If anyone has signed up to an Audible membership, there is an Audible-exclusive short book (two-three hours?) from Moneyball author Michael Lewis covering his experience as a father with learning about the youth sports industrial complex. It's included with Audible (ie you don't need to use a credit) and I recommend it (also covers some of the economics, venture capital etc. components of it)
Our kids played some “travel” sports and attended a large, inner ring suburban HS with moderately competitive sports programs - 2 kids from the last 10 years or so are in the NFL and NBA today, and many many played Division 1 sports. I think the “travel league” experience has a lot more variance than described.
This description of the travel leagues does not reflect what we saw - the travel league option was not related to profit-taking or striving for eventual varsity sports, but more to supplement existing offerings and competition, usually a few parent coaches who just wanted to put teams together and join somewhat more competitive leagues with zero regard for future success.
True that the costs were out of reach for some - but sliding scales were also available. I think in an ideal world that rec leagues would be a high quality option, but that is just not always the case.
If parents are unrealistic enough to not understand their child’s potential for future athletic success, that is a completely different story. I don’t think you can blame travel leagues for that.
Relatedly, there seems (at least from my experience living in DC and MD) to be much less organized team sport for adults in the US than in Australia. So, once a kid drops out of high school sport, that's it.
OTOH, individual sports like running are available at any age, and seem to be having a cultural moment.
The problem is not entirely a collective action one, or maybe it is a collective action problem that has morphed into a market failure in some communities. The problem may not just be parents opting into pay/travel leagues with rose colored glasses on, but that the expansion of travel/pay leagues to include lots of non-elite organizations that provide some training, but mostly exist as a profit-making venture, has choked off rec leagues and school programs where otherwise average-to-good players would go.
As an example, my kids play soccer. We used to live in Columbus, Ohio, which has a major league soccer team with a robust academy program. There are also lots of travel/pay teams and leagues, school teams, and a very healthy ecosystem of low-cost rec leagues. When my kids (average players) were younger, they played in school and also the rec leagues.
We moved to Cleveland, which has much less of a soccer culture than Columbus. At younger ages, there were both school teams and decent community/rec leagues available, but that evaporated in middle school. They go to Catholic school, so there were not enough kids to field a team through the school, and no rec league options past 6th grade (at least local to us). They are both on reasonably low-cost travel teams (only play within an hour or so range), not because we think they are phenoms, but because there were no other options available.
I have a friend who is the athletic director for a nearby suburban school district. The travel leagues have siphoned off so many players for some sports that it has been difficult to maintain programs at some of the schools, particularly at the middle school level. I do not think Matt is advocating for doing away with travel leagues (as some in the comments section may have inferred), but that the travel leagues, at least in some communities, have established a pay-to-play monopoly in some sports by choking off the traditional community/school options. This probably varies wildly by sport and geography, but it can remove free/low-cost options for casual players, or for average players who do not really have any sports plans post-high school. As someone pointed out, they also hoover up the types of players and parents who were really key to keeping those rec leagues alive.
In some cases, it would be kind of a mid-sized city that only had two grocery store options -- Whole Foods or the gas station. When we were in Columbus, there were plenty of options because there was an abundance of soccer related resources (coaches, fields, kids, etc.). In Cleveland, where there is a more finite amount of interested kids, qualified coaches (both volunteer and pro), and space, the travel teams have killed the rec league system for older kids in soccer. We were really surprised at how hard it was to find places the kids could play after 5th grade or so. Some of the rec baseball leagues have also struggled a bit because of travel ball, from what I have observed, but not as much.
I ran a women's gymnastics program from 1985 to 2024 and saw this takeover. It's all about the money. Adults discovered parents will pay to boost their kids and dove into a new market. The scandals in gymnastics are a direct result: none of the parents of the abused gymnasts stood in the way of the abuse. It's on the exploiters and the parents.
One possible cause of travel teams that I wish you had explored was the declining quality of public school and community offerings. We personally felt the need to find private activities for our kids as the community offerings were just dreadful. Gym teachers too fat to run and promoting cupcakes, teachers and after school leaders that really hated boys (because they were future men) and no discipline and structure on the playground. These private service providers grew as there was a real need to fill.
