Sparing no expense: Parents go to extremes to help kids reach dreams
The question earns a teenage giggle from Madison Keys.
“I have so much fun — I mean every single day,” she said. “I’ve been to Turin, Italy. Paris. Montreal. Costa Rica.”
And that is within the past six months.
So, when you wonder if she feels like she is missing out on a normal childhood, the 13-year tennis phenom wonders what you’re thinking.
“I never really thought I was giving something up,” said Keys, who left Rock Island three years ago for a nets-intensive upbringing in Florida and is traveling the globe playing — and winning — junior tournaments. “It was like I had the chance to go out and complete one of my dreams. Really, right now it is honestly hard to think of what a normal childhood without tennis would be.
“This,” said the No. 2-ranked 13-year-old girls tennis player in the U.S., “is my normal.’’
It is a “normal” that comes, however, at an abnormal price.
For then-10-year-old Madison to pursue her dream of a professional tennis career, her mother, Christine, surrendered her half of the family law practice and moved in 2005 with Madison and her two sisters to live in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Rick Keys, the father, spends four days each week tending to his law partnership in Rock Island, then boards a plane to Florida each Thursday evening to spend weekends with his wife and three daughters.
The father would not care to calculate the cost of maintaining two households, alongside the travel for himself as well for daughter, mother and occasionally himself to junior tennis tournaments across the world and nation.
That’s not to mention the annual tuition for his daughter’s daily instruction at the highly regarded Evert Tennis Academy, where the instructors include former pro tennis great Chrissie Evert.
“No,” Rick Keys said when asked for a ballpark estimate of the annual outlay. “Because it would scare me.”
Bettendorf’s Jeff Seitz, who preceded the Keyses in a sports-related family move to Florida in 2003, is equally reluctant to put a price tag on the completed figure-skating careers of his son, Andy, and daughter, Lindsey.
“Because it might look like I am this loaded guy, I hate to even tell you what it is,” said the local real estate developer. “A national championship costs about $10,000 to take the family, the coaches, hotels and airfares. I can tell you that.
“A pair of (skate) boots, you could spend up to $1,000. And these kids were growing, and we would buy every half-size. You would go, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But they had to have the best boots, all the right equipment, and it had to fit right.”
Hidden costs?
The Keyses and Seitzes are extreme examples of the levels of commitment Quad-City families increasingly are willing to make for their child athletes.
Andy Seitz, a 22-year-old college student and part-time skating instructor whose junior pairs skating career culminated with a national championship and a world silver medal in 2006, shares Madison Keys’ confusion over the question of childhood normality.
“I saw the whole world,” he said of a career that took him to Russia, Sweden, Bulgaria and beyond. “How many kids at 22 can say they have been around the whole world four times? I learned so much more than I could in a classroom.”
Still, Jeff Seitz sometimes recalculates the costs — and he’s not talking about plane tickets — and wonders.
“As I look back, we probably would have done some things differently,” he said, speaking for himself and his wife, Susie. “We maybe pushed them a little bit.
“They wanted it, but I also think we wanted it as parents, and I think that’s a good lesson. Sometimes you are pushing these kids along, and maybe the parents want it more than the kids.”
Ill-fated move
The Seitzes relocated to Bradenton, Fla., in 2003, where Lindsey and Andy attended the Bradenton Academy, a private school with a concentrated schedule that allowed for 4 hours of world-class skate instruction each afternoon.
Jeff Seitz said the move was made in tandem with his decision to open a business in Fort Myers, Fla., but he still commuted 2 hours daily up-and-down the Gulf Coast while also continuing his Q-C-based business.
Andy Seitz said the move brought internal pressure to succeed.
“From myself,” he stressed. “Never from my folks.”
Nonetheless: “There was a little bit of pressure on us that we had to perform because we did make such a big sacrifice at that point.”
That was difficult, but the real problem developed at the rink, where youthful Lindsey conceded she was a bit less dedicated than her driven older brother.
