By Senior Partner, Tanya Stanish
I have spent more weekends than I can count in a cold rink, and later on a cold bleacher on a football sideline, holding a coffee that went cold an hour ago, watching my kids play games that mattered enormously to them. Both my son and daughter grew up in hockey, and cycled through soccer and baseball (and other sports) the way most sports families do — different seasons, different uniforms, different fields, all somehow layered onto the same calendar. My son eventually found football in high school, and it became the sport that took him all the way to playing Division I football in the SEC.
I raised both of my kids as a single, working parent, which meant there was no splitting the early rink drop-off from the evening practice pickup, no second car in the driveway on the days two schedules collided. I know firsthand what it takes to keep an athletic kid's world running — the stress of it, the sheer amount of time it consumes, and, in the same breath, how much fun it is: the drives home replaying a good game, the tournaments that become their own kind of family vacation, watching a kid build discipline around something bigger than either of us. That combination — pressure, sacrifice, and genuine joy, all tangled together — isn't something you can fully understand from the outside. You have to live inside a sports family's calendar to know it.
It's also something I draw on as a family law attorney. Over years of representing families through divorce — many of them raising athletic kids of their own — I've come to see how closely my own experience maps onto the parenting issues that show up in these cases. Understanding a sport's schedule isn't background color to me; it's a lens I bring directly into how I help clients build parenting plans that actually survive a season.
How Can Divorced Parents Build a Parenting Schedule Around Youth Sports?
The first thing that experience taught me is that a parenting schedule built on paper rarely survives contact with a real season. A standard "every other weekend" arrangement doesn't account for a hockey tournament that runs Thursday through Sunday in another state, or a football practice schedule where pickup and drop-off happen at hours no custody agreement anticipates — and it certainly doesn't anticipate what D1-level recruiting does to a family's calendar once college coaches start showing up. Families I represent are often surprised that Illinois law gives them room to plan for this — a parenting plan can and should spell out how tournament travel, practice conflicts, and season-long commitments get handled, rather than leaving parents to renegotiate it every time a schedule changes.
How Should Divorced Parents Handle the Costs and Logistics of Youth Sports?
The second thing I learned is that sacrifice in a sports family is rarely evenly visible, and it compounds as a kid climbs from rec-league hockey to varsity football to Division I recruiting. As a single parent, I carried most of that weight myself — the driving, the equipment, the coordination — but in a two-household family, those responsibilities must be shared and allocated deliberately, or one parent ends up carrying it all by default. Then, we have to consider the cost of travel sports and private lessons. This is exactly what Illinois child support law anticipates when it treats extracurricular expenses, camps, and equipment as costs that can be addressed separately from a basic support order. What I see most often in my practice isn't a fight over the law — it's friction over logistics: parents who both want to be kept in the loop but aren't getting the same information from the coach or team at the same time, parents who dread showing up to the same game or tournament because it turns tense instead of just being there for their kid, and disagreements over who covers the cost of travel teams, private coaching, or gear once those expenses start adding up. None of that has to be left to chance — it belongs in the parenting plan itself, decided once instead of relitigated every season.
How Can Parents Keep Divorce Conflict From Affecting Their Child’s Sports Experience?
The third thing — the one I think about most — is that my kids never once needed to know when the logistics were hard, whether we were navigating two hockey schedules or fielding calls from D1 coaches. That was the job of the adult in the house. Kids who are serious about a sport are already carrying enough: the pressure of performance, of recruiting, of trying to be good enough for the next level. The parents I respect most, in my own life and in my law practice, are the ones who fight for clarity in private and show up united in public, even when they don't agree on much else. Illinois family law gives divorced and separated parents tools to make decisions about a child's extracurricular life — through parental responsibility allocation — specifically so those decisions can be made once, thoughtfully, instead of relitigated every season in front of the child.
What Should Divorcing Parents of Athletes Keep in Mind?
I didn't set out to become a family law attorney who understands tournaments, recruiting calendars, NIL, and SEC schedules. But raising athletes as a single parent — through every sport they tried before one of them found the one that took him all the way — taught me that the logistics of a sports family and the logistics of a divorced family aren't so different. Both require a plan detailed enough to survive real life, and both work best when the adults absorb the friction so the kids don't have to. That's the lens I bring to every sports family I represent: not just knowing the divorce statute, but knowing, from experience, what a Saturday in the bleachers actually feels like: glorious.
If you have questions about creating a parenting plan that accounts for your child’s athletic commitments, contact us to discuss your options.