From Play to Pay: The Changing Culture of Youth Sports in America

It may seem as if the Cox crew is particularly busy—they even considered rehiring childcare assistance in order to get everyone to practice on time—but increasingly, their lives are the norm for many families. These days, it can feel like the rec league just won’t cut it anymore.

Spend enough time around other parents and you might discover that there are travel leagues with better coaches, which could lead to better opportunities, like potentially playing in college or scoring a lucrative name/image/likeness (NIL) deal. You might hear about the private lessons other kids are getting or the hours of strength training they’re putting in at the gym to maximize their skills before they even hit puberty. You might come across the social media accounts (like “Baby Gronk”) that parents are running for their middle schooler to get greater exposure in front of coaches…and then you might feel the pressure to do the same, on some level.

HITANDRUN Creative Studio / Debut Art

That’s one reason youth sports have spiraled out of control: Everyone is merely trying to keep up with everyone else. But what’s also not helping is that private financial interests are driving that pressure on parents and kids. Since the 1970s, publicly funded opportunities to play sports have consistently declined due to dwindling budgets, says Linda Flanagan, a journalist and researcher and the author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters. So, where public sports (think: your local rec league) have steadily decreased, private ones (including various pay-to-play clubs) are taking their place. “It’s become a giant industry,” Flanagan says. (We’re talking a potentially $40 billion giant, according to an estimate from the Aspen Institute.)

The result is a youth sports culture that makes it hard to get all those wonderful benefits that come with participating in athletics throughout childhood—soft skills like teamwork, resiliency, and self-confidence, and health benefits such as, hopefully, a lifelong passion for being active. Instead, kids’ (and parents’) schedules are overloaded with practices, private lessons, chalk talks, minicamps, and more, just to please coaches and stay parallel with their peers. “You have to play the game, and that’s the truth of it,” Cox says. The big problem, though, is that none of this seems sustainable—or, more important, enjoyable—especially for the health and happiness of our smallest humans.

In 2026, we’re speeding toward a tipping point. Change needs to happen sooner rather than later for the sake of everyone’s physical and mental health, according to experts who are studying—and simultaneously fretting about—youth sports. “I would love to see us take a step back. I just don’t know if we’re going to be able to undo what’s already been created,” says Naomi Brown, MD, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Hearst Owned

Going Pro Prematurely—and Paying the Price

Today’s sports landscape treats kids like mini pro athletes long before their minds and bodies are ready for it, and that’s mostly due to the privatization of the industry. Practice, individualized lessons, gym sessions, traveling weekly out of state (or at least out of town) for a game—this sounds like the makeup of your favorite athlete’s schedule, not a child’s. But as private companies discover more ways to turn a profit in the youth sports space, they’re creating more so-called opportunities.

One particularly surprising (or not, depending on who you ask) offering for young athletes? A marketing team. Families of athletes—of all socioeconomic statuses—are targeted by companies that sell marketing services to help reach coaches and to grow social media presence, says Christopher B. Bjork, PhD, a professor of education at Vassar College and coauthor of More Than Just a Game: How the Youth Sports Industry Is Changing the Way We Parent and What to Do About It. “This whole industry has metastasized,” he says. “Sports entrepreneurs are paying attention to ways they can squeeze more money out of potential clients, and they’ve capitalized on that interest and the current pressures in the system.”

Since the chance to play sports as a kid is provided mainly by private companies (as are those “extras,” like kiddie strength training sessions and private lessons), investment in youth sports has skyrocketed. Over the past five years, family spending on sports has risen by 46 percent, with the average cost in 2024 being $1,016 on one child’s primary sport, plus $475 more for a secondary one, according to the Aspen Institute.

That financial finding is somewhat low in comparison to what Bjork’s research revealed. In his survey, parents estimated that they spent about $1,200 a year—but when asked to include expenses like travel, the number tripled or quadrupled. “They weren’t even aware of how much they were spending,” he says. While writing his book, Bjork spoke to a dad who spent $30,000 per year on his child’s figure skating career.

Wherever parents fall on the spending spectrum, it’s clear that prices are too high. Just take a look at the sports section on GoFundMe, a popular crowdfunding site. You’ll immediately come across folks looking for help to pay for expenses related to athletics, whether it’s to travel across the country to compete in a tournament, to cover the cost of attending a sports camp with friends, or simply to pay the fees to play on a team.

Paying so much for youth sports has dramatically changed what it’s like to be a kid playing them. “Parents are facing pressure to sign their kids up for travel teams, private coaching, and elite summer camps when they’re still in elementary school, so the stakes of the game have changed,” Bjork says. “The expectations have shifted as a result: Parents think that since they’re spending all this money on sports, there should be some kind of payoff at the end, and that means that sports has shifted from an opportunity for kids to get some exercise, make friends, and develop physically, emotionally, and athletically to a market that parents need to manage.”

In addition to all the money parents are spending, kids are paying a physical and mental price. Younger athletes already deal with mental health concerns like anxiety, depression, and eating disorders, says Kristene Hossepian, PsyD, clinical director of the Success in Youth Sports program at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. The growing intensity of sports only exacerbates the risks.