This is a tough bind for a lot of parents. I am someone who really doesn't want my kid to end us socially segregated into almost exclusively white, rich, elite spaces. That may sound pretty basic but for many successful professional families it is pretty counter cultural. It is part of why I chose public school, specifically our neighborhood public school rather than an "option" or "magnet" or "hcc" program. I had her taking swimming lessons at the city pool, etc. There were parents of her friends who thought that it was really unfair that we weren't giving our daughter the "best" experiences we could afford. But my husband and I went to public schools and played on parks and rec teams and we felt that was a healthier culture.
But then my daughter got interested in Hockey. My daughter is only 15 but when she started at age 6 there just wasn't much girl's hockey in Seattle. We joined a non-profit club but there were only two teams for girls her age and it got boring just playing the same girls each week. At the end of the first year, the girls went to a tournament in British Columbia and got to play 8 different teams in a weekend. My daughter loved it. The girls all stayed at the same hotel. It was like a big slumber party for her with a pool and pizza party at the end. But then she turned 8 and we got invited to join the Representative Team. It would play games every weekend but one each month in British Columbia (3 hr drive) against the dozens of teams in the area. I thought that sound nuts. My husband who was volunteer coaching for the club was more interested but also thought it sounds like a lot. But then we realized that this Rep team was not only where all her friends were going to play but that it was only going to leave one rec league team for her age group. They would just practice and scrimmage together and occassionally play the rec team a year older or year younger. That was just depressing.
So we signed up. And then she was playing all the time and got good and each year the idea of having to play on the sad one or two rec teams left behind after the rep team was chosen seems more and more bleak as the girls on the Rep team got better and better and most of the girls on the rec team didn't improve nearly as much. New girls would join the rec team but it takes a couple years to really learn to skate and play. They do a club wide 3 on 3 program in the Spring and those poor girls who were new just got trounced by the more experienced Rep team girls. Every Spring now features these high stakes tryouts with girls coming from all over Western Washington to try to make these damn rep teams. Every year, I hope she won't make the cut. Every year she does and she wants to do it and we say yes.
The worst part was the parents. They were so intense. So many of them thought their daughters had potential to play college hockey and are pushing them hard to reach that goal. They are nuts. Only one girl on our team in nearly that good and her parents already had the experience of having their older daughter play Division II hockey and burn out so they don't want that for her. Many of the parents sign their kids up for private lessons to supplement the 3 practices and 4 games they play a week. It seems insane. I only go a few games a year since my husband already has to go as a coach. The yelling and pressure from the parents in the stands are unreal. There was one tournament where our team was in the finals and all the parents were yelling and pounding the glass for the whole first two quarters except for me and one dad. They finally asked us why we were not yelling. He said he gets quiet when he was stressed. I said "I don't really give a fuck about the outcome of a youth hockey game. These are just two groups of kids divided arbitrarily by geographic area playing a game for no stakes except for what color the plastic metals they are going to get afterwards." Needless to say, I am not popular with the other parents. Luckily for my daughter, they really love my husband as an assistant coach who also does yell but they think that makes him look like a "serious, stoic, collegetic coach." Whatever the hell that means.
This year my daughter also took up water polo in the Spring for her high school. Since I don't do much for hockey, I got tasked as the waterpolo parent. It was so different. All the games were local against other public high schools. The parents were mostly chill. One girl was actually go enough to get offered a place on a college team next year but no one else is nearly that good and we are all super clear about it. They made it to state this year which was fun but the parents mostly seems shocked we got that far rather than being obsessed with winning at state.
Now that Seattle has an actual NHL team, interest in youth hockey has exploded. The Kraken created their own youth hockey team and are gradually killing off all the other clubs. They aren't doing girls my daughter's age yet but they will in a few years and our club will be a goner. I am so jealous of these younger girls who will get to actually play in a local league with 8 to 10 teams. I think they will probably still do a Rep team up to Canada but my daughter has been clear that she wouldn't opt for that if there was a real local option. Ironically, the Kraken league is for profit while our club is non-profit so that runs contrary to the pattern that Matt pointed out.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I don't think that it is somehow a solution, but there is one major youth sports organization that has (sort of) escaped this: Little League baseball. Because the Little League World Series is famous and on ESPN, kids aged 10-12 really want to play it. But in order to play in the competition that will get you on ESPN, you have to join the regular rec team with kids that are not that good at baseball. After the season, each league takes the best players on the regular teams and makes an all-star team to compete in the championship that ends up on ESPN. My son is pretty good at baseball and played on the Little League state champions team last summer, but he also loved playing with his regular season Little League team with kids who were not all all-star material and I think the "regular" kids had a better experience with the team that included kids of all skill levels. I have my qualms with putting a bunch of 12-year-olds on tv--it is a lot of pressure--but I do think having that carrot creates a better youth sports experience for more kids.