“I think I just had more interests in my life outside of skating,’’ she said after her recent graduation from Bettendorf High School. “I just felt like I wanted to experience all my life and not miss out. He was more dedicated to skating.”
Differences at the rink came home, Jeff Seitz said.
“We would sit around the dinner table, and what we talked about was the fighting,” the father said of a family that also includes golfing brother, Adam. “It just became too much.”
Solomanic solution
After about a year, a Solomanic solution brought the Seitzes home to Bettendorf, where Adam launched a nationwide search for a new female partner. He then landed in Michigan part-time with Kendra Moyle, with whom he enjoyed a successful, well-traveled three-year partnership that culminated with a national junior pairs championship.
Lindsey practiced and competed for a time with a new partner at the Quad-City Sports Center before focusing fully on her final few years of high school
Both are attending college. Lindsey enrolled at Iowa State two weeks ago. Andy, who gave up competition after his partner grew a bit too much, just completed his second year at the University of Iowa.
Both also are coaching skaters, Lindsey with the Ames Figure Skating Club, and Andy with two pairs teams, one in the Quad-Cities and another in Cedar Rapids.
Andy said his lone regret is never having skated in the Olympics, but he could yet wind up coaching Olympians, thanks in part to the resumé cache his past provides.
“It absolutely turned out well for Andy,” Jeff Seitz said. “I think going to that (international) level was important. It will open a lot of doors.”
Lindsey, meanwhile, loved her high school experience. And still loves her brother.
“Everything worked out perfectly,” she said. “We are best friends.”
Keys to a career
Loving their hectic lifestyle at the moment, Rick, Christine and Madison Keys are confident their story also will have a happy ending.
That could be with the pro career Madison announced as her goal at age 7.
But, her parents stressed, it does not have to end that way.
“If she got hurt tomorrow and was done playing tennis? Worth it?” Rick Keys rhetorically posed. “Of course.
“My kids have been so broadened now from a development standpoint. (Madison) has friends all over the world, and her sisters are seeing this, they are experiencing that. It is a whole different mindset for them. You can’t duplicate that.”
Christine Keys said it is not a lost childhood. It is an enhanced childhood.
“There is not a thing I worry about her,’’ Christine Keys said. “She is learning so many valuable lessons. And if she doesn’t end up playing tennis, she is a better person, a better character and has a tremendous work ethic for anything else she chooses to do.’’
‘You do for your kids’
As for the expense and the sacrifice required to supply their daughter those lessons?
“You want to give your kids an opportunity,’’ Rick Keys said.
In that, the Keyses and Seitzes are no different than hundreds of thousands of modern parents willing to do what they can to help their children reach for the sporting stars.
Sure, they have taken it to another level. That, Rick Keys said, is because the extreme is what Madison’s dream requires.
It also is because they have the means.
“That’s why I went to law school, that’s why I became an attorney,” Christine Keys said. “To give my kids an opportunity I didn’t have. This just happened to be her passion, and I’m thrilled to help her get where she wants to go.”
Madison’s younger sister has an eye on a fashion career. Her father said he will do what he can to advance that dream as well.
“If one of my kids wanted to be an airplane pilot, an actress and showed the will to make it happen, you would make the means available,” he said. “You’ve got to. You don’t work this hard not to give them a chance. You don’t work this hard just to buy more stuff.”
Madison, who is home-schooled by her mother and studies 3 hours daily after spending 4 hours each morning at the academy, wants to attend college at Harvard if her tennis dreams don’t come true.
She said she feels privileged, not pressured.
And that lost childhood?
“I don’t really miss anything,” she said. “I never went to the mall or the movies that often. I never went to a dance or a prom. And from what I have heard of them, they are not as exciting as everybody says they are.”
Besides, she will always have Paris.
Craig DeVrieze can be contacted at (563) 333-2610 or cdevrieze@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.