Are youth sports broken? Almost certainly.
It’s easy to rail against the craziness of youth sports parents. I’ve done so in the past, and a lot of it is deserved. But in a strange way, given our current climate, parents are making the rational decision to go hard into youth sports.
That doesn’t mean it’s the best decision or an ideal situation. But what I hope to show is that when we treat the youth sports issue like it’s just parental delusion—some crazy parents living through their child, convinced that their kid will get the athletic scholarship or the NIL deal—we make it impossible to change the system. While parent craziness is real and certainly plays a role, it misses the larger point for most adults faced with the youth sport predicament.
While some parents may be buying athletic development, a large number are buying something much deeper: hope with a dash of reality. They’re paying for the last unmediated, communal, high-stakes hour in their week.
The benefits of youth sports are real. The problem is the cheap version that we all grew up with, that supplied all of these in spades, was taken apart by people who profit from the expensive path.
And that’s exactly why, as outlined in recent articles in New York magazine and The New York Times, private equity is taking over youth sports. It’s a $40 billion dollar industry and they realize that hope, belonging, and the need to feel like your Saturday counted is inelastic. It’s the last thing a parent stops paying for. They’re buying mattering, and it’s recession-proof.
Parents Aren’t Buying Development:
We frequently talk about the screen problem for kids, and it’s a legitimate concern. Here’s a brief glimpse of some of the survey data:
40% of two-year-olds now have their own tablet.
Daily screen media for 2-to-4-year-olds: 2:07
Daily screen media for 5-to-8-year-olds: 3:28
For older kids, it’s even worse. One survey found that 50.4% of teens report 4+ hours a day of non-school screen time. And according to the Pew teen social media surveys, the percentage of teens “almost constantly online” has moved from 24% in 2015 to 40% in 2025.
In many senses, parents are choosing a youth-sports-filled life over a screen-filled one. They’re trading YouTube, video games, and even social media for being outdoors with others. Not entirely, of course. But they know that when little Suzy or Johnny is at practice or playing games all weekend, they won’t be on screens.
It’s what makes youth sports fantastic. It’s an increasingly rare moment where they are without screens, doing something active, with other kids. And even after the games, it’s off to the playground or the pizza place, living like it’s 1995 again. That’s a worthy trade-off, even if you have to deal with the time or financial commitments.
And that’s the entire point. We know the benefits are real. But the price to do so has grown and grown, even though everything I just described is right there for the taking on a Tuesday night rec league for sixty bucks. None of it requires a travel team, three coaches, and a hotel a five hour drive away.
We pay because the sixty dollar version is disappearing. No, not everywhere. Just in enough places where options feel limited, especially the older we get.
That explains why parents sign kids up to play sports. But it doesn’t help us understand why parents tolerate the cost, travel and chaos that is modern youth sports. For that, we’ve got to turn the spotlight on ourselves.
What Youth Sports Gives Parents
The same things that make youth sports important for kids, are right there for us adults too. Less talked about is that adults suffer from that same screen-filled life. And they use youth sports as an antidote for it.
The world around most of us adults pushes us to be alone and numb. Our leisure time has moved from active doing to more passive watching and consuming. During our breaks, or when we’re standing in line, we pick up our phone to deal with that slight sense of unease or boredom. We’ve trained ourselves to use devices as a pacifier. No need to feel any uncomfortable feelings, just numb it away.
And when we do scroll, we’re met with a feed that begs us to care about everything. Cat videos, someone dying, political nonsense, and on and on our feed goes. So in the end, our brain’s rational decision is to numb itself, instead of feeling the herky-jerky back and forth between watching a cute animal video and a drone killing someone in a war.
When we stop feeling much, we reach for those small moments that make us have some sort of emotional reaction. The trolls online are a perfect example. They get their “fix” from stoking outrage in the comments section. They don’t feel anything in the rest of their life, so being the reply guy will have to do.
The antidote to that? Doing things that make you feel something by being actively engaged in the world. It’s why former athletes, even those who made enough money to last a lifetime, take up high school coaching for that little bit of vicarious feeling of what it was like to set foot on the field. It’s why musicians tour long after their popularity fades, and writers keep on writing once the sales figures have plummeted. It’s why Hall of Famer Jaromir Jagr may have finally played his last professional hockey game… at the age of 54.
We all need things that make us feel alive.
The basketball court provides a place where parents are engaged, in the present moment, and actually feeling feelings instead of numbing them away. The same thing it does for our kids, it does for us. We may not be in the actual game, but for those engaged parents on the sideline, it provides this glimmer of feeling something. It’s a real game that you’re invested in, with an actual outcome on the line, that you’re going to feel after the game. In a world starved of significance and meaning, youth sports provides some.
For two hours, people aren’t scrolling through separate realities. They are part of the same event. It sounds strange to say, but it’s one of the few places where everyone occupies the same shared reality. Durkheim called these experiences the collective effervescence. Essentially the difference between being in the stadium and streaming the game. Research tells us these moments of shared attention are processed deeper and felt more intensely, than if we were there alone.
