Youth Sports Used to be For Kids: Now It's a $40 Billion Industry | The Deep

Youth sports used to be about Saturday morning soccer with dad, scrappy sandlots, used equipment, ill-fitting uniforms, the agony of striking out in front of all your friends, the thrill of a home team victory, followed by soft-serve ice cream at the local dairy stand. Today, we get brand deals, YouTube channels, private trainers, destination tournaments, and 10-year-olds on the global stage. Kids sports feels out of control. It seems like kids' sports went from Lord of the Flies-style strikeout to elite pipelines to the pros.

How did American childhood become big business, valued at $40 billion? That's almost double Disney's annual content budget. What happened to mainstream options for moderately interested athletes? Better, what happened to the Sandlot? Not the movie. I mean the actual free-for-all field where the kids voluntarily head after school, or on long, unstructured summer days for a game of pickup baseball, or soccer, or basketball. Some of the most iconic American sports movies center on kids, with adults playing peripheral coach roles. The Sandlot, The Mighty Ducks, Rookie of the Year.

Even Hoosiers opens with small-town boys messing around with a ball and their dreams of glory. The movies have happy endings, but not because all the kids get the college scholarships, turn pro, or win Olympic gold. They told stories about kids discovering what it means to be human by playing the game. But something went very wrong with organized kids. Sports. And I don't think it was because kids stopped loving games, or even because moms and dads wanted to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and every waking moment on travel teams.

So, how did we all end up somewhere no one wants to be? Let's back up and get some context. Since I was a kid, the youth sports industry has exploded. Revenue is estimated, as I mentioned, at $30 to $40 billion annually. According to the Aspen Institute's Project Play Initiative, in 2024, the average U.S. family spent $1,016 on one child's primary sport, a 46% increase since 2019. The cost per family skyrockets when you drill down on travel team sports. Last year, child athlete travel to tournaments and competitions accounted for a staggering 60% of the $52 billion sports tourism industry.

To stay competitive at these events, kids in travel programs typically train year-round to keep up with all the other kids who are training year-round. Moms are forced to print glossy headshots of their budding Tom Brady's for promotional purposes.

Needless to say, this is a pay-to-play scenario, and the wealthiest families, those reporting $100,000 or more on annual income, are spending the most. It's not just the money, though. The time commitment and performance expectations have become almost unbearable. Factoring in practice time, competitions, communicating with other parents, caring for equipment and uniforms, and just talking to your kids about their performance, parents of high school athletes report spending an average of 223 minutes daily on sports activities. Tackle football families spend more. The risk of serious injury has also risen among preteen athletes, as kids spend more time training for one sport year-round.

So, what happens next? Another AAP study found 50% of these injuries are a result of overtraining, ACL tears, shoulder and elbow damage, hip and ankle surgery, issues once largely limited to college or professional athletes, are now common among preteens. The sane response to this state of affairs is a question. To what end? What could possibly justify these kinds of expenses and strain on the child's body and family? Prepare for some cognitive dissonance. According to the Aspen Institute, most parents, 80%, enroll their kids in competitive sports because the child is interested, and 58% to make sure they'll be able to play on a high school team.

Gone are the days of a walk-on player at 9th grade. About 23% really believe their kid will make the college team and earn full-ride athletic scholarships. 11% believe their child will play professional sports someday. The reality? Less than 2% will play in college, and less than 1% will ever play professionally.

And yet, parents who can't afford to do so keep enrolling their kids in an industry where they can't afford to do so. So, what happens next? That acts like a pre-professional program and looks nothing like organized sports looked back in the 90s. Parents report high satisfaction with sports, and those who don't are playing keeping up with the Joneses. The kids, however, are voting with their feet. America's kids are abandoning sports in droves. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, roughly 70% of American kids quit organized sports by age 13.

