High-pressure youth sports is bad for America

Everyone needs to act more normal

Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Like seemingly every other parent of an elementary school-aged kid, I have recently seen Pixar’s “Inside Out 2,” the movie that saved the American box office this year.

The film (no spoilers) focuses on the interior life of a 13-year-old girl named Riley over the course of a three-day hockey clinic that she attends with friends from middle school but also with some older girls with whom she’ll soon be attending high school. Like most of the better Pixar movies, it’s psychologically insightful in a way that resonates with both kids and adults, but in this case, it also struck me as a bit sociologically clueless. The whole point is to illustrate how dramatic typical life experiences can feel when you’re young, so Riley doesn’t have any major problems. She’s not poor, her parents aren’t abusive and both live at home, she’s not traumatized by violence at school. She’s just navigating the dual pressures of making friends at a new school on the cusp of adolescence and her involvement in high-stakes, high-pressure youth sports.

But why has participation in high-stakes, high-pressure youth sports become a typical part of middle-class childhood?

The movie isn’t interested in this question. That’s not a criticism of the movie, exactly, but it is an example of how thoughtlessly the United States has stumbled into our current norms around youth sports. So thoughtlessly, I think, that adults who are young enough to have grown up this way don’t realize that it used to be different and adults who are too old to have experienced it don’t realize how much things have changed. But I think shifting from informal and school-based sports to expensive pay-to-play leagues has landed us in a pretty dysfunctional place, where parenting is unnecessarily complicated, society is unnecessarily inegalitarian, and communities are unnecessarily weak.

It’s the kind of thing where there’s probably not a one-stroke policy solution. There’s not going to be a Just Kick The Ball With Your Friends On The Playground After School Act of 2025. But it’s also beyond the capacity of any one family to address single-handedly. A lot of parenting is a series of collective action issues, where your options are heavily influenced by local norms and where concerted efforts to steer those norms could help land everyone in a better place.

What the hell am I talking about?

Big-time competitive sports reaches its apex with twenty-somethings playing in professional leagues and winning medals at the Olympics. Below that are the teams at Division I colleges, where being good enough to make the roster tends to come with concrete financial benefits and an edge in admissions. And below that is the much larger group of kids playing on varsity high school teams. A particularly talented or motivated child of eight or nine could be playing sports to try to climb that difficult ladder that ends in glory and remuneration.

Obviously, though, the vast majority of kids who take up soccer or basketball or baseball are never going to make money or win a scholarship doing it.

They play because sports is fun. And adults have traditionally encouraged kids to play sports because not only is it fun, it’s healthy to engage in regular physical activity, to say nothing of the useful social and emotional learning associated with the combination of cooperation and competition in sports. Sports helps kids learn discipline and self-control. It’s a way of cultivating an internal sense of agency and motivation — you practice swinging the bat or shooting the ball, even when it’s a little tedious, not because mom or dad is forcing you, but because you want to get better and win games because winning is fun.

Lots of kids don’t like sports, and that’s fine. But most kids do find sports to be enjoyable, and joining a team is a good way to make friends and spend time with other children. And for plenty of people it’s a lifelong hobby they continue to enjoy through club sports in college and rec leagues as adults. My 70-year-old father has never been a competitive tennis player, but he’s played tennis for fun consistently for decades and is currently hoping to rehab from an injury and get back out on the court.

My sense is that traditionally, these paths diverged in high school. You had the varsity squad and the JV team, and you had to work hard and be good to make it off JV and onto varsity. What’s changed is that the conventional wisdom (and perhaps the reality) became that in order to be in a position to make the high school squad, you have to be on a special competitive team in elementary or junior high. That lands you in the situation Jessica Grose described in February:

The typical grouse goes something like this: My kid loves soccer, and I want her to have an opportunity to play through high school. For that to happen, I have to start her in travel soccer in third grade, because all the other kids trying out for the high school team will have started travel soccer in third grade. But travel soccer costs thousands of dollars a year, my child is exhausted and traveling to games almost every weekend is putting strain on my other kids. Don’t even get me started about schlepping to practices all week long.

