In March, the madness begins. As the travel-team season starts up, suburban parents tailor their work schedules and their family obligations to fit the frenetic demands of their kids’ practices and games. Weekend tournaments, often hundreds of miles from home, require a punishing regimen of long-distance travel and overnight stays, fueled by caffeine and junk food. Checking accounts evaporate as costs mount for league fees, private coaches, designer equipment, and hotel rooms.
For many parents, retirement savings and car and mortgage payments take a back seat to their children’s athletic commitments. A 2014 University of Florida study found that the average travel-team parent spends $2,266 per year per child, while parents of the most elite players spend $20,000 a year or more. The average yearly cost of kid’s lacrosse is $8,000; for hockey, it is $7,000; for baseball, $4,000. Parents consider these expenses to be investments: 67 percent hope their children will achieve college athletic scholarships.
Sporting goods manufacturers, developers, and non-profits are cashing in on the youth sports mania. The working-class town of Aberdeen, Maryland has constructed a 5,500-seat minor-league stadium called Cal Ripken, Sr.’s Yard, a two-thirds’ scale replica of Oriole Park at Camden Yards. An on-site Marriott Hotel overlooks the field, so parents can watch their kids’ games in air-conditioned comfort. The Ripkin Baseball Complex’s other fields are replicas of Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Memorial Stadium, and Yankee Stadium.
On the West Coast, Big League Dreams houses 13 baseball diamonds that replicate different big league ballparks. At the center of the complex is an air-conditioned restaurant and bar where spectators can view the games. The town of Westfield, Indiana has invested $45 million to construct Grand Park Sports Complex, with 26 baseball and softball diamonds and 31 multipurpose fields for soccer, football, rugby, field hockey, and lacrosse. East Fishkill, NY is in the process of constructing a $25 million, 347,000 square foot indoor SportsKingDome complex with a dozen multisport fields. The facility will allow kids in the Northeast to play soccer, lacrosse, and baseball 12 months of the year, just as they do in the Southwest.
The United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) is the biggest organizing body for U.S. travel teams: Its 80,000 teams have 1.3 million players. The company’s website includes national standings for teams in age groups that begin at “4 and under.” Although USSSA is registered as a not-for-profit, the organizations rakes in huge sums of money from parents who are willing to pay skyrocketing fees. In 2015, USSSA generated revenues of $13.7 million. Its chief executive, Don DeDonatis, was paid $831,200 in 2015, according to IRS filings that are available online. The median salary for CEOs working for not-for-profits of comparable size is $200,000.
The youth-sports industrial complex is new to America. Until quite recently, neighborhood kids transported themselves to playgrounds and vacant lots to organize their own games without adult supervision. They selected teams, assigned positions, made up rules, and resolved disputes. Kids on the field shared modestly priced bats, gloves, and balls. Town leagues were local and free to everyone who showed up. Sports were a way of socializing kids from poor and immigrant families into the American mainstream: The skills learned on the sandlot—negotiating and settling conflicts in an atmosphere of mutual respect—were the foundations for responsible American citizenship. As President Bill Clinton said, “Everybody I knew when I was young played team sports. Everybody. There were church leagues for basketball so people like me who couldn’t make the [school] teams could play. This is really important because the benefits flowed to everybody.”
Today, the sandlot and the Little League have been replaced by tryout-based, multi-season travel teams. This early specialization makes it difficult for casual players to join youth leagues, and, in most sports, youth-league participation has become a prerequisite for varsity high school teams. In 2015 the National Sporting Goods Association found that youth participation in baseball has dropped from 8.8 million to 5.3 million since 2000. Softball, soccer, and basketball have all suffered similar losses. Today, fewer than one in three children ages six to 12 engage in high calorie-burning exercise three times a week.
Not only does the travel-team model exclude lower-class and casual players, it places enormous stress on less-affluent working parents. In 2013, i9 Sports surveyed 400 moms with children in organized sports and found that, in most households, travel sports leads to compromised job performance, financial difficulties, and marital tension. Almost half of the moms say they are less productive at work because of their kids’ sports involvement, and 24 percent report marital conflict over kids’ sports. Unsurprisingly, 76 percent of mothers say that they are happiest when sports seasons are over.
Nor are impossible schedules the only source of anxiety. Bob Cook, a father of four kids, describes kids sports as an “arms race” that he is desperately trying to keep up with. As Cook wrote for Forbes, “If you learn the 8-year-old fireballer mowing down your daughter and everyone else in softball has gone to multiple pitching camps and worked individually with coaching experts, you can’t help but wonder sometimes if you’re doing your child a disservice by not doing the same.”
