The high cost of the youth sports arms race

Youth sports are supposed to be about fun and team spirit.

But now, kids are training year-round and joining expensive travel leagues earlier.

It’s costing families, and kids too.

Today, On Point: The high cost of the youth sports arms race.

Guests

Jennifer Howell, former soccer player.

Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program. Founder of Project Play. Author of “Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children.”

Also Featured

Oluwatoyosi Owoeye, director of the Translational Sports Injury Prevention Lab at St. Louis University.

Linda Flanagan, author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters.”

Transcript

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Today we’re going to talk about youth sports. So let’s start with a former youth and a continuing athlete. Her name is Jennifer Howell, and she joins us from Denver, Colorado. Jennifer, welcome to On Point.

JENNIFER HOWELL: Hi, thank you for having me, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: I hope you didn’t mind that I called you a former youth.

HOWELL: I’d like to think I have a little bit of youth left.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) So let’s say definitely still youthful. That’s what I’m going to put. So tell me, you have played sports for a long time. What’s, what was the, the earliest you got involved in athletics?

HOWELL: Yeah. So I think I was five or so, my parents put me in just like your community recreational soccer league.

So I remember doing that for a little bit. I’m sure parents now are thinking of their kids with the soccer ball as high as their knees and not a lot going on. And then a couple years after that, around 2000, I think like my parents were talking to other parents and one of them suggested “Hey, like Jennifer’s really good.

You should consider putting her in a club sport, the local club team.” And they travel, they do tournaments. And is it essentially the first step onto maybe playing soccer in college or continuing on to like national team, Olympics all that fun stuff.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. And it sounds like you were about maybe eight or nine at the time.

HOWELL: Yeah. Yep.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, you know what’s interesting? First of all, when you said you got involved at age four or five at a rec league, I used to referee for the young kids at AYSO. And it’s a delightful time to watch children play, right? Because the balls are as high as their knees and everybody crowds around the ball and it’s like a school of fish moving across the field.

You can’t really see the soccer ball. (LAUGHS)

HOWELL: Yep. yep.

CHAKRABARTI: So it’s just wonderful. It’s actually quite both intense in a kid version and really joyful. So how, at that age, when you first got started and a couple of years in, how did you feel as a six- or seven-year-old playing?

HOWELL: I think I liked it. That was only a couple of years ago for me, definitely.

So I do remember having fun and especially you have all your fun little pizza parties and everything after, I think where it started to shift just a little bit was, we were trying to figure out who the goalkeeper of the team is going to be. And the story that I was told several times was I took a ball to the face and didn’t cry, and everyone was like, “Yes.

Goalkeeper.”

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, wow.

HOWELL: That is the goalkeeper.

CHAKRABARTI: The wall is what we used to call our keeper, the wall. But the keeper is also a real a leader on the team, right? Because she’s giving a lot of directions for how, where, especially the defensive line should stand and move, et cetera, was, so I’m presuming you were made the keeper of your team, and did you enjoy that role as well?

HOWELL: I enjoyed the technical aspects. The leadership portion was the most challenging for me, because I at some point, I was an extroverted child and then I definitely became a lot more introverted. So it was very difficult for me to be yelling and especially as age hit that middle school timeframe, where emotions are shifting at the drop of a pen.

And yeah, so then, you’re in a game and then it’s, “Oh I don’t like the way she yelled at me.” So it definitely was a bit dicey in terms of maintaining friendships off the field, on the fields. Especially if sometimes you’re a little bit spiteful where she didn’t pass me the ball, I’m not going to pass her the ball.

So a lot of factors at play.

CHAKRABARTI: But I’m presuming that you ended up, you did join the travel team.

HOWELL: Yes. Yep. And so I did that for, let’s see, I think around 2002, I’m not quite sure what year I quit, but I would have been around 2008, maybe. Somewhere in there. So yeah, I was with the same team for quite a while.

