About SidelinePlan
The real cost of youth sports, and the real return.
SidelinePlan started with a frustration Eric ran into while adding up what a few seasons of travel baseball had actually cost his family, then trying to find a straight answer online about what that spending typically buys. The calculators he found were either dressed up as scholarship-hype generators or didn't explain their logic — just outputs with no methodology behind them.
So he built something better. SidelinePlan is a collection of free, no-account-required calculators that give you an honest, itemized total of what a sport is costing your family, set next to real, cited NCAA data — and show you exactly how each number was reached.
Eric spent several years on the sidelines of travel and club sports, watching costs climb every season with no clear sense of what it added up to or what it typically returned. Frustrated that most "scholarship calculators" either oversold the prospects or hid their math entirely, he built SidelinePlan to show the real numbers, sourced directly from the NCAA, with nothing hidden.
Part of the Veraino network of free websites.
How it works
Every tool on SidelinePlan is grounded in a documented, citable method — a published formula, an authoritative standard, or a well-established model. We don't approximate or invent numbers. If we can't cite a primary source for the logic, we don't publish the tool.
Figures about a sport's return — participation rates, scholarship data — come directly from the NCAA's own published research, cited with a link to the source. Cost figures are built from real, dated price ranges for fees, coaching, equipment, and travel. When a number depends on an assumption (team size, season length), the tool states it and lets you change it.
Our commitments
- Free, no sign-up required. Every tool on this site is free to use with no account, subscription, or paywall.
- We show our work. Every tool explains its methodology, cites its sources, and surfaces assumptions — so you can verify the logic, not just trust the output.
- Honest about limitations. Where precision is limited or assumptions are required, we say so. Tools compute; they don't replace professional judgment.
- Kept current. Tools that use figures that can change over time carry a “last reviewed” date and are treated as an ongoing maintenance responsibility, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@sidelineplan.com. Eric reads every message personally.