“My biggest fear in all of this is burnout,” Cox says. She’s not wrong to worry about the mental fatigue factor: While Cox’s hope is to provide everything her kids need to be competitive enough to make a high school team, 70 percent of young athletes decide to quit their sport before they even reach that point, according to a report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). And this happens at twice the rate for girls at this age than for boys, per the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Whether adolescents get physically injured or mentally zapped, the harm is not just short-term; it can have long-term consequences, Dr. Brown says. “While we have this environment now where we can have ‘better’ athletes, we just have to remember at what expense,” she says. “Our children may be amazing baseball players when they’re 16, but then, at 35, their arm is dead and they can’t have a catch with their kid.”

HITANDRUN Creative Studio / Debut Art

Hearst Owned

The Specialization Trap

A major concern right now is that many children are specializing in a sport—which is pretty much the number one thing experts say not to do. Especially for the young ones. Forty-six percent of high school athletes, 68 percent of college athletes, and 46 percent of professional athletes played a single sport during their childhood, per a survey of 3,090 athletes in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine. The high schoolers surveyed specialized, on average, two years younger than the collegiate and pro athletes in the survey, indicating that kids may be zeroing in on a single sport earlier.

Where previous generations may have been able to enjoy playing soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring, kids today face pressure to go all in on just one in order to really make the most of the time, effort, and money their parents are spending. While it might mean that kids develop skills in a sport at a younger age, specialization is a trap, if you ask Flanagan. “Once you get on that train, you’re never going to get off,” she says.

Kids should delay specializing for as long as possible, experts agree. (Around the age of 16 would be ideal, says Lora Beth Scott, MD, division chief for sports medicine at Dayton Children’s.) Instead, it’s best to “sports sample”—to try a bunch of different ones. Not only is it healthier for a kid’s body and brain, but it might even be advantageous for their athletics.

“If you look at a lot of elite athletes, more often than not, they engaged in multiple sports at a given time in their childhood,” Hossepian says. “They weren’t solely basketball players, solely soccer players, solely baseball players.” As for why playing multiple sports is beneficial: “There are better physical outcomes associated with sports sampling, but also, psychologically, it allows for kids to figure out what it is exactly that they like, what it is exactly that they enjoy, within the sport world.”

Resisting specialization is incredibly hard when you’re actually facing it, though. Instead of joining a club team for one sport early on, Aleah, now 17, played multiple sports recreationally in elementary school. By the time she got to middle school, she wanted to try out for the volleyball team (a sport she hadn’t played before). She made the cut—but the differences between her and her peers were already clear. “We could tell immediately that she was far behind because a lot of the other athletes had specialized so early,” says her mom, Erianne Weight, 44.

Aleah loved volleyball and made the high school team the next year, but the coach encouraged her to join a club team and practice year-round in order to match the skill level of the other girls. But specializing in a sport just didn’t seem right to her parents, both of whom were Division I college athletes. “When I learned how expensive volleyball is—about $6,000 a year—and you’re traveling throughout the country, I just thought, ‘That’s insane and that’s not what I want to do,’” Weight says.

At first, the family decided to sign Aleah up as a practice player (for a reduced cost of $1,500 and a less busy schedule). Later, though, she joined a club full-time. Aleah was naturally athletic, but her technical skills remained a step behind. Between that and the demands of a club-level sport, Aleah decided to walk away from volleyball before her senior year.

In contrast, Aleah’s younger sister, Lilly, 13, has been focused on just volleyball since the age of 11 (after playing multiple sports recreationally prior). She’s keeping up with her peers, but at a different cost: less time to just be a kid. If you ask Weight, one of the core differences between her two daughters is that the child who didn’t specialize earlier (Aleah) was “able to have a normal childhood.” In fact, she’ll be doing one of the other sports she pursued—track and field—in college.

So the pressure to let a kid specialize is very real, even for kids who don’t aspire to play at the collegiate level. But for those who do, taking more time to find a sport may still pay off. For Aleah, continuing to play multiple sports turned out to be an asset in making her college dreams happen. “Kids can still participate in multiple activities and decide later,” Bjork says.

The people he interviewed during his research concur: “College coaches all told us they valued kids who participated in multiple activities or played a number of different sports during the year, because that helps them develop different muscles, it helps them remain enthusiastic about the sport, and it reduces the pressure,” he says. Professional athletes also seem to be on board with sports sampling: Only 22 percent of the pros in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine survey said that they’d want their child to specialize in one sport.

The case against specialization may not need any more support, but experts also raise a flag when it comes to the mental and physical risks. For one, specializing puts more psychological emphasis on the chosen sport, tying the child’s identity more closely to it, says Hossepian. This can make an injury that much more devastating or the stakes of a loss that much higher.