The Mobile Neighborhood
It’s not just feeling alive for adults, it’s also doing so with other people. Consider the following:
Time spent alone rose from 285 minutes a day in 2003 to 333 in 2020.
Time with friends fell from 60 minutes to 20.
Time spent at home rose 99 minutes a day between 2003 and 2022. The largest increase, +124 minutes, was among 15-to-34-year-olds.
The number of people with no close friends has gone from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021.
And men with six or more close friends: 55% (1990) → 27% (2021).
In 1982, Ray Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett called it the decline of third places. The first place was our home. The second was our work. And the third was the informal public places where we gathered and had serendipitous interactions. It’s the coffee shops, bars, parks, diners, churches, bowling alleys, and barbershops. They were the settings in which connection happened. A repeated, low-stakes opportunity to see the same people. Over time those small conversations turned into bigger ones, and soon you had friends you could trust. It’s the 1980s TV show Cheers.
And we’ve seen most of these disappear or become a minimal part of life. As I outlined in a recent piece, we took away all of the friction that forced engagement with other people.
Our kids’ soccer field is one of the few third places left. For a few hours on Saturday, you get to live like it’s 1995 again. You’re surrounded by other adults with a shared interest in the same team. It’s the perfect place to make friends. While we may not talk to our actual neighbors anymore, researchers have described travel teams as a “mobile neighborhood.” And increasingly, parents get a sense of community, identity, and meaning out of their youth sports tribe.
Parents aren’t just living through their kid’s sporting success, they’re using their kid’s sports to satisfy basic psychological needs that we once took for granted: a sense of community, feeling emotions, being present, and a sense of identity.
In 2015, a group of researchers went all in on following a small group of families across 15 months of youth sports activities. They had over 110 hours of direct observation across practices and games, over 40 hours of interviews, and dozens upon dozens of journal entries that parents kept. The title gives away a bit of what happened: “Early Socialization of Parents Through Organized Youth Sport.”
They found that parents developed a new self-concept as “sport parents.” They gained a new identity from being heavily involved. And that sense of self came with a community, or in our language, a third place. Parents described feeling connected to the other parents, as they had a built-in shared interest that occurred at a regular time. As one parent said, “It’s been a nice change… it’s given us something to do, as well as to identify with.” They experienced vicarious emotion. The excitement and anxiety of watching their kid compete was right there, and sometimes overwhelming. As one parent reported before a game, “I’m hoping that [my daughter] does well, probably more so than I did when I was competing. I definitely think there’s more anxiety as a parent.” It’s that vicarious emotion that makes us feel alive.
And lastly, it brought with it something else. An important piece of the puzzle which, as we’ll soon learn, drives much of the youth sports direction we now see: social comparison. Parents started to evaluate their own involvement against what other parents were doing. Their norms and expectations shifted based on what everyone else was doing.
It’s all right there: community, identity, and a place to feel alive.
Is it any wonder why parents spend thousands of dollars and make it where their weekends are spent at a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of nowhere? It’s providing the exact ingredients for living a fulfilling life that we stole from both kids and adults. The kids are getting screen free activity. We’re getting a social group. With a downside that’s seldom talked about, but occasionally rears it’s ugly head. The kid can’t quit her 10U volleyball team without the parents losing their social world.
Maybe a little of that anger from parents saying, “you can’t be a quitter!” is actually the fear of losing their community.
The youth-sports industry doesn’t have to invent the benefits for both our kids and ourselves. It only has to attach two additional forces to them: hope and fear.
The Exploitation of Hope and Fear
If we look at surveys, most parents don’t sign their kids up because they want to be a crazy parent on the sideline with a delusion of a future pro career. The delusional are the outliers, most people are in line with the statistics. Most sign their kids up (and continue paying) for youth sports because of the perceived benefits to their child: teamwork, fitness, friends, confidence, time away from screens, character, learning to win and lose, and so much more. Just about every parent has a few of those in mind when they begin the journey with their kids.
But as they get on that conveyor belt, especially one that is funded by keeping parents on it, they get sold something else:
Hope: Maybe my child has something. Maybe this could lead somewhere.
Fear: What if everyone else is doing more? What if my child falls behind? What if I am the reason they never find out how good they could have been?
We get enticed by all of the stories of little Johnny or Suzy going from runt to playing at Texas A&M. We see the list of players from the same youth club we’re in who actually made it. We hear the coaches praise our kids, and even sell us on what the future may look like. They create just enough possibility. Sometimes it’s for big money in the pros, other times a college scholarship, or still others just a chance to make that high school team so that little Johnny can have something to do in school. It’s that “maybe…” that grows in the parent’s head. It’s the possibility that your child might have a better future that is at the heart of it all.
It’s no different than hearing your child qualifies for the “Gifted and Talented” program. Are you going to say no? Of course not. Except here, the GT program requires you pouring money and time into a seemingly bottomless pit, instead of a few extra GT projects scattered throughout the school year.