That's right. Seven out of ten kids are done before they even reach high school. More concerning for kids' athletics is the trending direction of participation. In 2016 to 2017, 58.3% of kids ages 6 to 17 participated in a sports team or took sports lessons after school or on the weekend. Five years later, that share had dropped to 54.6%. And the drop was sharpest for boys, down from 50% in 2013 to just 41% in 2023. The decline seems to have stalled in recent years, but we're still waiting on those numbers.

Understandable, for sure. Much of organized sports has become a pay-to-play industry, leaving behind lower-to-middle-income families. Additionally, Every industry catering to kids is facing the demographic cliff. The graduating high school class peaked at 3.8 million students in 2025, and from here on out, the classes will all shrink rapidly. But that doesn't explain why the percentage of kids abandoning sports before high school is so shockingly high. The toxic effects don't end with kids. They reshape marriages and families.

Like car seat laws and inflation, the professionalization of sports has become a factor in whether people are willing to have children at all. The costs also show up in communities. Travel teams drain neighborhoods. When the most athletic kids and the most involved parents leave local leagues early, rec sports hollow out, local fields sit empty, and pickup games disappear. Because the kids most interested in organizing them have themselves been organized away. That loss is hard to quantify, but anyone who has watched a once vibrant local league quietly collapse knows that it is real.

Why? What's the currency if not Olympic gold or an NBA contract? The real currency for parents is belonging and prestige, and that prestige trickles upward. Travel teams feed elite clubs. Elite clubs feed varsity teams. Varsity feeds recruiting camps. Recruiting camps sell a dream at a very high price. Now, I hear the objections. As commentator Diana Lind helpfully put it, quit whining. First of all, she writes, raising kids is filled with tons of moments where you have to say, that's not what we do in this family, and explain why you live differently.

She adds, but more importantly, it's like these folks have never considered that they might have to create the thing they want to exist. Now, I tend to be a pick-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps kind of New Englander. I am a Mayflower OG heritage American, but I think Diana underestimates how hard and even impossible it can be for most people to break out of a system where no one is accountable for how bad it is. Blame the other parents. They're just responding to market pressure and herd mentality.

Blame the colleges. They're trying to survive, and sports are the moneymaker. Blame the theme parks and the Little League board. They're responding to parent demands. The reality is most people are conformists, and the current situation is way beyond any one family's ability to change. When it comes to kids sports, we have a collective action issue. Societal structures matter when we're looking at societal catastrophes like fractured families, loss of civic virtue, obesity, loneliness, and screen addiction. We should be willing not to whine about it, But to look clearly at the situation.

Clarity of thought leads to courage in action. We need to acknowledge that we have lost something in kids' sports that we should never have surrendered. I hear Diana again. You don't like it? Don't participate in it. But that's not only a boring conversation stopper. It fails to recognize the deeper relational good of sport itself. When sport is untethered from its uniquely human purpose, it becomes a perverse version of itself. In a 1952 address, Pope Pius XII warned about this phenomenon. What good would it do, he said, to use and develop the body, its energies, and its beauty, and to use and develop the body, its energies, and its beauty, If it were not at the service of something more noble and lasting, which is the soul.

If sports do not serve the soul, they are only a vain movement of limbs, an ostentation of short-lived beauty, an ephemeral joy. Pope Leo XIV continued the Church's great tradition of honoring sport with his recent letter to commemorate the 2026 Olympic Games. He wrote, When team sports are not polluted by the worship of profit, they are not polluted by the worship of profit. Young people put themselves on the line in relation to something that is very important to them. Moreover, working together with peers sometimes involves dealing with conflicts and managing frustrations and failures.

They even have to learn to forgive. In this way, fundamental personal Christian and civic virtues take shape. Play is one of the most specifically human activities we engage in as we learn to become who we were meant to be. From the first weeks of life. Until we die, we are playing peekaboo, pretend, baseball, chess, cribbage. Play, like art, which is just playing around as well, is useless. It exists for its own sake. Sport is specifically human because we do it for its own sake.

