Or is this children's sports club reasonably priced?

[powerof10]

DS is 8, likes sport, is getting interested in clubs, competition etc.
I'm sporty but new to the world of organised sport for kids. From my experience I expect sport to be a cheap hobby.

E.g. For my sport (running) my £90/year club subs gets me 4 club sessions a week, free entry to 30+ races a year, club gym, cheap bar. Juniors pay £20/year.
Where I grew up sports clubs were run by parent volunteers or by members for members, costs were nominal. E.g. Junior membership at the local tennis/squash club was £40/year for use of courts, clubhouse, organised sessions run by older kids, local leagues. (yes, that was 90's prices, but costs now are £40 for U11s, £70 for 11-18, £170 adults).

Last week DS went to a taster session at a club (for a sport I'm unfamiliar with) and loved it. It was an indoor winter training session with around thirty 8-12s, lots of skills, drills, run by volunteers in a hired hall, no expensive equipment. All good grassroots sport stuff.

But... the club are asking for a Direct Debit of £36/month (£432/year!) or £11/session. I think at his age the only session this covers is this 1 hour session a week, term time only.
I think this is a LOT! I was expecting to pay around a fiver a session. But AIBU and out of touch? Are my experiences unusual? Is it normal to expect to pay this much for organised kids sport now?

The only club that I pay less than £10 an hour is football, which is £300 for the year. I pay £12ph for tennis. £13 for 45 minutes for ballet. £10ph for gymnastics. £25 for 45 minutes for piano. £11 for half an hour of swimming.

I pay just under £30 a month for a 1 hour dance class a week.
I think gymnastics was more, and there was the organisation to join too.
Football/rugby seems cheaper as think it’s subsidised. Just had to pay an annual amount for £100-150

We pay about a tenner an hour for dance and around £8 for recreational gymnastics (primary age child). We're in a middling northern town, not a particularly expensive area.

My kids do MMA which is £80 a month for 2 training sessions a week. They also surf, which is £50 per session at the level they’re at. But then they play in a band which is £14 a month and they also go to a chess club which is only £1.50 a session.
They played rugby too which was £20 a month for two sessions a week. So, from my experience, it varies wildly. (These costs are per kid, not joint).

DD’s dance costs me £95/month for 3 training sessions a week (7 hours per week in total), plus we pay extra for competitions and costumes. I think it’s extortionate but she loves it.

My ds does football at £7 a session 1 hour a week. It's the going rate by the time you consider Hall hire, staff payment - about 20 kids and 3 adults.
My dd does a proper art class and that's eye watering about £180 a term.

We pay $20 CAD (£11.35) for basketball, per hourly session. It's a ten week course. You get a free tshirt

It seems decent value to me

Athletics (with our local athletics club) is about £70 a year, for around 4-5hrs coaching a week. Then it’s an additional £20 a month for membership to the local track to cover entrance fees to the venue. We pay completion fees on top, typically about £10 per event.

Rugby is £120 for the year, 2hrs coaching a week. This includes competition fees.

Club netball is £160 a year for 2hrs coaching a week, county netball is £220 a year, also 2hrs coaching a week. Both also cover completion fees, court hire etc. Very much sport dependent in my view.

Things to consider:

• Volunteers still incur costs. Training, accreditation, DBS
• Halls aren't cheap to hire
• Equipment costs
• Membership fees if they belong to an organisation

That's expensive (though what you get for your running club is exceptionally good value).

Taekwondo here is £35 a month. That's for one session a week - 50 mins.

Swimming is £12 a session. 1 hour.

Football and rugby are the cheap ones - £100 a year.

Is the club entirely run by volunteers, with the expectation that parents help out with setting up, taking down, kit, running it, etc sometimes? Othetwise, often big parent-run clubs do have a paid coach / manager, or pay an administrator if they don't have enough parent volunteers. Is there a membership to a governing body eg for insurance purposes? Are volunteer coaches having to do qualifications paid for by the club? Do the annual fees include uniform costs? Is there a competitive team who do longer hours being subsidised by beginner /recreational members?

Even so, £11 an hour seems v expensive!

Thanks for the replies, its fascinating to see how costs for this stuff wildly differ depending on the set up in your area!
I'd definitely expect to pay more for something run by a paid set up vs volunteers, or if special equipment is involved, or where instruction or coaching is more specialist.

However this club was like a good quality PE lesson focussed on this sport (which I'm all in favour of, its exactly right for this age group). The only big cost I could think of was the hall hire.