And then at some point it folded and I’m not quite sure what the details were. And so then we started traveling to an adjacent city that was about an hour away. And then not sure why we switched again, but we ended up driving to Tallahassee, which was about an hour and a half away to two hours for a one-way trip for a practice.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So then you’re talking about four hours out of your day just in transportation.

HOWELL: Yep. Yep. And in the on season, that was about twice a week. So during high school I was in the IB program and was taking AP electives, on track to become valedictorian and was doing four-hour, round trip, twice a week for practice. And that didn’t include tournaments on the weekends.

So that was my entire life was school practice, homework tournaments, and that was it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise to you, Jennifer, that some people are hearing this saying, good for her. She was a really focused, accomplished, talented, young woman whose high school career would be the envy of a lot of other kids.

I get it. It’s a huge time commitment. But like I said, in just hearing, like, the resume version of what you experienced, it’s really impressive. But what was going on with you then during that time? Because I also understand you were like attending college sports camps. Were you even in the pre recruitment processes with colleges which all sounds good too, but what was happening with you internally during this time?

HOWELL: Oh, yeah. Internal Jennifer was not having a good time. Just the stress from having to keep up with homework, studying for tests, making sure the GPA wasn’t slipping. But also, making sure that I was making that resume as nice as possible for college and the way kind of everybody frames it as a, “Oh if you play for D1, you don’t have to pay for college.”

You’re on a full ride. Don’t have to worry about those pesky student loans. And so it became very pressured. It was a very difficult situation. And it got to the point where I was developing a lot of anxiety, became very depressed. And so I’d say from the time that I was about, Ooh, maybe 13 or 14.

I learned what panic attacks were. Maybe for an upcoming tournament the night before, might not be able to sleep. If I made mistakes during the game, it would send me spiraling mentally because then it became a, “What if there is a college recruiter at this game?”

I made a mistake. I’m the goalkeeper. Mistakes are pretty obvious. The casual viewer can pick it up, ’cause the goalkeeper makes a mistake. It’s almost an automatic goal.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I had to get past 10 other people first though. I just want to say.

HOWELL: It did, yes. And that was a very common. It’s, oh, it did have to get passed to other people.

And it’s yes, but also yeah, it’s really hard not to take that, a goal, personally. And it’s a big thing. The words were there, almost as a platitude, but it never was like, Hey, we’re going to really dig into this and make sure that you’re actually doing okay.

And so it just wasn’t a really good time. I was dreading practices. I was dreading tournaments, games. Just a lot of anxiety in my life at that point. And I didn’t know how to get out of it, because that was all I knew.

CHAKRABARTI: It was your whole identity.

HOWELL: Yeah, that, that was it. If you asked anybody who knew me it was just like, Oh yeah, Jennifer, she does soccer.

There was nothing really else going on. Not, Oh, she loves Harry Potter or anything like that. It was just, yes, soccer. And that is it.

CHAKRABARTI: I understand though, that did stop playing before you graduated from high school. Is that right?

HOWELL: Yes. Yeah. So I reached a point, it was one of those weeks, right?

I think it was just a lot going on academically. And then we’re on the way back from practice, in the dark, like trying to do homework by flashlight, because this was before you could just have a laptop and do all of your homework on your laptop. And I just remember thinking like, I’m really not happy.

At this point in my life, there’s not really anything redeeming to me. And just in the car ride home, I said I don’t want to do this anymore. And my mom did not take that well. And at that point, that was also her entire identity. Was like, I am the soccer mom, there’s absolutely nothing else.

And she ended up calling all the relative people or the pertinent people that needed to know. So like my coaches, my dad and just was like, Oh Jennifer decided to do a 180 and ruin her life. So it was a very long car ride home.

CHAKRABARTI: You were hearing all these phone calls.

HOWELL: Oh yeah. Yeah. I was in the car at the same time.

CHAKRABARTI: How did it change your relationship with your mother over the next year?

HOWELL: So she didn’t talk to me for about a month. Sorry.

