The folding chair is the most important decision you will make this season

You will spend more hours this year in a folding chair than in your own bed, and you spent weeks researching the bed. Most parents buy the chair at a gas station on the way to the first tournament, which is how you end up with a sixty-dollar, nine-pound throne with two cup holders and a cooler pocket that you abandon in the parking lot by October.

Let us do this properly.

First, where are you sitting?

There are three tournament seating situations and they want three different chairs.

• Bleachers. You do not want a chair. You want a stadium seat: a padded, backed cushion that hooks over the bench. Anything with legs is a hazard on a bleacher and a crime in front of the people behind you.
• Courtside or fieldside on a flat floor. This is folding chair country, but the venue will tell you how close you can sit and how wide you can be. Low-profile wins, because the parents behind you are also people.
• The hallway. Convention centers run matches on eight courts and your kid is on none of them for two hours. The hallway is where tournaments are actually lived. Here you want something you will carry without resenting it.

The only four things that matter

1. Weight, honestly measured. Under three pounds and you will bring it. Over six and it lives in the trunk. The chair that gets used is the chair that is light enough to carry up a stairwell with a coffee in your other hand.
2. Packed size. If it folds down to the size of a water bottle or a loaf of bread, it fits in a backpack with the cooler and the blanket. If it folds down to the size of a golf bag, it is a second trip to the car, and nobody makes the second trip.
3. Seat height. Low chairs, the kind that sit eight inches off the floor, are great on a sideline and miserable in a hallway full of standing adults. A mid-height chair, roughly knee height, works almost everywhere and is far easier to get out of at hour nine.
4. Setup time. If it takes more than fifteen seconds and a YouTube video, you will set it up once. Look for chairs that unfold like an umbrella, not ones that assemble like a tent.

Things that sound important and are not

• Cup holders. You have a hand and a floor. The cup holder is where coffee goes to tip over.
• Built-in coolers. A chair with a cooler is a heavy chair with a warm cooler. Carry a real one.
• Canopies. You are indoors.
• Phone pockets. Your phone is in your hand because the bracket just updated.
• Reclining. You are at a gym, not a lake. The moment you recline, your kid's team will need you to film something.

The stadium seat question

For bleacher venues, which is most of them, the stadium seat is the whole game. Spend the extra money on real padding and a backrest that goes above your shoulder blades. A little lumbar curve is worth ten dollars. Wide hooks that fit older, deeper bleachers are worth another ten. If it has a shoulder strap you will actually bring it in from the car, which is the entire point.

Our honest recommendation

Own two things, not one. A padded stadium seat that lives in your tournament backpack for bleachers, and one lightweight, mid-height folding chair under three pounds that lives in the trunk for hallways and fieldside. Between them you have covered every venue on the circuit for about the price of one bad gas-station chair.

A note on etiquette

Your chair takes up one seat's worth of space. Not two. Not your chair plus a chair for your bag. On a crowded sideline, the parent who spreads out is remembered, and not warmly. Fold it when you leave for the two-hour break so someone else can use the spot. And if the person next to you is on raw aluminum and you have a spare cushion, you know what to do.

The club fees are what they are. The schedule is what it is. The chair is one of the few parts of this life you actually get to choose. Choose the light one.