Matt, is this a subject you'd consider covering in greater depth? Perhaps another series such as the recent examination of left-right?
I think this aspect of our society warrants far more attention, and could provide sneaky-oblique entry into the greater pathologies (and, I'm sure, somehow a few successes) within our culture.
The critical thing I think drives this - and I speak only from the experience of living in suburban and exurban areas, I don't know what its like in cities like DC where Matt lives - is simply how many kids with families live in the area.
There is differentiation between kids on ability, parent willingness to pay for travel sports, etc, but ultimately, if the supply of kids is high enough, you can have rec leagues that do a good job of allowing kids to play through their entire school years.
When you don't have this, it falls apart completely. All kids who want to play end up either going the travel route or end up just stopping. The rec leagues that do exist consolidate age brackets, which make it less fun, and in some cases for soccer and basketball, gender brackets, which drive all the girls out.
The first situation is what I grew up with in Carroll County MD in the 2000s-early 2010s. Sports were under threat because of the best kids going to prep schools and travel teams, but there were still enough to make it possible to have rec leagues with decent participation, and this was in multiple sports. Football I think was starting to come under more pressure around the end, but that was the exception.
The latter situation is what I observed with family in the Albany NY region in the late 2010s. After COVID, the leagues basically collapsed, and so did the travel teams, although I think they are trying to restart the rec program.
Where my fiancee is from, right near the Tennessee-Georgia border near Chattanooga, the situation is completely different. Tons of kids are playing sports, and there are just a lot of kids, period. The rec league for baseball and for lacrosse (its growing in the South) have multiple divisions for each agre group bracketed for skill, and high school sports are a major part of the local community.
Is this just a cultural thing? Is the south just more sports friendly? Or more kid friendly, in the sense that parents are voting with their feet and preferring to raise families in the Sunbelt? That might be overstating it. But the bottom line is that youth sports needs lot of kids who are interested, and they don't all have to come from upper middle class families.
Much like the housing debate, there are tons of things that we can talk about regarding land use, luxury vs affordable, NIMBYism, etc, but there is a truth to that notion that quantity provides a quality in and of itself. The youth sports problem seems to be a reaction to there simply being less kids into sports, and less kids in general, much as the Hagwon culture in East Asia is a reaction to declining fertility in many ways.
Matt, I certainly know where you’re coming from, but I’d like to focus on your last statement. In the highly competitive families who love sports, Travel teams can fill a need for the parents as well as the children. Parents who have had great success in sports generally see at least one of their children as exceptionally gifted. The these parents are happy to get involved in Town teams as Coaches, Refs, Etc. The kids play several different sports: soccer, lacrosse, basketball, baseball, football and gymnastics. As they show promise in one or more these families advance to Travel Teams at around ages 11 or 12. They continue to play Town and School teams. At 13 some kids become paid Refs. The schedules and miles of driving are horrendous. When this is pointed out, a parent will reply that their child needs to be doing these sports so they won’t just be on tv or computer games. Or the kids are so happy playing several sports they are happy to support them. Years ago when I was bringing up my own children, we just used the town teams and swimming pool.
Athletics may teach some useful skills not taught in class, but I have not noticed any superior morality of athletes!
If anyone has signed up to an Audible membership, there is an Audible-exclusive short book (two-three hours?) from Moneyball author Michael Lewis covering his experience as a father with learning about the youth sports industrial complex. It's included with Audible (ie you don't need to use a credit) and I recommend it (also covers some of the economics, venture capital etc. components of it)
EDIT: it's very good :-)
Our kids played some “travel” sports and attended a large, inner ring suburban HS with moderately competitive sports programs - 2 kids from the last 10 years or so are in the NFL and NBA today, and many many played Division 1 sports. I think the “travel league” experience has a lot more variance than described.