CHAKRABARTI: It’s okay.

HOWELL: And we basically never talked about it again. There wasn’t anything like, “Why do you want to do it? Or, “Is there a reason?” It was just like an immediate, like you have ruined your life and therefore, thereby ruined mine. And so it just, yeah.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Today, we’re talking about youth sports and the pressures these days that come along with it. To be frank, this is not new. This has been going on for a long time, but we’re talking about how youth sports has changed so radically, because it doesn’t seem to be moving away from that trajectory.

It’s still happening, and perhaps with ever more intensity as parental fears about college rise with every additional year. So we’re going to talk more about that in a minute, but we’ve been listening to Jennifer Howell in Denver, Colorado, share her story with us. And first of all, Jennifer, I just want to say thank you again for trusting us. Because I know that it can’t be easy for you to talk about difficult things that caused a rift between you and your parents.

So I really feel that, and I wanted to say thank you for trusting us. So what, just briefly tell me what happened after that? What did college look like? What does your life look like now? Did it get ruined by that decision you made in the back of the car with the flashlight over your homework?

HOWELL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Terribly ruined. No, definitely much happier now. Really, my relationship with my parents is definitely not close. So it’s like we maintain like a check in, “Hey I’m not dead. Our fence blew down a couple of weeks ago.” Just very minor communications like that.

So it definitely caused the rift, but part of that was just really feeling like a prop or like a trophy, essentially, for my mom to show up and say, “Look at this shiny child that I have.” And so through quite a bit of therapy, a lot of therapy, and through my college years, I branched out, I started doing things other than soccer.

I actually ended up playing Quidditch in college, a shout out to all my friends from the Quidditch team. And moved out to Denver afterwards. Ended up playing a little bit of Gaelic football and some Australian rules football. And ended up getting my master’s in biomechanical engineering, and now I’m working at a medical device company doing hardware testing.

CHAKRABARTI: Not too shabby.

HOWELL: Yes. And my husband would be a little bit remiss if I didn’t mention that I’ve married a wonderful man. (LAUGHS)

He’s going to listen to it later and be like, why didn’t you?

CHAKRABARTI: You got your shout out there, Jennifer’s husband, much deserved. Jennifer, I don’t, I can’t, of course, say that I understand or know specifically what was going on in your parents’ heads, specifically your mother’s head. So I’m not going to make any claim to that.

But also, I’m also reluctant to demonize parents in general, because from my POV now as a mother myself, it’s really complicated, right? Right? Like you love your children more than anything else and you want to see them love something that they’re doing in their lives and really blossom and succeed.

And especially if they have some talent in it, there’s always this give and take. Okay, how much should I encourage them? How much should I like help clear the path forward for them? And could this talent also help with other things later in life? Some parents might go overboard, but I would say that it’s really complicated on the parental side of things.

So I’m wondering now that you’re older, how do you think about that?

HOWELL: Oh yeah. As an adult and having to manage my own household and work and taxes, all the fun things that come with growing up, I can’t imagine having children on top of that. It’s difficult. It’s a difficult job. And part of what I would just say is, make sure that your children aren’t your entire identity. That’s a lot of pressure, whether you explicitly say that to your kids or not. ‘Cause I’m sure it feels great to be like, to have your parents be like, Oh, you’re in my entire world. But also, there’s that like little bit of a dark underside to it where it’s like, Oh if I’m the entire world, what happens if I mess up? What happens if I don’t meet expectations? Does my mom or my dad’s entire world crumble because of that?

So I think it’s making sure that you also have something else. And your child isn’t everything, which it sounds weird saying that out loud. But also, just like making sure your kid is still having, like your kid is still being a kid, shouldn’t be a job at that point.

And checking in. Hey, are you still having fun? Is this something that still want to do? And then if your kid wants to go on to the Olympics, or whatever level they’re aspiring to be, just be like, “Hey, in order to do this really awesome thing at the end, here’s what you’re going to have to go through to get there.