Yes, it develops the body. Yes, it can instill discipline. Yes, it can serve useful ends. But its primary value is not instrumental. The myths and legends and rituals we build around sports teams, games, and champions are something we also just do, as St. Thomas Aquinas notes, for their own sake, for the glory, for the pleasure of it. A beautiful orchestral performance does not need to justify itself, and neither does a great game. Remember the old ABC Wide World of Sports intro?

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. The human drama of athletic competition. This is ABC's Wide World of Sports. Neither the thrill of victory nor the agony of defeat are reserved for prime time. The human drama is not a zero-sum good. It belongs to the kid who scores in a pickup game on an empty lot just as much as it belongs to the pros. Pope Leo also mentioned that the spiritual, moral, and physical benefits of sports belong to everyone who plays the game.

From the flow experience, to teamwork, to sacrificing for a higher good, he writes, The experience of sports is exhilarating. This is as true for two 10-year-olds as it is for two professional champions. The virtues learned through sport do not require elite performance. The fat kid in the sandlot learns perseverance the same way that Rocky Balboa does. A child who stands up for fairness on a local field is practicing the same moral muscle as Jesse Owens in 1936. That's the good of sports.

And it's worth defending for our kids, not just my kids, but all American kids. When sport becomes untethered from the soul, it stops forming human beings. It starts consuming them, their families, and their community. Which brings me to a forgotten story that we should resurface. In the 1930s, New York City was in a crisis. The Great Depression was at its height. Families were fraying. Both communist and fascist ideologies were flourishing. The Catholic Archbishop of New York, Patrick Hayes, saw that young people cut loose from their traditional supports and forced by unemployment into idleness were vulnerable.

In his words, It is not surprising, then, that under the trying circumstances of these days, cunning propagandists of dangerous social and philosophical theories find a fertile field in the minds of youth for the dissemination of seeds which, when full-grown, are dangerous to church. His solution? Sports. Inspired by principles from Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, he established the Catholic Youth Organization in 1936. He disbanded existing clubs and refocused his evangelization efforts around athletics. Not because he wanted to make young men employable, he wanted to make them saints.

Sports were the hook, and heaven was the prize. He wrote, It is our fervent hope that all Catholic children know their church and their parish priests more intimately. To attain this end, it will be necessary to organize leisure time activities which will attract and hold our young people. The goal was never elite achievement. The goal was belonging to a local community, parish-based, parent-supported, and accessible for everyone.

And sure, just like in the Sandlot, some CYO kids became famous. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Chris Mullen, Len Elmore. But while these outliers became the legends, they were never the measure of success for CYO. The measure was the thousands of children who played for the love of the game, and, as a result, stayed rooted in their communities and their faith. They remembered where they came from. They remembered their family and their parish. They remembered the one unremarkable home run that saved a game on a dusty field.

They remembered letting a younger sibling score, and they carried those lessons into adulthood. That is what a successful youth sports system could look like. So, what would it mean to fix kids' sports today? It would mean starting from the bottom up, not the top down. It would mean communities choosing to say no to sports empire and yes to sports with a soul. We would gain kids who could love the game without resenting it. Kids who learn how to fail without quitting.

Kids who grow up in thriving neighborhoods and parishes where their friends don't all disappear on the weekends for a tournament. The winners would be ordinary children who learned courage and justice and joy on local fields, surrounded by adults who knew their names, who weren't utterly broke because of fees. Maybe it's time to build something new. If you remember the ending of The Sandlot, there's a detail that matters more now than ever. David Mickey Evans tells us, He kept in touch with the guys over the years.

One kid went on to play professionally. Most did not. Some got married. Remember Squints, who stayed in town and had nine kids? Some moved away. Some forgot each other. But Evans never suggests that any of the guys somehow failed because they didn't sign on with the MLB. No one walks away from the sandlot saying, gosh, I guess they really wasted all those hours playing that stupid game. They didn't make it. The point wasn't what use the game was. The point was the game itself.

And that's the ending that we lost. And it's one that we should fight to get back for our kids. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.