Kim Kardashian’s Team Moms highlights the ridiculous excess of the US youth-sports industry

Remember when pushy sports parents were deserving objects of our collective scorn? When Marv Marinovich and Jim Pierce were bywords for abusive fatherhood, Sarah Palin made the overbearing hockey mom a global punchline, and grim stories of pushy parents assaulting officials, kids and one another grabbed headlines and trained a harsh spotlight on youth sports? Well, the rebrand is in full swing.Team Moms: Baseball is a glossy new reality series premiering Thursday that aims to recast the pushy sports parent as something well worth coveting, a sexy black hat with a designer label. From the makers of Love Island (ITV America), for Hollywood’s most rapacious studio (Paramount Skydance), with none other than basketball mom Kim Kardashian attached as executive producer, the Paramount+ series follows a cluster of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy – a Scottsdale, Arizona baseball hothouse with an intense focus on cultivating diamond gems. Anyone coming to this expecting genuine insights on a $40bn industry that’s now under siege from private equity, swallowing ever larger chunks of hard-earned family budgets along the way, should know up front: this is a closer cousin to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise than ESPN’s 30 for 30.The title alone – a deliberate play on Teen Mom, MTV’s train-wreck young-mothers series – gives the game away. It makes abundantly clear that the focus of Team Moms’ eight hour-ish episodes isn’t the 13- and 14-year-olds chasing their field of dreams. It’s the middle-aged parents chasing vicarious glory, proximal clout and social validation. The tone is reinforced at the start of the show, in an around-the-horn-style opening title sequence that punctuates family portraits with the kids’ heroic glove work before landing on baseball cards of the individual moms fanned out over home plate. Never mind that the moms are set up to be the fall guys for the real drama queens: the dads.Parents watch from the sidelines as their children compete in the high-pressure world of travel baseball featured in Team Moms. Photograph: Paramount+The Kardashian-meets-Love Island alchemy is undeniable in the way Team Moms presents staggering opulence as wholly incidental: the luxury car fleets, the giga-mansions, the immaculate show kitchens that provide the backdrop for daily routines and gossip. The kids move through this world as you’d expect of kids who essentially have baseball for a job, zombieing themselves from bed to a hot cup of coffee before shuffling off into the predawn for another shift at the ballpark salt mines. For inspiration, the kids only need look to the writing on the walls: Prefer pain. Comfort is a slow death. Die growing, pledge growth to the grave. Upton Sinclair, eat your heart out.It’s a five-days-a-week grind before you even get to weekend games – many of which demand hours of commuting – or the additional baseball “tutoring” many of these families seek out in hopes of keeping their kids on a steady development curve or outpacing their peers. The same can hardly be said of the academic side of this equation, which doesn’t appear to take up more than a few hours of the training day if the players even have energy left to get it at all. Producers can barely be bothered to ask about the obvious toll of this grind in the gratuitous kiddie confessionals, much less get them to consider the prospect of taking up other sports – something many great athletes do, as my former Sports Illustrated colleague David Epstein explores in his 2019 book Range.Young players from the Legendary Performance Academy arrive at the ballpark ahead of a game. Photograph: Paramount+Of course none of this athletic hothousing comes cheap. Legendary Prep doesn’t publicize its tuition costs, but I suppose you’re already in trouble if you even have to ask. Similar academies charge anywhere from $12,000 to more than $20,000 annually for the same basic bundle of high-level athletic training, sports science analytics, team travel and a hybrid or supervised online academic curriculum. There was no explicit mention of tuition costs in the three-ish episodes of Team Moms that I watched, but one mom did let slip that she bought her 16-year-old daughter a Porsche Macan to somewhat offset the money the family spends on her brother’s baseball prospects.While this same mom – we’ll call her Pilates Mom because the names on this show aren’t as important as the archetypes – bankrolls her boy’s dream despite her keen awareness of his having “a 0.02% chance” of making it to the MLB, the other parents in