What's Going On with Youth Sports?

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Long Run. Happy Fourth of July weekend to those of you based in the States! Hope you can get outside and do something especially American. This week’s post is coming to you from the road somewhere in Utah. I was debating splitting it into two pieces, but rather than force the first part out last week, I decided to try a single longer-form piece. Let me know what you think!

If you like this article, you can subscribe below to receive the blog weekly!

You can also check out my previous posts here and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Let’s hop into it.

Growing up, I played a lot of sports  – baseball, soccer, basketball, football, track, cross country, you name it. It wasn’t that I was forced to play any sports (and in many cases, my parents probably wished I had less practices and games to run to). And I certainly wasn’t good at all of them (as a 70 pound 11-year-old running around in pads and colliding with kids who were double my size, physics would tell you who wins that battle), but sports were just what everyone did.

Particularly at a younger age, most of us didn’t have video games or iPads with an endless stream of content. We spent our summers outside, playing pickup basketball or spontaneously throwing together a game of capture the flag.

And we never struggled to get enough people to play because most neighborhood kids were in the same boat – going outside with no schedule was just what you did as a kid growing up in the early 2000s. And then, of course, in a small town with limited options for after-school activities, many just joined a sport as a social activity.

And to be honest, all of this probably served us well. We stayed physically active, we figured out how to socialize and work through disagreements, and we learned values like teamwork and discipline.

By the time I got to high school, with the increasing stressors of AP classes, girls, and college applications, sports were the only outlet for channeling any anxiety or stress I carried throughout the day. And from a social standpoint, sports were how I made my best friends, many of which I’m still close with to this day.

Overall, sports played a large role in shaping who I am today.

And this is why I was troubled by a trend I came across a few weeks ago – the decline of youth sports participation across America. The pandemic changed life as we know it, and particularly for kids, we still haven’t scratched the surface on what the long-term impacts might be.

The kids are not alright.

The Decline in Youth Sports Participation

Consider this startling fact: in 2019, high school sports participation declined for the first time ever, and it has been thrown completely into disarray since the pandemic hit the following year.

The number of boys playing high school sports has steadily increased nearly every year since 1992, until the last two years, where it dropped to levels not seen since 2007 – this is the absolute number of boys, not the percentage. So even with hundreds of thousands of more boys going to high school, the number playing sports has still dropped dramatically.

These same trends are true starting at the grassroots levels with kids participating in sports before they get to high school (think ages 5-13).

What has changed in the last 10 years that might be causing this?

Screen time aside (we’ll get to that later), even if you just look at the sports themselves, youth sports are becoming privatized.

Local rec leagues & public school teams are struggling, while travel leagues are thriving.

Among the individual sports themselves, every sport saw a decline in participation last year, except for one – golf, which is ironically one of the most lonely sports out there.

And then of course we remember that all of this is happening at a time where children are spending an ever-increasing amount of time on their digital devices. Put aside the argument of whether screen time and social media themselves are inherently bad – we only have a limited number of hours of time in the day, and as kids are spending more and more of those hours on their devices, those are hours not being spent socializing, going outside, or playing sports.

Meanwhile, a new advisory from US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy last month called loneliness and lack of connection a “public health challenge that needs immediate attention.”

Think about the ways people sought meaning in the past. They were typically community-driven organizations, such as churches, clubs, and sports leagues, and places to connect in-person with the people around you.

In the past decade (and accelerated by the pandemic), we’ve seen dramatic declines in church attendance, a withering of the American social clubs scene, and now – you guessed it – the fall of American sports, the last frontier of social connection among our country’s youth.

Participation Trophies Are Not the Problem

Earlier this year, North Carolina introduced a bill that would ban participation trophies for children. For whatever reason, this issue has been getting people heated for years.

Sure, maybe participation trophies are “weakening our youth,” but you know what weakens our youth even more? Sitting at home on their phones and not playing sports at all. If more kids stop playing sports, pretty soon you won’t even need to give out participation trophies because nobody will be playing.

I could really care less whether kids get trophies or not, and I don’t think the existence of a participation trophy changes anyone’s decision to play a sport.

But for the love of God, if you’re an elected official, there are much bigger problems to be focusing on.

The reality is that, regardless of how skilled you are at the sport, there’s an endless number of studies showing that youth sports participation is good for kids’ self-esteem, social skills, and mental health at-large.

Team Sports and the Tale of Two Cities

In 2008, about 45% of kids ages 6-12 were playing team sports on a regular basis. Soon after, recession hit, which cut budgets for local parks, while many sports became more privatized (which cut out families who couldn’t afford it), and that figure eventually dropped to 37% in 2014.

Yet, as an economy, youth sports actually continues to grow. How can this be?

Two words: travel leagues.

Despite drops in sports participation across the board, travel leagues are growing increasingly expensive, and those who still do participate are continuing to spend more and more each year.

Research shows that parents alone spend more than $30 billion per year on sports for their children – and this excludes public spend from schools or municipalities.

$30 billion.

For context, that’s more revenue than the NFL and NBA generate, combined. That’s about equal to the collective value of every team in the English Premier League, the largest soccer league in the world.

And parents continue to pay up.

In many ways, sports are becoming just another example of a tale of two Americas.

The average family spend per child, per sport in 2022 for families making less than $50,000 in HHI per year is $523. For families making over $150,000, it’s nearly 4x that at $2,068.

Let that sink in. $2,068 annually, per child, per sport.

And this is just the average. The survey only segmented the largest bucket as groups making over $150k, but there are many families making far more than that, and I would venture to say they’re also spending far more than the average, as well.

$5,000 for your son to join that travel lacrosse league? If the parents have the money or find it, they’ll fork it up. “If that gets him a scholarship to an Ivy League school, it will totally be worth the investment,” they tell themselves.