This description of the travel leagues does not reflect what we saw - the travel league option was not related to profit-taking or striving for eventual varsity sports, but more to supplement existing offerings and competition, usually a few parent coaches who just wanted to put teams together and join somewhat more competitive leagues with zero regard for future success.
True that the costs were out of reach for some - but sliding scales were also available. I think in an ideal world that rec leagues would be a high quality option, but that is just not always the case.
If parents are unrealistic enough to not understand their child’s potential for future athletic success, that is a completely different story. I don’t think you can blame travel leagues for that.
Relatedly, there seems (at least from my experience living in DC and MD) to be much less organized team sport for adults in the US than in Australia. So, once a kid drops out of high school sport, that's it.
OTOH, individual sports like running are available at any age, and seem to be having a cultural moment.
The problem is not entirely a collective action one, or maybe it is a collective action problem that has morphed into a market failure in some communities. The problem may not just be parents opting into pay/travel leagues with rose colored glasses on, but that the expansion of travel/pay leagues to include lots of non-elite organizations that provide some training, but mostly exist as a profit-making venture, has choked off rec leagues and school programs where otherwise average-to-good players would go.
As an example, my kids play soccer. We used to live in Columbus, Ohio, which has a major league soccer team with a robust academy program. There are also lots of travel/pay teams and leagues, school teams, and a very healthy ecosystem of low-cost rec leagues. When my kids (average players) were younger, they played in school and also the rec leagues.
We moved to Cleveland, which has much less of a soccer culture than Columbus. At younger ages, there were both school teams and decent community/rec leagues available, but that evaporated in middle school. They go to Catholic school, so there were not enough kids to field a team through the school, and no rec league options past 6th grade (at least local to us). They are both on reasonably low-cost travel teams (only play within an hour or so range), not because we think they are phenoms, but because there were no other options available.
I have a friend who is the athletic director for a nearby suburban school district. The travel leagues have siphoned off so many players for some sports that it has been difficult to maintain programs at some of the schools, particularly at the middle school level. I do not think Matt is advocating for doing away with travel leagues (as some in the comments section may have inferred), but that the travel leagues, at least in some communities, have established a pay-to-play monopoly in some sports by choking off the traditional community/school options. This probably varies wildly by sport and geography, but it can remove free/low-cost options for casual players, or for average players who do not really have any sports plans post-high school. As someone pointed out, they also hoover up the types of players and parents who were really key to keeping those rec leagues alive.
In some cases, it would be kind of a mid-sized city that only had two grocery store options -- Whole Foods or the gas station. When we were in Columbus, there were plenty of options because there was an abundance of soccer related resources (coaches, fields, kids, etc.). In Cleveland, where there is a more finite amount of interested kids, qualified coaches (both volunteer and pro), and space, the travel teams have killed the rec league system for older kids in soccer. We were really surprised at how hard it was to find places the kids could play after 5th grade or so. Some of the rec baseball leagues have also struggled a bit because of travel ball, from what I have observed, but not as much.
Not sure what the solution would be.
I ran a women's gymnastics program from 1985 to 2024 and saw this takeover. It's all about the money. Adults discovered parents will pay to boost their kids and dove into a new market. The scandals in gymnastics are a direct result: none of the parents of the abused gymnasts stood in the way of the abuse. It's on the exploiters and the parents.
One possible cause of travel teams that I wish you had explored was the declining quality of public school and community offerings. We personally felt the need to find private activities for our kids as the community offerings were just dreadful. Gym teachers too fat to run and promoting cupcakes, teachers and after school leaders that really hated boys (because they were future men) and no discipline and structure on the playground. These private service providers grew as there was a real need to fill.
This is a tough bind for a lot of parents. I am someone who really doesn't want my kid to end us socially segregated into almost exclusively white, rich, elite spaces. That may sound pretty basic but for many successful professional families it is pretty counter cultural. It is part of why I chose public school, specifically our neighborhood public school rather than an "option" or "magnet" or "hcc" program. I had her taking swimming lessons at the city pool, etc. There were parents of her friends who thought that it was really unfair that we weren't giving our daughter the "best" experiences we could afford. But my husband and I went to public schools and played on parks and rec teams and we felt that was a healthier culture.