Do all of these sounds cool with you? Is this something that you want to do?” ‘Cause it’s one thing to say I want to win a gold medal, but you don’t just go out and win a gold medal. Yeah, there’s a lot of work in between.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your story with us.

I really appreciate it.

HOWELL: Yeah, no, thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Jennifer Howell. She joined us from Denver, Colorado. So when we told you, On Point listeners, that we were going to do an hour or are doing an hour on youth sports. We got a ton of responses. This is something that touches a lot of families across the country.

For example, here’s AJ Pesta, who’s been a youth basketball referee in upstate New York for more than a decade. And he says, specialization, and that’s really what we’re talking about, specialization like Jennifer did at a very young age, is putting too much pressure on the young athletes he referees.

AJ PESTA: The pressure is just immense.

And what compounds that is now these tournaments are costing big money and there are those who see it as a way to build skill and improve. And I think it’s being taken advantage of, with specialization comes the sacrifice of joy for any of this sport.

CHAKRABARTI: Here’s listener Jordan Lewis from Salt Lake City, Utah.

And he said for his family, the high cost of youth sports is actually well worth it. Jordan has two kids. They climb competitively, which means more than $800 per month in gym fees.

JORDAN LEWIS: But it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to my kid. My son is really shy, and when he goes into the gym, he has this community.

He’s able to open up and talk to people, which is something that he couldn’t have done a few years ago. And in climbing, you get to compete against yourself. So it’s all kids rooting for each other, and it’s a really great community. I believe it’s been just the greatest thing in the world for my kids I’d spend any amount of money for them to be able to have that in their lives.

AKRABARTI: So there Jordan’s talking about all the other things that come along with being dedicated to a particular sport. Joining us now is Tom Farrey. He’s executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program, founder of Project Play and author of “Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children.”

Tom, welcome to the show.

TOM FARREY: Great to be here, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: So you know what, again, I don’t want to spend the whole hour beating up on parents, but we will come back to parenting a little bit later in the show. What I want to hear from you is that there is an entire youth sports economy that’s grown up around these trends in youth sports. How would you describe how big that economy is and how pervasive it is?

FARREY: Based upon our research just prior to the pandemic. So it’s probably, the numbers are probably larger now. Parents alone spend north of $30 billion a year on youth sport. So to put that in perspective, the NFL is, the money flowing through the NFL is a lot smaller, so the youth sport economy is bigger than any sport economy that we have in our society. And it’s money that’s attached to a lot of emotion. I like to say that when you have a child, your favorite athlete is no longer LeBron James or Steph Curry or whoever, it’s that child down the hallway. And that’s the one you have the emotional investment in.

That’s the one you want to advocate for. That’s the person you talk about at cocktail parties or backyard barbecues or whatever else it may be. It’s an enormous institution and stories like Jennifer’s just make me sad. And unfortunately, they happen every day.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Are we talking about, or let’s understand more of the forces that have led to this $30 billion business, for lack of a better word.

Is it specialization, this trend towards specialization that we’ve been talking about kids at younger and younger years, not just getting started playing, but then just deciding, or maybe they don’t decide, but their families and them end up being locked into one sport. Is that what’s driving it? Or are there other factors that we should also take into account?

FARREY: Yeah, there’s no one. That’s why it took me 284 pages of how this all came.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) I’m going to ask you to summarize it in 30 seconds but go ahead.

FARREY: Yeah. Bottom line is the incentives for athletic performance at an early age have grown significantly since the 1990s. In the early 1990s, there was about $200, $300 million a year that was distributed for NCAA athletic scholarships D1, D2. Today, that’s north of $3.6 billion. And that is what has driven the creation of these early forming travel teams, which leads to the early specialization and the year round play and the high doses of training, and the type of unfortunate experiences that we heard from Jennifer.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So I just still want to, so what shifted in the ’90s? Specifically?

