Youth Sports Are Disappearing For Many — Unless You Are Rich
How income inequality is removing sports from daily life for so many kids.
My friend James has a 13-year-old son who plays soccer religiously, and has a Ronaldo aura about him, scoring in every game, sometimes in spectacular fashion, weaving between his opponents with the ease and agility of a gazelle, kicking the ball harder than a mule.
Last week, we were standing outside of my home and James groaned, “Yeah, I’m spending about $30,000 a year on his travel team right now. It’s killing me.”
We live here in Florida, which has surprisingly good travel leagues and which I'd known were expensive. But that price tag left my jaw on the floor.
Somewhere between today and 30 years ago, something changed about sports. They were once a universal experience, that was largely independent of how much money your family made.
Today, we’ve seen the rise of elite travel club teams, that start as early as age 8, with kids getting private lessons and sharpening each other’s skills. The youth sports industry has ballooned to more than $15 billion in revenue, with thousands of entities walking away with huge paychecks — but at what cost?
The sad state of youth sports
Per a study led by Dr. Bianca Edison, only 39% of seniors participate in organized sports. There’s also a massive decline in participation among middle schoolers, which has consequences beyond the playing field. Per Dr. Edison, “Sports keep kids active, which can set the stage for healthy long-term habits.” It can lead to lower rates of depression and anxiety. It increases socializing and feelings of belonging, which are so critical, especially in adolescence.
This is also a proxy for the decline of the American childhood. The allure of video games, social media, e-sports, anything digital, has increasingly pulled children away from each other, and out of view of the sunlight, and into a life where we are more secluded and lonely than ever.
Yet with rich families, youth sports participation is rising. Here in Florida, there’s an entire religion around travel baseball teams. You see masses of kids in airports, Chipotles, anywhere people live. And on these teams — I rarely, if ever, see a black player on the team.
And this is in part why there’s so few black players in Major League Baseball. In 2023, we saw record-low numbers of black players in the league, making up only 6.2% of players, despite them comprising more than twice that percentage as a total of the population. Yes, this is in part cultural. We’ve seen competition for talent from other sports, basketball and football, within black communities. And increased competition among white athletes, as baseball is extremely popular with rural, mostly-white communities.
Baseball has a structural issue as well: it requires significant land compared to other sports, which has made it inaccessible to many urban communities.
But there’s also a financial disparity. Travel baseball costs money. Per Jerry Manuel, former manager for the White Socks and Mets, “The sport has gotten so expensive that it has eliminated a lot of our kids. So we’ve got to do everything we can to get them back in the pipeline.”
Playing baseball requires access to transportation, money for high end equipment, and resources to accommodate expensive travel teams — which is how talented players truly develop. And if you come from a low income home or one with a single parent, getting to practice consistently isn’t easy.
Even further, to succeed in baseball, you can’t wait until you are 14 to pick it up. There’s a long learning curve, much like there is with golf and tennis. So by the time disadvantaged kids want to take it up, the sport feels too intimidating or they just get cut from the team.
It was like this with competitive swimming, which I did growing up. It took so much effort on my parent’s part that I only now appreciate. They took turns picking us up and dropping us off. You couldn’t miss many practices and still hope to compete well. There was no getting around the hours needed to develop skills and cardiovascular conditioning to become an athlete.
There’s also the issue with talent localization. When these youth travel leagues steal talented players away from surrounding counties, you’re left with a husk of a local sports team, which robs kids from poorer backgrounds from competing with and developing alongside the best players possible.
Just to travel to a weekend tournament, it can cost well north of $1500 after baking in entry fees and the cost of hotel rooms. This is no small ask if your parent only makes $30,000 a year and you have siblings.
American parents deserve credit
We not only spend the most per-capita on sports in the world, we also spend the most as a percentage of total income. But when comparing the largest bracket to the lowest, you’ll see that wealthy families are spending 7x what the poorest are spending on their children’s sports. A
It’s admirable that parents are involved in any way in their kid’s lives, regardless of their income levels. Yet it does invite the question of how we allow for more involvement in sports, and the ability to compete at a fair level, even if your parents can’t afford an elite aluminum bat, or private batting lessons with a former major leaguer.
Over the past decade, families making $25,000 or less per year, saw children’s sports participation fall to only 26.6%. Whereas with families making more than $100,000, participation went from 35.7% to 38.1%.
Some solutions are easy. We can set up more access to sports through programs like the MLB uses, called the “The Program”, which brings in 1500 youth athletes from disadvantaged communities each year.
If you are the parent of one of these youth athletes, consider sponsoring a kid whose family can’t afford to send their child to it. Coaches also need to be given guidance on how to help disadvantaged kids, whether that’s getting them access to practice and gear, or finding resources that can get them what’s missing.
Another option starts at the top and is a bit counterintuitive: make sports less competitive. Hyper-competitive systems ultimately leads to such high costs. For example, with US Youth Hockey, they’ve eliminated national championships at the peewee level to prevent parents from forming “super” teams, which ultimately leads to greater travel times, huge costs, and reduced local competition.
If you’d like to help, consider donating to programs that are aimed at helping give youth a chance. There’s the Play Equity Fund, which helps on all the aforementioned issues and the Coalition for Sports Equity, which also aims to provide more access.
The takeaway
We should get away from a pay-to-win system. It isn’t meritocratic, and undermines the value of fairness, and probably leaves behind so many talented athletes who could have benefitted by having a safe place to be after school. Kids miss out on the character building attributes of challenging yourself, learning to win with humility, losing with grace, being a team player, and becoming a leader.
We stand to benefit as a society by lowering the walls of access. Getting kids involved in sports reduces their odds of doing drugs, committing crimes, and improves a child’s odds of finishing high school. It even reduces the risk of teen pregnancy. Failing to do these things are all predictors of poverty later in life.
Let’s do more and open the doors to more kids. Sports are such a great aspect of life and can bring us together in these unending moments of division.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of Tampa, Florida. I write story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.