But then my daughter got interested in Hockey. My daughter is only 15 but when she started at age 6 there just wasn't much girl's hockey in Seattle. We joined a non-profit club but there were only two teams for girls her age and it got boring just playing the same girls each week. At the end of the first year, the girls went to a tournament in British Columbia and got to play 8 different teams in a weekend. My daughter loved it. The girls all stayed at the same hotel. It was like a big slumber party for her with a pool and pizza party at the end. But then she turned 8 and we got invited to join the Representative Team. It would play games every weekend but one each month in British Columbia (3 hr drive) against the dozens of teams in the area. I thought that sound nuts. My husband who was volunteer coaching for the club was more interested but also thought it sounds like a lot. But then we realized that this Rep team was not only where all her friends were going to play but that it was only going to leave one rec league team for her age group. They would just practice and scrimmage together and occassionally play the rec team a year older or year younger. That was just depressing.
So we signed up. And then she was playing all the time and got good and each year the idea of having to play on the sad one or two rec teams left behind after the rep team was chosen seems more and more bleak as the girls on the Rep team got better and better and most of the girls on the rec team didn't improve nearly as much. New girls would join the rec team but it takes a couple years to really learn to skate and play. They do a club wide 3 on 3 program in the Spring and those poor girls who were new just got trounced by the more experienced Rep team girls. Every Spring now features these high stakes tryouts with girls coming from all over Western Washington to try to make these damn rep teams. Every year, I hope she won't make the cut. Every year she does and she wants to do it and we say yes.
The worst part was the parents. They were so intense. So many of them thought their daughters had potential to play college hockey and are pushing them hard to reach that goal. They are nuts. Only one girl on our team in nearly that good and her parents already had the experience of having their older daughter play Division II hockey and burn out so they don't want that for her. Many of the parents sign their kids up for private lessons to supplement the 3 practices and 4 games they play a week. It seems insane. I only go a few games a year since my husband already has to go as a coach. The yelling and pressure from the parents in the stands are unreal. There was one tournament where our team was in the finals and all the parents were yelling and pounding the glass for the whole first two quarters except for me and one dad. They finally asked us why we were not yelling. He said he gets quiet when he was stressed. I said "I don't really give a fuck about the outcome of a youth hockey game. These are just two groups of kids divided arbitrarily by geographic area playing a game for no stakes except for what color the plastic metals they are going to get afterwards." Needless to say, I am not popular with the other parents. Luckily for my daughter, they really love my husband as an assistant coach who also does yell but they think that makes him look like a "serious, stoic, collegetic coach." Whatever the hell that means.
This year my daughter also took up water polo in the Spring for her high school. Since I don't do much for hockey, I got tasked as the waterpolo parent. It was so different. All the games were local against other public high schools. The parents were mostly chill. One girl was actually go enough to get offered a place on a college team next year but no one else is nearly that good and we are all super clear about it. They made it to state this year which was fun but the parents mostly seems shocked we got that far rather than being obsessed with winning at state.
Now that Seattle has an actual NHL team, interest in youth hockey has exploded. The Kraken created their own youth hockey team and are gradually killing off all the other clubs. They aren't doing girls my daughter's age yet but they will in a few years and our club will be a goner. I am so jealous of these younger girls who will get to actually play in a local league with 8 to 10 teams. I think they will probably still do a Rep team up to Canada but my daughter has been clear that she wouldn't opt for that if there was a real local option. Ironically, the Kraken league is for profit while our club is non-profit so that runs contrary to the pattern that Matt pointed out.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I am so glad that the conversation around this is heating up. Our family has so far decided to forgo club sports and our kids will definitely have a harder time making school teams as a result. I hope that the additional at-home family time, home cooked meals, slow hours with opportunities for wonder, time for reading, playing board games, making art, wandering the yard and neighborhood, and having siblings as companions more often than teammates, will be a positive trade off. Even the opportunity to sometimes sleep in on the weekend is important. For religious families, intense sports schedules can cut into church attendance even as research shows regular church attendance is associated with many positive outcomes for children. From what I hear from friends involved in travel clubs, there is pressure (and financial incentives) for everyone to stay at the same hotel and then the kids hang out with the kids (often with screens) and the parents hang out with the parents (often drinking in the lobby) which I think must be detrimental to families. Dr. Leonard Sax, in one of his books, cautioned parents to think about the message that is sent to the child when the family schedule and even finances, revolve so tightly around the child’s participation in sports. They get a twisted message about priorities and can feel pressure to continue even if they don’t want to. I also had never thought of the class divide nature of all of this and I really appreciate your bringing that forward as it’s an important point.
