Originally posted in the Sports Business Journal by Erik Spanberg on May 1st 2023
The fragmented world of youth sports presents challenges to both availability and affordability for kids and their families.
Sports are often about statistics, and statistics tell much of the story when it comes to youth sports.
According to data collected by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, 37% of children ages 6 to 12 played team sports on a regular basis in 2021, down from 38% in 2019. In 2008, kids’ participation peaked at 45%.
The federal government’s Healthy People 2030 project, a data-driven national measure of 358 objectives to improve well-being, found that, in 2021, 50.7% of children ages 6 to 17 played organized sports or took sports lessons after school or on weekends, down from 58.4% in 2017. The target is 63.3% by 2030 — a 10% lift from the 58.4% participation rate in 2016-17, which the inter-agency group used as its baseline when the data was released.
Most kids stop playing sports by the ripe old age of 11, citing a sad but obvious reason: It’s not fun anymore.
“It’s a challenge, but I’m quite optimistic,” said Tom Farrey, founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. “The reason is because if you talk with kids — and we do for our surveys — the vast majority want to play sports. But it has to be served in a form that meets their needs and interests.”
He then put the matter in pithier terms: “The demand is there; the supply side needs to be better.”
While there are some encouraging numbers and trends — gains in participation among children who live in lower-income households and growth in community-based programs and leagues — the universal consensus remains that the U.S. must do better when it comes to ensuring children start playing and keep playing.
Beyond the immediate reward of having fun -— that’s what happens when there’s less worry about finding the next LeBron or the next Serena — there are all the other statistically verifiable, lifelong benefits associated with active adult lifestyles: better academic and career achievements; improved physical and mental health; fewer catastrophic illnesses; and so on.
To reach those goals, the first step is to find ways to help children gain access to and sustain an interest in sports and play.
Youth sports is a $30 billion industry in the U.S. That’s both good and bad.
Privately run, for-profit leagues provide millions of children and families with coaches and teammates who share in the joys of learning how to play and compete, but often at the expense of those who can’t afford hefty participation and travel expenses and, at times, risk of injury and burnout for those who do participate because of excessive time and competition demands.
Reform advocates, including the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, which presides over the Project Play initiative to bring key stakeholders together to solve the problems facing youth sports, see cause for optimism. However, they also acknowledge the many hurdles impeding progress.
“There are two main issues,” Dionne Koller, director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said. “One is exclusion and the barriers to entry because youth sport is heavily privatized and it’s extremely expensive and hard to access for lots and lots of kids. For the ones who do get into youth sport, we have another set of problems. Those break down along what is referred to as the professionalization of youth sports.”
Koller is an expert on youth and amateur sports. In 2021, she was named co-chair of the Commission on the State of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the congressionally created and appointed committee formed to ensure better conditions for athletes at all levels, from elite amateurs to recreational youth players.
Her concerns echo those of most experts and executives throughout the fragmented world of youth sports. As almost everyone contacted for this story mentioned, the United States is one of the few countries lacking a ministry of sport or some other governmental body that provides oversight, policymaking and funding.
Ed Foster-Simeon, president and CEO of the U.S. Soccer Foundation, which has installed 500 mini-pitches over the last five years across the country, said that a unified campaign is needed to ensure proper investment in youth sports. “This requires a national effort to tackle this problem at scale,” he said.
The challenges stemming from USOPC’s dual responsibilities of developing top performers in the Olympics and presiding over youth and amateur sports are among the topics Koller is expected to address when the public hears from her commission for the first time as part of the upcoming Project Play Summit (see story, Page 22).
Executives and others involved in, and concerned about, youth sports are encouraged by increasing awareness and action by everyone from apparel and media companies to the biggest pro leagues and sanctioning bodies — while still holding out hope for an overarching government body.
“If we just rely on the private sector to solve the problem, it won’t be solved,” Koller said.
BALANCING PROFIT AND PARTICIPATION
IMG Academy, self-described as the world’s largest sports education brand, runs in-person and online training and recruiting programs, including elite high school and college athletes.
