit family, your number will be lower. If you also do box, a regional select team and a private coach, yours will be a lot higher. More on that later.

The number

$13,536.

Take out the one big splurge we made at the end of the season (story below) and it’s just under $11,900.

Here’s where it went:

Category	Cost
Hotels and Airbnbs	$3,828
Club tuition, rec fees, USA Lacrosse	$3,635
Restaurants on the road	$1,589
Gas	$1,133
Tolls	$844
Gear	$752
Team food (Gatorade, water, oranges, pickles)	$476
Team clothing	$435
Tournament extras	$325
Family snacks	$294
Tryouts	$123
Coach gifts	$100

Club tuition alone was $2,940.

Tournament weekends alone came to about $7,100:

Tournament Location	Cost
Large tournament in MD	$2,575
NC	$1,347
VA	$1,301
VA	$966
NC	$742
NC	$120
Local tournament	$87

The stuff I didn’t see coming

The tuition, the gear and the hotels I was mostly braced for. These are the ones that got me.

Tolls. $844. The practice field is about 30 miles away and down a toll road. I only noticed because I drive part of that road to work and saw the toll on my statement. Then the rec team. Then a couple of tournaments. Then Maryland. That’s about $70 a month just for the privilege of getting there.

The car. Between practices, rec and tournaments we drove about 7,300 miles. That’s roughly 145 hours behind the wheel.

That’s almost four full 40-hour work weeks. In the car.

Practice. My kid is 10. Dropping him off 30 miles from home and leaving didn’t feel right, so we stayed. Across club and rec that’s around 100 practices, and another 150 or so hours on a sideline. Add it up and it’s close to 300 hours before you count a single tournament day. And there were about 14 of those.

Let’s do some math

This is where it gets a little uncomfortable.

Club tournaments are usually three games on Saturday and two on Sunday. Games are 40 minutes. My kid plays 50% of the time during club games - about 20 minutes a game.

Over about 31 club games, that’s roughly 630 minutes. About 10 and a half hours. For the whole season.

Which works out to:

• About $20.50 per minute
• About $1,230 per hour
• About 14 hours in the car for every hour he played in a game

If you stop reading here, that looks insane. Please…don’t stop reading here.

Club vs. rec

He also played on two rec teams this spring. One cost $280. The other was free.

Each rec team played five games, 40 minutes each, and he was on the field about 90% of the time. Rec teams are small, so there’s nowhere to hide and plenty of time to play.

	Club	Rec
Games	~31	10
His minutes per game	20	36
His total minutes	~630	~360
Cost (incl. gas and tolls)	~$12,940	~$600
Cost per minute played	~$20.50	~$1.67

Rec gave him about 36% of his game minutes for less than 5% of the money.

Now the fine print. Rec is cheap partly because it runs on volunteers. More than once we showed up to rec practice and there was no coach, and some parent got drafted on the spot. (I wrote about becoming the involuntary volunteer coach if you want the full story.) On club, some days there were three to five coaches on the field.

Zero coaches vs. three coaches. That’s a lot of what the $20.50 buys.

Why rec is worth it anyway

I love rec. I knew the difference going in and I’d still sign him up for both every time.

The playing time is obvious. But the part I really love is that rec teams don’t win that much, and that’s a great learning experience.

My kid is one of the stronger players on his rec team, and I push him to help the newer kids. Especially the quiet ones who aren’t sure they belong yet. His favorite thing to do, and I think he’d admit this, is to run in with a clear shot at the goal and dump it off to a new kid who’s never scored. The kid catches it. Scores. For the first time.

You can see the light come on. He gets it. He scored. One of the better players trusted him with the ball.

I can almost guarantee that kid comes back next season. That one pass helps the new kid, and it teaches my kid how to be a genuinely decent person to have around. I’ll take that over a hat trick.

The other underrated part of rec is before and after practice. We’d get there early and stay late, sometimes an extra hour, just so the kids could run around together. Shooting on each other. Tackling each other. Throwing a football. Some really good club players say their favorite part of lacrosse was rec practice and hanging out with their buddies. I believe it.

And rec games put him on the field against some of his own club teammates. Fierce on the field. Joking around together at the end of the game. That’s the whole thing, right there.

Why club is worth it

Club is different, and coming off of rec, that’s a good thing.

It’s focused. Some practices are position-specific, so he got to train with college D1 players who are at the top of their game at those positions. Almost every kid on the team is good. They have real off hands. They’re confident. Just being able to hang with those boys builds confidence. Sometimes they scrimmage older teams. The pace is fast and the teaching is great.

Then there are the extras you can’t put on a spreadsheet. Catching a PLL game, a college game, or going to the local high school games with teammates to cheer on their older siblings. Hotel breakfasts with the family or with a team family that you might not know so well. Team lunches and dinners. Hanging out at a brewery with the other families on a tournament weekend. Getting some food and a drink with some of the dads while the kids create chaos running around the hotel.

And the travel. Stopping somewhere weird on the way home. Turning a tournament into a couple extra days somewhere new. Everyone trying new things. That’s most of why our number is what it is, and honestly it’s my favorite part.

What we didn’t do

This is what still surprises me. We said no to a lot.

No box lacrosse. No select or national teams. No private coaches, which could run up to $100 an hour for a lot of the kids we play against. No PLL Jr. No extra tryouts or camps.

$13,536 was the restrained version.

The splurge

A large tourney was our last tournament of the season and we wanted to go out big. We booked a couple of extra nights at a resort and rented a private cabana for the day after the tournament ended, so we could all relax.

The day before we left, I came down with shingles. First time in my life.

So I stood on a late spring sideline in the heat, sweating, with shingles. Then I spent our splurge day in a hot, loud cabana, kids screaming all around me, sweaty, where I could not get comfortable on the lounge chair, and could not get in the water or play with the kids.

There was no relaxing for me.

But the kids loved it. Watching them have that much fun made it fun for me, and it was worth the money. The resort plus the cabana is the roughly $1,650 difference between our two totals. I’d call it a splurge, not a lacrosse cost, but it happened because of lacrosse, so it’s in.

Life happens

The other thing a spreadsheet can’t show you.

We had a death in the family in the middle of the season, and the funeral landed on a tournament weekend. We missed part of a tourney. (For this post I priced that weekend as if we’d gone for both days so the number reflects what the season really costs.)

The family member that passed was one of my kid’s loudest cheerleaders on the sideline. We all missed that. It was a tough stretch of the season.

The schedule doesn’t stop for any of it. Funerals, shingles, whatever. You keep showing up, partly because the kid needs you to, and partly because the sideline is where a lot of the good stuff happens.

So was it worth it?

$13,536. About 7,300 miles. Four work weeks in the car. Another 150 hours on a sideline. Ten and a half hours of game time.

By far. And it isn’t close.

Not because of the 630 minutes. Because of the kid passing off a sure goal to a teammate who’d never scored. The rec practices that ran an extra hour because nobody wanted to leave. The D1 players working with him. Watching all the PLL games, college games, and high school lacrosse games. The breakfasts and the road trips and the weird stops on the way home.

A lot of those 145 hours in the car were just me and my kid. I didn’t count that as a cost.

If you’re about to start your first club season

• Budget beyond tuition. For us tuition was about a quarter of the total. Hotels and food on the road were bigger than tuition.
• Don’t pay full price for gear. Gear was one of our smaller lines at $752, partly because we hunt for deals. New to all of it? Start with the beginner gear guide.
• Count the tolls. Nobody does. You’ll be surprised.
• Do rec too, if you can. It’s the cheapest playing time you’ll ever buy, and some of the best memories.
• Track it as you go. I did this from a credit card export and it took a morning. Next year I’m tagging charges as they happen.

Speaking of next year, my daughter just signed up for a travel sport. It’s closer to home, so it should be cheaper, right?

Right…?

I’ll let you know.