While maybe this is sometimes the case, the reality is that this is the exception, not the norm. But it sure makes for a compelling story that the owners of these travel sports leagues sell to parents.

Unfortunately, we’re becoming a society where money is a prerequisite for kids to play sports. Like seemingly everything else, sports have become pay-to-play.

Whereas before, local rec leagues (think YMCA basketball leagues or Little League Baseball) were where kids from all sorts of backgrounds went to play sports, now rich families are spending thousands of dollars and traveling multiple counties (sometimes even states) away to get their kids into “talent pipelines” or onto “superteams.”

And as this happens, the local public leagues lose funding, turnout, and talent.

Numbers and Retention — a Slower Fill and a Leaky Bucket

Let’s detour with a quick story.

Back in high school in Illinois, I ran cross country. At my school, we had years where we struggled to just fill an entire team – just 7 runners to compete in races covering 3 miles across various terrains. It can’t be that hard, right? Well, in most years, our high school produced below average performance for long distance running.

A few hours north, there was a different high school called York. Sure, York was double the size of our school, but the crazy thing about York was the number of people that turned out each year to run cross country. In a given year, York would often field over 200 boys eager to run on the team. They were one of the powerhouses in the state, and the culture of cross country running at York was so strong that they even made a movie about it. And because there were so many kids on the team, at varying skill levels, everyone had someone on their level to compete with daily at practice. York’s top 7 runners would often all beat most teams’ best runners, even among the best schools.

So how did they do it? Simple – retention and a long time horizon.

They created a culture that made running seem fun and accessible to anyone, and as a result, running cross country at York was seen as cool. Their coach, Joe Newton, understood the value of getting higher turnout and keeping kids on the team, and as a result, they had a large funnel with little attrition.

It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to understand that choosing 200 kids at random and taking the top 7 to create a team is a far better strategy than choosing 7 kids at random and those 7 being your team, no matter where the school is located.

In modern day youth sports, where travel leagues are inaccessible to many, and oftentimes kids burn out early with so much pressure placed on them from their parents, we’re decreasing the amount flowing into the top of the funnel through lower turnout rates, while simultaneously leaking more out of the bottom of the funnel with poor retention rates.

Is making youth sports “pay-to-play” solving anything? Most kids don’t end up getting athletic scholarships, so in reality most parents paying for travel leagues for their kids are just subsidizing the experiences for the select few kids who actually are capable of going onto a higher level of play.

How much of pay-to-play youth sports is just a natural reaction to the exploding prices of higher education, where parents are seeking any bit of hope to get some part of their kids’ college expenses paid for?

An unintended consequence of this phenomenon is more and more kids feeling the need to specialize in one sport early, which typically does more harm than good.

Specialization and The Cult of the Head Start

In David Epstein’s Range, he argues in favor of being a generalist vs. a specialist, particularly early in life (whether that be in sports, career, or getting better at any skill). I won’t go too deep here (and I’d highly recommend the book if you haven’t read it before), but he cites a ton of evidence to suggest that forcing kids to choose a single sport early and stick to it leads to burnout, loss of enjoyment, and, ultimately, worse performance than kids who played many different sports at a young age before specializing.

Anecdotally, you hear a lot of people talk about how competitive youth sports are these days. However, economically speaking, what we’re seeing now is actually anti-competitive behavior.

As we learn in Econ 101, the opportunity for more entrants creates competition, which is healthy for any functioning market. But when you raise the barriers of entry and only a few large incumbents control prices (travel leagues), that’s not healthy competition – that’s a cartel.

We see a similar phenomenon creep up in higher education, as well, which is ironically the same reason many parents justify sending their kids to expensive travel leagues to begin with – to get an athletic scholarship at a prestigious university.

There are thousands of high schools across the US, yet a small fraction of feeder schools send kids to Ivy League schools.

I think the decline in youth sports participation, the stress created among both the kids and the parents, and the pay-for-play nature of seemingly everything for kids is largely a function of the ever-rising cost of higher education. It’s a reflection of the fact that, more and more, the most common way to get ahead in America is to start ahead.

The question we should ask ourselves is “Is this a world we want to live in?” One where if you don’t have a head start, you stand no chance of ever catching up?

I don’t blame parents for sending their kids to travel leagues and private schools. If you love your children, you want the best for them, and if doing these things are going to increase their likelihood of getting into a good college (which is still the primary leading indicator of income in life), it’s probably the right thing to do given your options.

But systematically we should really think about whether we’re actually solving any issues or just making problems worse by burning kids out, not letting them socialize with kids from different backgrounds, and removing all of the benefits that youth sports have for our society broadly.

Every kid should have access to play, to compete, and to learn the life lessons that youth sports instill. The point is not winning the game, the point is development of our nation’s future citizens.

In a world where there are endless digital alternatives and distractions, we should remove any barriers for just getting kids outside and off their devices. We should celebrate kids wanting to play sports.

Youth sports have enormous potential to shape the people we become, but it only works if we actually play to begin with.

-Owen

Fresh Finds

Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI (Lex Fridman Podcast)

Podcast | 191 minutes

Marc Andreessen doesn’t speak publicly often, but when he does, he usually has something insightful to say. He’s incredibly intelligent and lives at the forefront of technology, so his takes on what the future of AI means for the world are probably worth at least listening to. This 3 hour interview was packed full of interesting discussion, debates on how the world will change over the next decade, and lots of fun historical nuggets.

If you enjoyed this piece, subscribe here to receive the newsletter! Once a week, no BS, and sure to make you think.

Also, if you’re interested in starting your own blog or newsletter, check out Beehiiv here!