After spending one boy?s student loans to get to a cross-country video game tournament, a ragtag group of teammates must win to get any chance of getting home.

What you have is sort of the gist of it.

As pertaining to the title, it is exactly what it is. I'm sure we've all spent our youth doing hedonistic pleasures instead of real work, and this is what the story is about. Both the road-trip and the tournament have elements that see this protagonist (and his friends) grow.

The boy, fed up (or disillusioned) with the notion of work, school, the contemporary american dream, decides instead of using his money for studying, he's going to use it doing what he enjoys the most - playing video games with his friends, and just all around hedonism.

He drags his friends along when he gets the first chance to escape, and the road-trip is filled with obstacles within and outside of the group.

I like your logline as it straightens out the more important elemens in my story, however I think it needs to have a little more individualistic elements as pertaining to my main character (and his supporting cast of friends).

I'll keep working on it!

I think you have a misplaced adjective - the tournament is a cross-country video game? How does one steal someone else's student loans? When I received a student loan, it went straight to the school or came in a form of a check addressed to me. And is the coming of age/dramatic element occur during the road trip to the tournament or during the tournament? By your logline, the stakes are they can't go home if they don't win, which are... pretty low stakes.

What would grab my interest is if the tournament was like a Call of Duty type game and they had to employ skills attained from playing the game to hurdle obstacles encountered during their road trip to the tournament. But I realize that's probably nothing like your story.

Also, I found your title a little odd - Wasted Youth. To me, it's implying that the adventure your protags are embarking on is a waste of time. Probably not the impression you were going for.

How about:

After stealing money to enter a video game tournament, a misfit group of on-line gamers have 36 hours to travel cross-country from Boston to San Diego. Can they make it without killing each other?

If it's "coming of age", you'll probably need something like "together they learn... " and some kind of stake, like saving the local arcade or some garbage.

I'm sorry, the only movie I've seen like this is 'Joysticks (1983)'...