the series are quite convinced they have the next Aaron Judge or Bryce Harper on their hands. (With names like Jett and Stryker, how could these kids miss?) All the families are white, and the irony of their sons of privilege chasing an MLB dream that so many less-resourced Latin American kids pursue, with relatively outsized success, is completely lost on them (even though that pipeline has its leaky bits, too).We’re meant to view Pilates Mom as the villain because she swans around in athleisure wear that accentuates her curves and draws snide remarks. Pilates Mom sets tongues wagging after offhandedly calling one boy “a little bitch” during one of her Pilates sessions with the kids – the same boy had told her son he watches Pilates Mom on OnlyFans, prompting a schoolyard dustup.Players from the Legendary Performance Academy warm up before a game, one casually tossing a baseball as teammates look on. Photograph: Paramount+Team Mom fault lines are drawn in hair dye. On one side, there’s the cliquey blondes: Martha Stewart Mom, the type-A who leaves her husband a “How to Be Me” memo when she steps away from the house; Party Mom, living her best life in retirement with streaks; and Trophy Mom, a Nascar wife who cites marriage and motherhood as her biggest accomplishments. On the other, the slightly more self-aware brunettes: Pilates Mom, often shot inside her empty studio; Wine Mom, the wary wife of a hobby vintner; and Friends Mom, a Courteney Cox lookalike whose coming-out story and enduring friendship with her fogey ex-husband frustrate the parent group into making crude jokes about her “returning to the other side of the pond”.But the women and their drama just provide cover for their pushy sports spouses. A group spring break trip has Wine Dad torn over whether to let his son, a flashy teen who seems better at branding than baseball, join his friends on a kayaking excursion or drive him an hour away for some extra hitting. (So as a compromise, they do both.) Party Dad can’t stop touting Pilates Mom’s body in mixed company. Only Nascar Dad sets a halfway decent example because Casey Mears, motor racing royalty, has actually been there, done that and is moving merch.But the worst is Egg Dad – the Humpty Dumpty who can’t let a moment pass without mentioning he played professional hockey, even though he was no better than a minor-minor leaguer in his day. Ever irascible, he’s always threatening to drop the gloves and throw down with the moms and dads at the first sign of a funny look. Egg Dad’s son, a U14 pitcher, is relegated to the fringes of the production after breaking his forearm in a fielding collision. After Egg Mom carts him home from a hospital visit to have the surgical pins removed from his arm, Egg Dad pushes him to get back on the ball.“I don’t even know if I could put on a glove right now,” the kid says.“The doc says it’s up to you, but I want to see you play,” Egg Dad says.Tensions flare among parents during a gathering in Team Moms, the reality series set in the world of competitive youth baseball. Photograph: Paramount+On spring break, Egg Dad organizes a game of Plant the Flag on the gravel driveway of their Italianate resort compound – Great idea, Wine Dad says, with an eye roll – and his son winds up hurting his arm again. Egg Dad puts his poor kid on the kayak without a thought and then booze-bonds with Party Dad over how soft their two kids are. “[They’ve] got to understand the difference between a real injury and [pain] and just go,” Party Dad says. It seems no amount of Hollywood high gloss can make the stigma of the pushy sports parent disappear, even if it’s buffed and contoured by Kim K.Likely, this won’t be the last Team Mom installment if the titular colon is any indication. You can just picture spinoffs into soccer, tennis and perhaps even the southern California youth basketball scene – where Kardashian already features prominently. Really, the fact that youth sports in the US can so easily be spun into idle entertainment tells you everything that’s wrong with a homegrown approach to athletic development that favors the paying parents over the toiling kids, or even the major college and professional clubs who have a financial incentive to turn a catch-as-catch-can approach to talent scouting into a halfway dependable, European-style conveyor belt.And the fact that Kardashian and her producing partners intuitively know that parents would rather watch richer, better-looking versions of themselves than watch kids like theirs crash and burn while pursuing their dreams is just proof that pushy sports parents haven’t softened. They’re just reaping the benefits of softer lighting now.