No one wants to be the parent who kills their child’s dream. So they keep it alive… even if deep down they know the chances may be slim to none.
All of this is made worse because we live in the age of comparison. We look around and see Jimmy’s parents getting them private lessons, joining the travel team, and think, “My son’s just as good as theirs…” Which then spirals into… “Doesn’t my child deserve the same opportunity…” The comparison drives us insane. And it’s made 100 times worse because it’s not just the kids down the street we’re comparing to, it’s everyone in the entire freaking world.
The feed has changed what “normal” parenting looks like, convincing a generation that normal is a level of extraordinary commitment. It’s why recent researcher show that both moms and dads spend more time with their kids than any modern generation, and yet still feel overwhelming anxiety that they aren’t doing enough.
A recent study found that perceived world threats and upward social comparison on social media were associated with parental anxiety and overprotective parenting. And the youth sports industrial complex hijacks this, playing off that anxiety, and giving us a supposed solution for it… paying them more money. It creates that lingering “what if…” and attacks the heart of “what would a good parent do?”
That’s why private equity is buying up youth sports. Who wants to be the bad parent? Who wants to destroy their kid’s dream? Who wants to take away the one place where adults can find community and kids can be without screens?
And our kids end up feeling that anxiety. Sometimes it’s the parent who spends the car ride home thinking they are offering constructive feedback, when all that child hears is that my dad or mom only cares about how I perform. Other times, it’s seeing your parents spend all that money on your coaches, training, and travel, and then expecting a payoff. Some parents vocalize this payoff, telling their child they need an athletic scholarship. While other well-meaning folks send the same message in a subtler, almost imperceptible way. Researchers found that greater family financial investment is associated with greater perceived parental pressure and lower enjoyment and commitment among children.
Even when parents are trying to do the right thing, children often feel the weight of the investment and expectations. At that point, the problem is no longer a collection of overzealous parents. It becomes a collective-action trap: each family makes an understandable choice, and together those choices gradually eliminate the sane alternative.
The Collective-Action Trap
Most parents don’t want to hire three different coaches and travel to 15 different tournaments in the summer. But our expectations have shifted so far that it’s both normal and often the only viable option. We’ve decimated the cheap options. And we made it hard to make high school teams thanks to giant behemoths of high schools so that we can have more talent to excel at football. The end result is a bunch of kids who never have a shot at even making the high school team, unless they’re very talented or went all in like every other parent in their neighborhood did. Or alternatively, they go the rec league route and look around at 10 and see that there’s no one left on the recreational ballfields to play.
If everyone else is jumping off the bridge, we just do it. Saying “no” seems nearly impossible in many social groups. Or it’s literally the only option. Each parent may be making an individually understandable decision. They weigh the trade-offs and say the screen-free time is worth the potential burnout. And the only way to keep doing that at 8, 9, 10, or what have you, with his friends, is to sign up for the travel team. In many ways, it’s the rational choice.
But collectively, those decisions destroy the affordable, sane alternative. Which is what private equity is counting on with youth sports. It’s right there in the data. When 400+ people active in youth sports investment were surveyed, 61% said recession resilience is what drove their conviction in youth sports as a valuable asset.
What’s recession resilience? Knowing that parents and kids both need what youth sports provides. That people will pay a lot of money for not only the hope of their child’s future, but also the screen-free time, community, and identity that the rest of the modern world has slowly taken away. The product they’re trying to sell isn’t the community or team you’re a part of. It’s the Holiday Inn Express you stay in for the full weekend tournament that doesn’t allow you to video your kids because they offer a subscription service for it.
Of course, there’s an alternative.
Rebuilding the Sane Alternative
Everything good that we want—screen free, active engagement, community, character— comes from the local rec league. It’s the magic of youth sport. You don’t need the fancy stuff to play the game at that level. But we’ve been put in a place where that no longer feels like a choice. That’s intentional. The single conveyor belt with no alternative, the utilizing our parenting fears and the dreams of our kids against us is intentional. It’s what makes it recession proof.
But even if travel leagues are the only option, we can take collective action. Put guardrails on how many travel tournaments we go to. Limit practice time to a reasonable amount, not making winning the 8U championship the be all end all, making a decision with as many parents as you can muster to keep the local teams and competitions afloat.
And perhaps adults need something else, too. While youth sports teams are wonderful places to connect with other parents, if it’s the only third place in your life, if it’s the only thing that makes you feel alive, then every game will carry too much weight. And most of that will be pushed right onto your kid, whether you mean to or not. Find your own third places, and take on meaningful challenges on your own accord that make you feel alive. Your kids will thank you for it later.
Youth sports should add something meaningful to a family’s life. It shouldn’t be the only meaningful thing in it.
-Steve Magness
What can you do as a parent to help your individual child? I covered that in a prior post here. I also created a youth sports guide for parents for free.. You can access it here.
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