Private Equity Is Coming for Youth Sports
Bloomberg’s cover story in September was all about youth sports (alt link). I’m not involved in youth sports right now, but since I grew up playing, it is interesting to read about what seems to be a totally different world than even 20 years ago.
The sandlot era when kids played sports largely unsupervised is long gone, Goldberg says. And the days of parent-coached recreational leagues are fast receding. In their place has come the age of travel squads. Kids as young as 6 are playing on teams with paid coaches, year-round schedules, multiple practices per week, long-distance travel and, in many cases, intense competition for roster spots. In theory, these teams prepare kids to play at the college level and beyond. In practice, they’re making youth sports increasingly expensive, exclusive and pressurized.
In the chase for a limited supply of college scholarships, more kids are also specializing in a single sport at younger ages, despite research showing that cross-sport sampling is best for their athletic development, not to mention mental health. American parents are also going to greater and greater lengths, including hiring private coaches and buying high-end equipment, to pad their kids’ sports résumés and give them an edge on their college applications. They’re spending at least $30 billion a year on youth sports, according to 2022 research by the Aspen Institute. And the actual tally could be as much as $50 billion by now, according to Tom Farrey, head of the nonprofit’s sports and society program. On average, parents spend about $900 per child per season, according to Aspen, whose research also shows that children from households making $150,000 or more are more than twice as likely to participate in travel and club sports than those from households making less than $50,000.
This setup is inefficient at identifying and developing athletic talent, because it pushes aside children from low-income and single-parent homes. It’s also often no fun for kids, whose play comes to resemble unpaid work, and miserable for parents, whose nights and weekends become an endless series of training sessions, tournaments and trips to Dick’s Sporting Goods. “Parents are all just working with a system that is dysfunctional at best and broken at worst,” Farrey says, “but they’re afraid to step out of that, because they love their kids and they just don’t want them to miss out.”
It seems like money is coming in to solve a problem that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place. I’m proud that my City government still sees youth recreation not as a service to save money on, but on a development program that pays off in less crime, better education, better involvement, and a more vibrant city. I don’t know how sports should be funded in the US (where they can all too often take over schools). But the new system doesn’t seem to be the way. It seems to be bad for everyone – including actual professional sports who increasingly go abroad looking for top talent (which – is a good trend that is reinforced, but not driven by struggling US talent development).
Aside – a lot of the obsession seems to be driven by the opportunity for college scholarships. I don’t know about Ivy League and top private institutions, but maybe we fully-fund state universities so sports can be about sports…not about “getting ahead”?
