Now it’s Noah’s turn. After going 26-4 this year as a freshman at Wake Forest University, the 19-year-old turned pro in June and will try to start recouping some of his parents’ investment. He was granted a wild-card entry into the qualifying tournament for the US Open, and he won his first match to earn $10,000. Noah lost in the second round, however, so he won’t get a shot when the main event starts on Monday. Still, the prize for his first-round win more than doubles his career professional earnings, which previously totaled $8,833, won in places like Lexington, Ky., on the ATP Challenger Tour, the minor league of tennis.

“What were they spending on me? Absurd numbers, and I was still young and they didn’t know what potential I had. It’s putting down a lot of money for something that may never be,” Noah says of his parents. “They’ve put a lot of money into it, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that’s why tennis is one of the toughest sports to get into. I mean, if you want to be good there’s no happy medium. Money will be spent.”

The British Lawn Tennis Association estimates it costs about £250,000 ($385,000) to develop a player from age 5 to 18. Staying pro doesn’t come cheap, either. The U.S. Tennis Association estimated in 2010 that the annual average cost to be a “highly competitive” professional tennis player was $143,000—including $70,000 for coaching and $60,000 for travel—and that only the 164 highest-ranked players on the men’s tour would have broken even with such costs.

The potential rewards for top players are enormous. The men’s and women’s champions of this year’s US Open each will receive $3.3 million. Roger Federer, the men’s No. 2 seed, has more than $93 million in career earnings, and the 34-year-old Swiss player was the most marketable athlete in the world in 2014, with an estimated $58 million from endorsements.

But Noah is ranked No. 631 on the men’s ATP tour, about as far away from tennis wealth as a professional can be. He still has to win qualifying matches just to play in minor-league events. He won a wild-card spot in last year’s US Open but lost in the first round.

Noah’s extraordinarily expensive upbringing is unusual among his elite tennis peers. Many left home at a young age for the USTA development system or private tennis academies that provided training and covered their travel and other costs.

“He could have gone to the USTA. They would have housed him in Boca Raton, they would have pretty much covered all his living and training expenses,” says Lawrence Kleger, director of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy in New York, who’s been Noah’s coach for the past eight years. “Noah could have probably gotten a scholarship to seven different academies.”

“Every decision that they made, my tennis was behind it”

Some of Noah’s travel has been covered by the USTA since he was 11, and training since his early teens has been provided free by Sportime, a group of New York-area clubs that house the McEnroe Academy. When Noah turned 15, Sportime also started paying most of his travel and tournament costs.

But almost all of his early expenses came from the pockets of his parents, who still must pay their way to his tournaments. When Eric and his girlfriend spent a week with Noah in May at the NCAA tournament in Waco, Texas, it cost them $5,000.