Fred Engh, executive director of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, writes that parents “behave as if they are watching the final four, world series, and super bowl all rolled up into one.” Although most parents are well-mannered, there are routine reports of parent-spectators yelling at kids, criticizing coaches, insulting referees, and sometimes getting into fistfights with parents of the opposing team. A growing number of parents have even filed lawsuits against coaches for benching or cutting their kids, alleging that the kids were thus disadvantaged in the competition for college scholarships. Ray Reid, a soccer coach at the University of Connecticut said, “I’m appalled by the attitude. My reaction is: ‘That’s interesting. Your son is a mutual fund.’”
The intensive, year-round training that is demanded of young athletes puts them at risk for injuries to tendons, bones, and joints. A 2015 survey in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that 60 percent of all Tommy John tendon surgeries in the United States are performed on patients ages 15 to 19. Pediatrician Rebecca Demorest, who practices at New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery, sees youth baseball pitchers ushered into her waiting room at the age of eight. Sports Management Professor Mark Hyman writes that such overuse injuries are a new phenomenon: “Children entertaining themselves at their own pace in their own way simply did not play sports until it hurt.”
We must find a way to bring sanity back onto the playing field, not only for the sake of kids who play, but also for kids who have been priced off of the playing field.
At the same time as an epidemic of overuse injuries plagues club sports participants, an obesity epidemic plagues lower-income kids and puts them at risk for diabetes, heart disease, strokes, joint and bone diseases, and depression. In 2016, children ages 6 through 12 whose family income was under $25,000 were nearly three times as likely to be “inactive”—meaning they played no sport during the year—as kids whose families made more than $100,000 per year. “Sports in America have separated into sports-haves and have-nots,” said Tom Farrey, the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society program.
There is a racial component to this disparity. Up2Us, not-for-profit established in 2009 to promote youth sports, cites a series of studies to show that middle-class white kids are 50 percent more likely to play sports than low-income children of color. In 2013, The Girls Scouts Research Institute reported that half of tenth-grade white girls get daily physically exercise, while only a third of tenth-grade African-American and Latina girls get daily exercise. In 2017, The Robert Wood Johnson foundation estimated that the annual medical costs of obesity in the United States was between $147 and $210 billion.
Because the cost of inactivity is so high, public health officials demand that we broaden the range of opportunities for kids to play sports. We need to expand the range of opportunities for casual play by setting aside time for pick-up games at ballfields, gyms, and churches; we need to revitalize the local leagues and church-based teams that have been eclipsed by club teams; and we need tort reform so that our gyms, playgrounds and ballparks cease to be vipers nests of frivolous litigation.
Edmond, OK, Bayonne, NJ, and Methuen, MA have all succeeded in expanding casual play opportunities at very little cost to their communities. In Edmond, league coaches have started a weekly tradition of “disorganized baseball.” The coaches make gloves, helmets, and bats available and offer low-key supervision, but the kids direct their own pick-up games. Bayonne, NJ runs a summer camp that combines light coaching with pickup play. The program draws 100 players a day. Methuen attracts casual players to its recreation center with the slogan, “No parents, no coaches, no cost.”
Sporting Goods Manufacturers and major league teams are concerned about declining participation rates in sports and have been sponsoring such sandlot programs. Batters Up USA, a nonprofit organization supported by sporting goods companies, gives free bats and balls to towns interested in hosting sandlot baseball and softball games. “We’re trying to take the sport to kids who don’t have much opportunity to play,” said Jess Heald, Batters Up’s executive director.
The benefits of such programs extend far beyond physical health. After the city of Phoenix, AZ decided to keep basketball courts and other recreation facilities open until 2 a.m., the police saw an astonishing change: Calls reporting juvenile crime fell by more than 50 percent. Reports of crime go up again in the fall once gymnasiums go back to regular hours. The Trust for Public Land’s Green Cities Initiative concludes, “Compared to other crime-fighting measures, midnight recreation is a bargain. With 170,000 participants in Phoenix, the cost is 60 cents per youth.”
And there is also evidence that a more robust culture of pickup play could benefit even our best athletes by introducing more spontaneity and personality into organized athletics. In Best Practices for Coaching in the United States, the U.S. Soccer Federation advised coaches to organize less, say less, and allow players to play on their own. “Be comfortable organizing a session that looks like pickup soccer,” the report advised. The foundation wanted not just more players, but more creative players, like those emerging from the street soccer cultures of South America.
A return to the sandlot would be a first step toward reducing the professionalization of youth sports and returning them to the invaluable tool of civic education that they have always been.