FARREY: It was Title IX, for number one, Title IX got enforced. It was not enforced really for the first 10, 15 years after it was signed by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. The court started enforcing it, much more money.

Parents started to wake up to the idea that if I invest in my daughter through sports, then they might be able to receive a scholarship and they might be able to receive preferential admission to selective universities. That’s a big driver as well. How do I get my kid into the Ivies? How do I get my kid into Babson, places like that?

And so parents are willing to write the checks.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we received, I received an email from a listener about exactly this point. And this listener was quite concerned that this would end up being an hour of just blaming parents for driving their children to distraction through sports specialization. And unrealistic hopes and dreams, but this parent said quote, “I think all the finger pointing at sports parents is missing an important point.” And this gets to what you’re saying, Tom, for quote, “Overrepresented majority girls specifically,” and my guess is she’s saying, probably white young girls, even those with strong academics, sports have become the only entry to selective colleges, including D3 schools, unless your parent is wealthy or an influential politician.

The listener said, “I would never have believed the extent to which this is true until my own children experienced it. Intense sports is a soul crushing, enormous financial sacrifice and a killer of family time. But sadly, for many parents, it is also the best investment you can make in your child’s educational future.”

So are you saying this listener is wrong, Tom?

FARREY: No, they’re right and they’re wrong, right? They’re right in that if you are a recruited athlete and look, my son was. My son got into Babson and because he was a recruited soccer athlete, the coach went to the admissions department.

He was a good student and ended up being an honor student and has done very well in his post college life, but like soccer absolutely got him into a selective college and the parents know this. Parents know this. And so they’re willing to invest. Unfortunately, what happens is along the way, it becomes all about the return on investment and you lose the real reason why you want your kids playing sports, which is for health, which is for human development, which is for, can be very good in terms of protective for mental health problems. We just we forget that like sports is meant to be about joy of game, development of physical literacy, lifelong habits of fitness. But once parents have written a whole bunch of those $5,000, $10,000 checks, they want that return on investment.

CHAKRABARTI: And that also makes those checks, and their increasing cost makes it become an exclusive kind of part activity, which we’ll talk about more a little bit later, Tom. But okay, so like total transparency, I’m getting up there in years. I graduated from high school in 1993. So just before this sort of the shift, as you’re talking about.

And in the town that I grew up in, like lots of people, lots of kids played sports. I can’t think of maybe one or two, kind of, were specialized at that time. But the thing is that the community was really involved. There was a lot of fields to play on. There were a lot of local rec leagues.

If people wanted to play in high school, they could. Is there less of that, like community sources of athletic play now that these, basically the private sector, the private youth sports sector has stepped into?

FARREY: Yes, there is less of it. The pathway now is kids slip on. Look, when I was a kid, I’m a little bit older than you.

When I was a kid, I slipped on a uniform when I was probably eight years old for the first time. By the time my kids came along, it was five years old. Now it’s when kids are three years old and the travel teams, these select travel teams begin to form when kids are six and seven and eight years old.

And at that point, Meghna, that’s when you start to see the dissolution of these in town recreation leagues, these in city leagues, they lose bodies, they lose coaches, they lose energy. And then the money from these private clubs that are at the center of the travel team experience, they’re just more entrepreneurial and they grab the public, the fields and the gyms and they come to dominate the environment. So yeah, there are, and I’d love to at some point talk about some of the solutions. There are communities that are pushing back on this and doing some good things.

I do not think this is the end of the game. I think we can right size it, but yeah, right now the trend is toward travel and not in city leagues.

CHAKRABARTI: I promise you, we will talk about solutions in the last third of the show because we love solutions around here. But Tom, we just got 30 seconds before our next break then.

Do you see any sign of this, again, the sports, youth sports business, of its growth abating in the near future?

FARREY: No, I don’t in part because there have been so many communities now that are invested in these megacilities that are designed for tournaments, like large tournaments.

So there’s a lot of incentives to keep that part of the economy, the esports economy going.