“Of course, the student athletes whose families can afford to pay for our various products and services do,” said Lisa Strasman, president of IMG Academy-owned NCSA College Recruiting. NCSA stands for Next College Student Athlete and its products represent the online side of IMG Academy. “We’ve always recognized there’s a lot who can’t.”
NCSA offers its products and services at different prices to help families of varying income levels.
The company’s All In Award is a scholarship providing access to recruiting products and services for student athletes who demonstrate need and meet other criteria. Last year, NCSA awarded $12.7 million to 4,000 recipients through All In. Another $15 million was provided through 50% discounts for student athletes who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches at their schools.
IMG Academy provided $3.5 million in financial aid in 2022 toward girls’ participation in sports as part of a new initiative backed by a committee of advocates including Lindsay Davenport, Robin Roberts, Michele Tafoya and Lindsey Vonn.
“For our business, it’s baked into our culture,” Strasman said, noting that the programs above have awarded more than $200 million in aid since 2006.
Other for-profit private companies with youth sports outreach initiatives include NBC Sports Next and Varsity Spirit. NBC Sports Next has six apps and technology products tied to youth sports, offering everything from video and streaming to e-commerce and background screening.
The best known of the NBC Sports Next products is SportsEngine, a mobile app that provides tools for messaging, schedules, rosters, availability, and live scoring.
Brett MacKinnon, senior vice president and general manager for youth and recreational sports at NBC Sports Next, noted that SportsEngine is now offered to teams and families at no charge (premium versions are not free). The move, he added, is part of the company’s effort “to reduce the barriers of entry.”
At Varsity Spirit, a Memphis-based competitive cheerleading and dance company, President Bill Seely said the balance between profit and participation is addressed by keeping prices low for competition camps. “We want to make sure kids can afford to attend,” Seely added, estimating the camps cost 25% as much as those for some other sports. As the pandemic went on, Varsity Spirit created a “Take Them All” campaign encouraging coaches to have as many people participate as possible, a campaign that has helped keep participation rates higher in cheer since then.
ENCOURAGING ACTIVITY
Thinking smaller, thinking local, thinking cheaper, and thinking about how to keep kids playing and active into adulthood are among the core strategies endorsed by Project Play, the Aspen Institute initiative.
The Aspen Institute’s Farrey said his organization’s work and collaborations boil down to putting the youth back in youth sports.
“It’s so adult-dominated,” he added. “It’s designed by adults for adults.” Reform, Farrey said, is “a challenge because there’s a lot of money to be made.”
He cited the U.S. Tennis Association and the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation as examples of sports and philanthropic organizations that are investing in youth sports with effective strategies and results.
EIGHT PLAYS
Strategies that Aspen Institute’s Project Play has used as its foundational message and blueprint since 2015.
1 — Ask kids what they want
2 — Reintroduce free play
3 — Encourage sport sampling
4 — Revitalize in-town leagues (to make youth sports more affordable and accessible)
5 — Think small (put fields, courts, and other sports and rec facilities in neighborhoods near children rather than constantly focusing on large complexes designed for tourism-friendly mega tournaments and events)
6 — Design for development (emphasize opportunities to throw, kick, catch, etc., through smaller and nontraditional forms of games and sports instead of focusing on competition and rigorous adherence to top-level versions of sports and games)
7 — Train all coaches
8 — Emphasize prevention of injuries and prevention of all forms of abuse/bullying
Source: Aspen Institute
Between 2015 and 2020, U.S. tennis participation among 6- to 17-year-olds increased 47.5% to 6.23 million, according to the Physical Activity Council. That’s within range of outdoor soccer at 6.76 million, but still well behind baseball (8.21 million) and basketball (11.07 million).
Craig Morris, USTA Community Tennis CEO, cited several factors for the recent gains, including mandatory safety checks for coaches, hybrid versions of tennis (shorter games, team formats) to make it more fun and faster to play, and a developmental model emphasizing school P.E. classes. In addition, the USTA’s tournament structure now has more levels to better ensure level competition. The governing body instituted one-day events to ease time and cost burdens for players and parents alike.