I don't think that it is somehow a solution, but there is one major youth sports organization that has (sort of) escaped this: Little League baseball. Because the Little League World Series is famous and on ESPN, kids aged 10-12 really want to play it. But in order to play in the competition that will get you on ESPN, you have to join the regular rec team with kids that are not that good at baseball. After the season, each league takes the best players on the regular teams and makes an all-star team to compete in the championship that ends up on ESPN. My son is pretty good at baseball and played on the Little League state champions team last summer, but he also loved playing with his regular season Little League team with kids who were not all all-star material and I think the "regular" kids had a better experience with the team that included kids of all skill levels. I have my qualms with putting a bunch of 12-year-olds on tv--it is a lot of pressure--but I do think having that carrot creates a better youth sports experience for more kids.
"What the hell am I talking about?"
This is a great header for a section. Just saying.
Matt, is this a subject you'd consider covering in greater depth? Perhaps another series such as the recent examination of left-right?
I think this aspect of our society warrants far more attention, and could provide sneaky-oblique entry into the greater pathologies (and, I'm sure, somehow a few successes) within our culture.
The critical thing I think drives this - and I speak only from the experience of living in suburban and exurban areas, I don't know what its like in cities like DC where Matt lives - is simply how many kids with families live in the area.
There is differentiation between kids on ability, parent willingness to pay for travel sports, etc, but ultimately, if the supply of kids is high enough, you can have rec leagues that do a good job of allowing kids to play through their entire school years.
When you don't have this, it falls apart completely. All kids who want to play end up either going the travel route or end up just stopping. The rec leagues that do exist consolidate age brackets, which make it less fun, and in some cases for soccer and basketball, gender brackets, which drive all the girls out.
The first situation is what I grew up with in Carroll County MD in the 2000s-early 2010s. Sports were under threat because of the best kids going to prep schools and travel teams, but there were still enough to make it possible to have rec leagues with decent participation, and this was in multiple sports. Football I think was starting to come under more pressure around the end, but that was the exception.
The latter situation is what I observed with family in the Albany NY region in the late 2010s. After COVID, the leagues basically collapsed, and so did the travel teams, although I think they are trying to restart the rec program.
Where my fiancee is from, right near the Tennessee-Georgia border near Chattanooga, the situation is completely different. Tons of kids are playing sports, and there are just a lot of kids, period. The rec league for baseball and for lacrosse (its growing in the South) have multiple divisions for each agre group bracketed for skill, and high school sports are a major part of the local community.
Is this just a cultural thing? Is the south just more sports friendly? Or more kid friendly, in the sense that parents are voting with their feet and preferring to raise families in the Sunbelt? That might be overstating it. But the bottom line is that youth sports needs lot of kids who are interested, and they don't all have to come from upper middle class families.
Much like the housing debate, there are tons of things that we can talk about regarding land use, luxury vs affordable, NIMBYism, etc, but there is a truth to that notion that quantity provides a quality in and of itself. The youth sports problem seems to be a reaction to there simply being less kids into sports, and less kids in general, much as the Hagwon culture in East Asia is a reaction to declining fertility in many ways.
Matt, I certainly know where you’re coming from, but I’d like to focus on your last statement. In the highly competitive families who love sports, Travel teams can fill a need for the parents as well as the children. Parents who have had great success in sports generally see at least one of their children as exceptionally gifted. The these parents are happy to get involved in Town teams as Coaches, Refs, Etc. The kids play several different sports: soccer, lacrosse, basketball, baseball, football and gymnastics. As they show promise in one or more these families advance to Travel Teams at around ages 11 or 12. They continue to play Town and School teams. At 13 some kids become paid Refs. The schedules and miles of driving are horrendous. When this is pointed out, a parent will reply that their child needs to be doing these sports so they won’t just be on tv or computer games. Or the kids are so happy playing several sports they are happy to support them. Years ago when I was bringing up my own children, we just used the town teams and swimming pool.