This can be expensive, exhausting, and annoying. It’s also almost certainly not inherently true that to play high school soccer, you need to begin intensive training when you’re eight. But it becomes a collective action problem and a collective action trap.

The travel team spiral

The basic issue here is that everyone’s individual decisions about this stuff ends up impacting the rest of the community. If none of your kid’s friends are on some travel soccer team, then everything is fine — she and her friends can just play in whatever way is convenient. But if every year, the best two or three kids shift to a travel team, that has downstream impacts.

One is that the more casual team is now a lot worse. That makes it less fun, but it’s certainly not the end of the world.

I think the more insidious aspect is that people are generally conformists. If you’re interested in soccer and your friends who are interested in soccer join the travel team, then you want to join the travel team. And soon it’s not just the top one or two players from each cohort on travel teams, it’s everyone who can afford to be.

This all might make sense if it were something like the government of East Germany trying to build an elite soccer team for reasons of national prestige. But these leagues are not part of some federal program to maximize the quality of American athletes. They are for-profit entities that are making money by charging families to play. So while entry into the leagues is somewhat selective and involves tryouts, the incentive is to avoid setting the bar too high. This is not a question of selecting the most talented 1 percent of young athletes and bringing them into elite programs, it’s about selecting an above-average kid whose parents are willing to pay.

And the ability to pay is an important part of this. This is, again, not a program to maximize American sports performance by giving the most talented kids extra training. A kid at the 70th percentile of ability and the 90th percentile of household income is much more likely to be on an elite team than a kid at the 90th percentile of ability and the 20th percentile of income. The result is a growing class divide in sports participation.

At the end of the cycle, low-touch and low-effort community-based teams have withered to the point where parents who have means often have few alternatives to paying for a travel team. And parents who don’t have means are left with little for their kids to do except mess around on screens.

Selective teams, weaker communities

Pushing selective, expensive, and intense leagues younger and younger down the age pipeline undermines so much of what is valuable about sports.

Project Play found that “the average child today spends less than three years playing a sport, quitting by age 11.”

After all, if what it means to “play baseball” is to join a baseball team that involves high fees and extensive travel, then you and your family need to be very committed to playing baseball. You need to decide at a relatively young age whether your kid is really into Sport X. If the answer is yes, then you’re practicing in the off-season and dedicating your weekends to it. If the answer is no, you’re not playing. In a more low-key world, kids might casually play a wide range of sports seasonally for a period of years just to try things out for the sake of fun and general fitness.

Linda Flanagan wrote a great book on this subject a couple of years ago titled “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters.” She notes that this over-training and over-specialization leads to more injuries and worse health outcomes. It’s clearly bad for poor families, and I think it leads to weaker communities. One of the great things about sports is that it tends to cut across other kinds of political and demographic lines. Kids who all live in the same neighborhood playing sports in their neighborhood against other kids who live nearby is part of having a community. Parents can get to know each other. Because it’s happening locally or grounded in schools, the number of adults who need to be involved in transporting and supervising kids is limited. And because the point is just to have an activity and something to do, it can be reasonably inclusive.

Flanagan and a lot of the advocates in this space talk about the need to fund parks, rec centers, school teams, and other public options that can help break the spiral.

I’m all for that, and I do think it would help at the margin. But I also think we need to be real that the cycle isn’t fundamentally driven by a lack of parks. There’s a youth sports industry that benefits from affluent parents’ participation, and the parents themselves are stuck in a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the family that opts out. On some level, there’s just no alternative to some set of individuals accepting responsibility for making a decision that’s better for society and participating in community-based sports instead of expensive travel teams. If more people do that, then it becomes easier for others to do it. I’d love to see some public officials talking about this and starting to mildly stigmatize it.

Because ultimately, people just need to opt out of the craziness. Unless you have some kind of good faith belief that your kid has the makings of an elite athlete, just chill out and be normal!