Having a pathway to introduce the game in schools and carry players beyond that introduction was crucial. Or, as Morris put it, “Don’t go hard on acquisition until you’ve got your retention program set up.”
He added, “We have to get sport back in the schools to get kids active and moving.”
Project Play and the USTA are among a chorus of youth sports advocates who see school participation and neighborhood sports facilities as the most important ingredients for boosting participation, particularly among lower-income and underserved populations.
“A kid gets through the first part of the school day to get to the second part,” said Karissa Niehoff, CEO at the National Federation of State High School Associations. “And when we lose them in the second part, the first part might go with it.”
ECONOMIC BARRIERS
Children who come from lower-income homes, who are LGBTQ+, who have disabilities, and those from minority racial and ethnic groups lack access to sports and, in turn, participate at much lower rates. In March, Matt Richtel of The New York Times described the disparities as “the physical divide,” similar to the way the digital divide plagued poorer households until technology companies and other organizations ramped up internet access and provided devices in recent years.
Those disparities are why Project Play’s 23-person cross-sector roundtable, Project Play 2024, places an emphasis on making sports available to youths 12 and younger in underserved areas.
According to federal data from 2020-21, 67.7% of children ages 6 to 17 from the wealthiest homes participated in organized sports, compared with 33.9% from the lowest-income households.
Statistics from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association show that, in 2021, a significant participation gap remains between children from homes with income less than $25,000 and those above $100,000. Among kids 6 to 12, the participation rates were 24.1% and 40.2%, respectively; among youths 13 to 17, the rates were 28% and 47.9%.
Stephen and Ayesha Curry’s Oakland-based Eat.Learn.Play. Foundation, soon after forming in 2019, enlisted the Aspen Institute to conduct a youth sports landscape analysis. That research helped set the blueprint for the foundation’s focus: underserved schools in Oakland’s flatlands area.
Christopher Helfrich, CEO of the Currys’ foundation, said that partnerships with the Oakland school district and Kaboom!, a national nonprofit dedicated to reducing playspace inequities, are helping transform high-need schools that tend to have “a lot of concrete and not a lot of places to play.”
This year, the foundation is installing courts, playgrounds, and soccer mini-pitches, among other features, at six Oakland elementary schools. The school district handles site prep and early construction costs for each project; Eat.Learn.Play. puts in $250,000 to $500,000 per school.
Helfrich said the foundation has targeted 40 schools in Oakland for playground and sports field projects in the coming years.
MICHAEL BONFIGLI / USTA
Familiar faces — Project Play, Kaboom! — as well as Tony Hawk’s nonprofit, The Skatepark Project, are among the key partners of the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation. The foundation serves 16 counties in western New York and southeast Michigan (surrounding Buffalo and Detroit), backed by $1.2 billion generated from the sale of the NFL Buffalo Bills upon Wilson’s death in 2014.
Wilson’s estate calls for all the money to be spent within 20 years, by January 2035. A portion will go to youth sports. Jim Boyle, vice president of programs and communications at the foundation, said the total overall investment will be $2 billion to $2.5 billion by the time funding is exhausted.
So far, the Wilson foundation has awarded $85 million in grants for youth sports and recreation projects. With its various partners, the foundation has helped build 100 play spaces and 20 skateparks.
“We don’t just roll the ball out,” Boyle said. “It’s not a nice-to-have. We look at this as central to community health.”
Sports leagues and governing bodies, too, including MLB, NFL, NBA, WNBA, NHL, MLS, and PGA of America, are investing more money and resources in recreational youth sports, not just the top-level pipelines. They are motivated, in part, by the lifelong fandom likely to accompany early participation.
But a fragmented structure and decades of reinforced sedentary behavior (hello, screenagers) cannot be fixed in a few years or, in the case of Project Play, even a decade.
Koller summed up the challenges in straightforward fashion: “We need to be building a system that the greatest number of kids can access and want to access.”
Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication.