Want to get ahead in youth sports? Try staying back a year.

0:01NPR.

0:12Sally Hersheps, you're back on The Indicator, this time with a personal story. Welcome back. Thank you. Yes. So I'm a step parent. My stepson Clyde is 17. He plays soccer. And I kept hearing about this thing the cool kids were doing. It is called reclassing. Clyde Felsen. Hello. So what is what is reclassing? Reclassing for high school students is when you redo it a year of high school. He's talking here about student-athletes specifically. And by the way, it also happens in middle school. You just repeat 7th or 8th grade. And here's the thing. They're not doing it because of bad grades, but because they want to.

0:55Why would you want to redo a year of school? So, I mean, it gives you an advantage because most, if not all, the kids you're playing against have played four years of high school sports or whatever they're doing. And you'll be having played five. An extra year could give a kid like Clyde the time to get bigger, faster, and stronger. So Clyde has decided to reclass. It could help with his long-term goals, including playing college soccer. Having a car is like another one, but like going to Division I is pretty high up there. Like that's the main goal, but if I can get a scholarship, fantastic, because debt sucks.

1:29Debt does suck. I'm a parent too. I'm spiraling now just talking about college costs. The debt college spiral. But the idea is that reclassing can give students an edge trying to get into college, which might help your kid get into a better school and maybe even land a scholarship. But it can also come with some heavy costs for kids and their parents. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Sally Herships. And I'm Waylon Wong. On today's show, the decision to invest in reclassing. How does it work and can it pay off? We're going to start today by looking at the glory stories. To do that, imagine we're in a gym and there are some bleachers with three levels.

2:16There's a group of teenagers on each step. For example, you said your stepson Clyde sees reclassing as a way to help him achieve his goal, playing college soccer at the top level. Yeah, and then, of course, there are the parental goals, like maybe it will help Clyde get into a better school with a scholarship. But his goal puts him at the first step. And when I first asked Clyde about reclassing, he was like, you got to talk to my friend Sage. His friend Sage Mateo is an example of a kid sitting one level up on those bleachers. Sage is 17. He lives in New York City. And he's really serious about basketball.

2:53So I want to play in college for sure. I think it'd be interesting to play overseas for a couple years out of college just for like some experiences living in a different country. Sage comes across as pretty mature for his age. When I asked him if he wanted to play in the NBA one day, he was like, maybe. I don't know. I think if the NBA opportunity comes along, I'd love to do it after college. Sage got serious about basketball way back. But by the time he got to eighth grade, there was a big problem. It was that Sage wasn't big yet. He called himself a late bloomer. So Sage reclassed. He did eighth grade again.

3:31That extra time not only meant he could grow, but he could also improve his basketball skills, which could eventually attract the attention of a college recruiter. Maybe he gets into a better school, which in turn could lead to higher future earnings or even the potential of Sage's dream, going pro one day. But here's where things move up to the top level in our bleachers. This is where a group of teenagers who are already arguably professional are sitting. They're how my stepson Clyde first heard about reclassing. Like when my friend Pearl was like, oh, look at this kid Cooper Flagg. He's reclassed.

4:07Look at Elliott Cadeau. He's a reclass. Take that second name Clyde mentioned, Elliott Cadeau. He's 19, he plays basketball, and he got recruited to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And remember, rules have changed and student athletes can now earn big bucks on brand deals. Well, Elliott's already landed some with companies like Wilson Sporting Goods, Marriott, and the restaurant chain Kava. He also has almost a quarter million followers on Instagram. After a tough practice, Kava is my go-to to refuel like a champion. So Elliott Cadeau reclassed in eighth grade so that he would be in the best possible position for high school, which is when things got more competitive.

4:46And it worked. He was a star. So much so that he was being recruited left and right. And then he reclassed again. It's another way to work this reclassing strategy. He graduated a year early so he could play point guard at UNC. So reclassing has worked for Elliott. But reclassing has all these rules. A key one, generally the day a kid starts high school, a clock starts ticking. They get four years to play high school sports. But those are public schools. We checked and couldn't find a state that allows reclassing strictly for athletics. So kids who reclass go to private school, and it's expensive, as much as$60 ,000 a year.

5:27Yeah, and that's one of the big criticisms of this system, that it can be pay-to-play, that all kinds of talented kids can be shut out because they can't afford private school. There are some private schools that offer aid, but there's little data on athletic scholarship money. And I should say here that the only way Clyde gets to reclass is that my husband teaches at the private school where Clyde is a student. So we are getting a pretty good deal. What about the rest of us who might not be so lucky in our choice of partners? I know not everyone can be so lucky. Well, there are college scholarships.

6:03The NCAA gave out more than$3.9 billion for the 2023 school year, but that money only goes to fewer than two and a half percent of all high school athletes. Still, money aside, the odds of winning a spot at a Division I school are incredibly tight. Even if you do have the means to send your kid to a private school, it's still not a slam dunk. Three percent of students win a spot at Harvard. Only about one percent make it to a Division I basketball team. Yeah, it's highly competitive. And reclassing has even led to lawsuits like one in Massachusetts, where a fight broke out between the body that oversees public school sports and a private school it accused of, quote, serious, egregious, and repeated misconduct for its students' reclassing.

6:52Michelle Cajot is familiar with all these different perspectives. She is mom to Elliot Cajot, that UNC player with all the sponsors, which she does help him manage. In her other time, she's become a reclassing consultant, and she's pretty direct about how she says parents should think about reclassing. It's a business decision, really. It's important to have a plan so you get some kind of return on your investment. The kid gets a return on your investment. the parents get return on the investment. Some coaches and industry pros we talked to were a bit down on reclassing. They say if you hold a kid back a year, of course they're going to look good because they're older than all the other kids and bigger.

7:32Wayne Mazzoni coached Division I baseball at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut for almost two decades. He now advises kids and parents about how to get on track to play college ball. He's not down on reclassing, but he does have two very different perspectives. Coaches don't care how you got there. If you went to Mars to go train and came, no one really cares. It's just by the time your year comes, are you good enough to help the program? But when it comes to the kids' perspective, Wayne says they should think twice before they switch to private school and leave old school friends behind.

8:08He says not all students who do this are successful. For every one of those you see, you don't see the 1 ,000 kids that say, this stinks, this is miserable, I'm not going to play in college. I spent my whole life and all my time doing this. I regret it. I should have, you know, gone into science. As for Sage Mateo, our serious New York City basketball player, he finished his sophomore year and reclassing seems to have paid off for him. Right now, this June 15th mark, this past June 15th mark opened up when coaches can actively reach out to me and text and call my phone. and I'm currently talking to like 10 schools.

8:45Now, we don't want to name names here because we don't want to affect Sage's college prospects, but we will say there are some hefty schools on that list. So I don't know, Waylon, should we reclass? Like I volunteered to redo my 40s. We could get some like podcast recruiting us. What do you think? I'll do my 20s again. Right?

9:07This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by James Willits. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kicking Cannon is the show's editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.