You have to be born on third to achieve anything these days 

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me.

You have to be born on third to achieve anything these days 

“It’s getting too expensive for some kids to even play, and the pressure to be perfect takes away the love for the game,” Dončić told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/30/heir-ball-how-the-cost-of-youth-sports-is-changing-the-nba

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How much has changed vs the past?

The Williams sisters were raised to play tennis starting at 4 by a former pro father. Messi needed growth hormones when he was 13 which were paid for by FC Barcelona when he joined their academy. Kobe was groomed from the time he was a toddler by his father who was a pro. Magnus Carlsen skipped school and started training w/ a coach at 9.

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“In 2009, ten players in the league had fathers who’d played for N.B.A. teams; this past season, there were thirty-five.”

Moving from “being born on third helps but there are other ways in” to “you have to be born on third”

To me There's a distinct tightening of opportunity across every single sector in the US relative to my parents’ generation and this is only getting worse

How can you look at a 4x diff and say it’s no different? 

Idk 

I have bias 

I feel the vise squeezing and I am so well off 

Matter of time before I too am below the line

Those don’t feel apppreciably different to me.

It’d been true for a long time that if a kid doesn’t have elite genetics and isn’t training from when they’re little, they have zero chance of being a pro in a major sport.

Maybe it’s worse but it’s:
0.000001% vs 0.0000001%