I think because I love doing sport with my kids (and lets be honest, a bit tight) I find it hard to justify paying for stuff we just do ourselves anyway, but as they get older that will get less interesting for them. I suspect I need to think a bit harder about what is about rather than just assuming whatever we have a go at will be decent value.

Interesting to hear PP comment about football being expensive - DS did a football/multi sport week this summer which was £20 for 4 days 10-2. Even I thought that was good value!
(And yes, my running club is amazing - this thread makes me appreciate it even more than usual)

I think it depends a lot on whether it is a community group run by volunteers or an activity with professional teachers/coaches who are making their living from it. I coach at a community club and we charge a £5 annual membership and £3 per week pay as you go for an hour's coaching session. That covers our costs - venue hire, affiliation to our national governing body, basic equipment etc - and puts a bit into the pot for things like coaches training courses. But none of us is paid or receives any expenses and in fact we not infrequently pay for out own courses to help keep costs down. If we were needing to pay even one person national minimum wage the fees would have to go up considerably so I can quite understand why coaches who are running their club as a business charge a lot more.
It also depends a lot on what kind of venue and equipment is needed. A sport that requires hire of a specialist venue, such as maybe a track cycling club that needs to hire a velodrome, or uses a lot of equipment like gymnastics is bound to cost more to run than something like a cross country running club held in a park or school field. So what would be very reasonable for one sport may be excessive for another.

What made things cheap was volunteers. Its like scouts. Still cheap because it does not pay staff. If you have to have 4 adults with a group of 20 children thats £60 an hour not allowing for those people travelling to the session, planning sessions, set up/tidy away etc. Often 1 of the 4 is running it as a business & needs to be paid for the time they spend invoicing, insurance costs, training/paying for certifications for coaches etc, time and money spent marketing to bring in coaches.

Then there is facilities. There is no such thing as a council run tennis court any more, now its run by a private provider so the cost of hiring a space.

People don't get rich running kids sport clubs. Its just what it costs

Sounds normal to me. We pay £30ish per month per kid for each of their sports, dance, recreational gymnastics, swimming...

DS did a football/multi sport week this summer which was £20 for 4 days 10-2.

But you must see that that's subsidised in some way? £5 for 4 hours means each child is paying only a little over £1 a hour. You'd need 12 children per coach even to simply pay minimum wage, let alone pay for insurance or space hire and provide any equipment at all.

Do you live in a very cheap part of the country?

Ime some sports are a lot more expensive than others.

And as others have mentioned dance is often expensive as well.

Mine did swimming (not cheap) and martial arts. The martial arts was I think 7.50 per session which was 2 hours (they were teens)
Obviously no equipment needed really beyond the clothes.

Now horse riding.....

Ballet/tap/modern are about £10/h.
Swimming is about £10 for 30 min lesson or more for better quality ones.
Rugby is £200 a season, thats two terms so about 8 months, about £25 a month and the coaches are all volunteers.

Our local tennis club is only about £10 a month for an hour a week but again relies on volunteers/members & teenagers helping out with the kids.

If you like doing sport with your kids, and you like it to be cheap, have you ever thought about volunteering to help keep costs down?

We pay £50/mth for one child's martial arts, holiday courses and gradings are extra.

Then pay over £1K per MONTH for our other child's sport.

We pay around £160/mth for their music, excluding cost of their instrument and exam fees.

Then pay around £32/mth in term time for one child's dance class, excluding recital and exam fees.

I think because you're comparing it to a running club, is why you're shocked.

Volunteers don't make it 0 cost

It just means you aren't paying their wages

They still have a cost

I also missed insurance of my list

Im £187 per month per child for gymnastics. Plus many more costs in between

PerditaLaChien
Totally - I couldn't believe how cheap that football week was. I live in a part of a city with both high deprivation and more recent pockets of affluence. The sort of place where lots of grants are available to subsidise activities, alongside a market that want and can support £££ activities.

Compared to my small town upbringing where you knew what all the local clubs were and there weren't the same extremes of wealth it makes it all very confusing!

And we just about still have council tennis courts - £25/year - was there with the kids today!

ScholesPanda
Yes, I volunteer a lot at running. Am sure I'll end up very involved in whatever my kids end up doing, but I'm at the start of that journey!

I was paying $12 a session in 2003 for dd1's sports activities. We then moved to uk and switched to music and that's far more!!!