Addressing the Youth Sports Industrial Complex

I recently had someone reach out to me on social media to ask my thoughts on youth sports. This is a great question with a complex and nuanced answer. I’d start by saying that I believe that youth sports are incredibly important in a number of different ways. There is obviously a huge demand for providing our communities with these opportunities and creating a robust feeder program is essential for continued success in most sports.

For me, playing baseball, wrestling, basketball, soccer and football were all important experiences prior to arriving in high school. Through those opportunities I learned a lot about myself as well as allowing me to have a fun and challenging experience. I don’t know if I ever had more fun in sports than playing baseball in 7th and 8th grade. It was just pure joy in so many ways.

I believe that there are many youth athletes who are having a positive experience, however I am concerned with what some have referred to as the professionalization of youth sports.  There are several aspects of this professionalization that are problematic. 

The physical toll that increased sport specialization has on youth athletes.  In one study, researchers found that adolescents who spent more hours practicing a sport per week than their age (ie a 12 year old practicing for 13 or more hours) are 70% more likely to sustain an overuse injury. Another study found that athletes who practiced a sport for 8 months or more were three times as likely to sustain an overuse injury than their peers.

Counterbalancing the argument for athletes to specialize at an early age is this study by the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine suggesting that the, “effectiveness of early sport specialization limited in most sports, sport diversification may be better approach at young ages.” According to their study, 88% of college athletes played more than one sport as children and 70% didn’t specialize until they over twelve years of age. This idea is the main thesis of the book Range by author David Epstein, where he provides example after example of how generalists outperform early specializers. A 2015 paper from Harvard cited that one year of specialization can lead to an increased risks of injury and burnout.

Another concerning statistic are the results from a poll by the National Association of Youth Sports shows that 70% of youth sports participants quit organized athletics by the time they are 13.  Among reasons for this are that sports are no longer fun anymore (because their designed that way), cultural expectations not supporting older children for playing just for the fun of it and the high cost (both physically and financially) to compete.

During the 2018-19 school year, participation in high school athletics fell for the first time in 30 years. Unlike 30 years ago when enrollment in schools was falling at the tail end of the baby boom, 2018-19 was the first year that athletic participation fell while student enrollment was increasing. Some blame the reduction in participation on the concussion crisis in the sport of football, however, basketball, baseball, golf and lacrosse are all losing participation as well.

One concerning statistic surrounding the professionalization of youth sports is that kids from homes earning more than $100,000 are now twice as likely to play a team sport at least once a day as kids from families earning less than $25,000. Derek Johnson a writer for The Atlantic believes that:

The deeper story is that the weed of American-style meritocracy is strangling the roots of youth sports. As parents have recognized that athletic success can burnish college applications, sports have come to resemble just another pre-professional program, with rising costs, hyper-specialization, and massive opportunity-hoarding among the privileged.

Before kids enter high school, they tend to participate in youth sports leagues, which have become one big pay-to-play machine. It’s now common for high-income parents to pull their kids out of the local soccer or baseball leagues and write thousand-dollar checks to join super-teams that travel to play similar kids several counties away. As I wrote last year, it’s not a crime for parents to spend money on their children. But as travel teams hoard talented (and, typically, high-income) kids, they leave behind desiccated local leagues with fewer resources and fewer players. As a result, many low-income children lose the sports habit (or never gain it to begin with), and simply stop playing altogether by the time they get to high school.

In an article titled The Gentrification of College Hoops, authors Tom Farrey and Stephanie Walters detail how  in 2010, just 28 percent of Division I basketball players were first-generation college students. Only five years later, that figure has fallen 9% with fewer than one in seven students receiving athletic scholarships across all Division I sports coming from households without a college graduate.

The reason for this was explained in the first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Outliers where he theorizes that the reason why 40% of the players will have been born between January and March isn’t something magical about being born in the first quarter of the year. Rather, he posits that when young hockey players first start trying out for travel team hockey in Canada, those born during the first three months of the year have the advantage of being the oldest players in the process since the cutoff is January 1st. Gladwell argues that this head start gives players born in the first quarter of the year a real advantage as the players born throughout the rest of the year catch up in physical maturity: they are more likely to be chosen for top tier competitive teams, they get more ice time and better coaching. They same can be said for American travel teams where your ability to pay for inclusion provides students from wealthy backgrounds a huge head start and advantage over their economically disadvantaged peers.

One may ask the question of what should we do to address the above issues in youth sports. I don’t have all the answers but I’m a big believer in that focusing upon that which is within our power so my suggestions will be actions an average athletic director can take.

1. Hold a youth sports summit for your community. Invite the organizers for your community to discuss the issues and cast a vision for what is possible. I think you will find that most people who are involved in youth sports understand the value and need for positive and appropriately programed youth sports opportunities. Creating a dialogue among your stakeholders is essential to creating a broad-based approach to youth sports in your community.
2. Educate your parents on the risks of specialization. Preseason parent meetings, athletics or principal newsletters, social media posts are all good ways to share the risks of specialization. Educating your coaches and parents will help them spread that information with your youth community.
3. Encourage youth programs to partner with organizations such as the Positive Coaching Alliance or Changing the Game Project. Youth program organizers typically not going to have enough time to plan and coordinate coach and parent education about best practices for transformative athletic experiences. PCA, Changing the Game Project, 3D Coaching, Proactive Coaching all create and share a tremendous amount of excellent coaching and sports parenting resources. Partnering with them allows your youth organizations to front load dealing with many of the negative issues that are fomented when athletes and their parents arrive at your school.
4. Address equity in youth sports.  Start by having a conversation about the students who attend your schools and how they are represented in the youth programs that utilize your facilities.  Creating a scholarship program and equity fund for equipment and gear is a good first step.  Identifying whether the participants in a program are representative of the community at large is an important step as well.
5. Sponsor school based athletic programs for elementary and middle school students. A victim of cuts over the past half century, school districts cut their school based athletic programs as private community based organizations picked up the slack. With the rise of the Youth Sports Industrial Complex, some districts have begun to address issues of equity through athletic programs. Portland Public Schools revived school-based middle school programs in an attempt to address equity issues in many of their communities. As a result, schools that were not able to field baseball or softball teams, are now able to provide that opportunity in their communities.
6. Leverage your facilities for productive partnerships.  School districts have the ability to allow and deny access to their facilities. One way districts can encourage youth sports organizations to address the identified issues is to ask them to address those issues as a part of their facility use requests. Youth organizations should be able to demonstrate how they are educating coaches, promoting sportsmanship with parents, addressing issues of equity in their membership and educating families on the dangers of overuse. Many districts contribute to the Youth Sports Industrial Complex by just renting out facilities. Asking partner organizations to demonstrate a good faith effort to address these issues encourages progress in youth sports while maintaining the revenue produced through rentals. At the very least, participation in your Youth Sports Summit can be the barrier for entry to your facilities.