And risk of injury is actually greater for a specializer, says Dr. Brown. A child playing one sport year-round is more likely to develop an overuse injury than a kid who switches it up. That’s because spending all your time on one sport puts the same kinds of stresses on muscles and bones repeatedly. Playing multiple sports allows kids to have more balanced muscle development, she says, because they’re placing different kinds of demands on their bodies. (Similarly, it adds some variety for parents, whether it’s getting to be around a different group of parents or changing up the drives to practice.)

Though youth sports are looking more and more like the big leagues, the players’ bodies are still very much developing. Physically, “kids are not young adults,” Dr. Brown says. “There are very specific things to youth that are different.” The most significant difference is open growth plates, which generally close for girls between the ages of 13 and 15, or two years after their first period, and around 17 to 20 years old for boys. “Overuse when growth plates are open puts a child at high risk for injury,” Dr. Brown says. Injuries like gymnast’s wrist and Little League elbow are common—and only possible—in children. Open growth plates also mean that sports-related activities like weight training need to be different (typically, higher rep counts combined with lighter weights or even just bodyweight instead of low reps with heavy weights), Dr. Brown says.

Hearst Owned

Why Play May Save Us All

In the midst of all the chatter around the chaos of youth sports, it’s important not to lose sight of one of the most important facts: What’s also at stake is a kid’s lifelong relationship with fitness and exercise. Today, 75 percent of children are not hitting their physical activity recommendations, with quitting sports being a major reason why, per the AAP study.

The antidote is not to force kids into a system that isn’t working for them (or their parents). It’s to lean into something experts call “free play,” which is basically any unstructured time kids have with little adult input. It might look like running around the backyard with a friend or sibling, making up a game during recess, or even kicking around a soccer ball—with no uniforms and certainly no adult refs or coaches.

While organized sports are beneficial, it’s key that children have this unstructured time, Dr. Brown says. “Free play is one of the most important things we can offer our children,” she says. “It helps in so many ways if we can just let our kids have the freedom to go and be a kid again.” Mentally, free play is critical because it provides mental stimulation and teaches creativity, but physically, it also helps children with neuromuscular development and control.

Free play is also fun (remember fun?)—and doesn’t come with any pressure. “The professionalized model we have now has drained the fun out of youth sports as the stakes have gotten higher,” Flanagan says. “The stakes are both the parents’ money and the parents’ time and this perception that it’s going to potentially lead to a college scholarship, admission to a better school, or an NIL deal.”

For that reason, free play is also less likely to come with future emotional baggage. Every child reacts differently, but when a child experiences their sports environment as threatening, pressure-based, or even unsafe, it can have lasting effects, says Allyson Weldon, PhD, a sports psychologist at Akron Children’s. “These experiences can build up over time and ultimately lead to loss of joy or interest in the sport,” she says. The negative emotions from youth sports can be short-lived or last into adulthood, with triggers popping up years down the road.

Hearst Owned

How to Take Back Control

We’re dealing with a massive, complex industry, so it won’t be fixed overnight, but parents and families still have agency, experts agree. “It is countercultural to just let your kid play for fun, but it’s possible,” says Dr. Scott. “It’s hard, your friends won’t be doing it, but it’s very possible.”

Though it takes some toughness, it’s also important: By raising a kid who loves to play a sport (or many sports), you’re raising a kid who’s likelier to stay active throughout their life. “Exercise is fun, exercise is social, and you don’t have to be an elite person to enjoy it,” Dr. Scott says. “When parents and coaches lose this perspective, they’re pushing for the wrong things.”

No one wants to be that person. There are a few hard-and-fast rules from experts that can keep you on track. First, kids need to take time off. They should have at least one or two days away from their sport per week, and two to three months off from their sport per year, the AAP recommends. This not only gives kids the chance to physically recover, but mentally, it gives them time away from intense competition, Dr. Scott says. It also gives them unstructured time when they can still be active, but on their own terms. (Dr. Scott caps her son’s time with his swim team at eight months per year, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get in the pool for fun during his off time.)

Experts also recommend that the hours your kid spends on a sport per week be less than or equal to their age, all the way up to age 16. So, if you’ve got an 8-year-old, they shouldn’t spend more than eight hours a week at gymnastics practice, says Dr. Scott. This helps prevent injury and burnout.

And ideally, a child should play only one sport per season, says Weldon. Easier said than done, but playing one sport at a time is key. “The mental shift of going from one sport to the next can be taxing on kids and parents,” she says. Playing two sports simultaneously makes it hard to fully commit to either and even harder to find time for free play, sleep, and homework.

One of the most important steps you can take as a parent is to maintain a healthy and realistic perspective on the future. Which is hard with the college-size elephant in the room. If youth sports are a big industry, college is even bigger, Bjork points out—and the idea that a kid can have the glory of representing their school and a hefty discount on their education is enticing. It may even make all that time and money worth the investment. But the thing is: Very few youth athletes grow up to play in college, even if parents are made to feel their kid has a chance. For major sports like basketball, baseball, softball, and soccer, less than 3 percent of high schoolers make it to Division I, per the NCAA. Meanwhile, 11 percent of parents believe their kids can go pro, according to the Aspen Institute.

Really, it’s best for parents to leave college athletics in the back of their mind. The chances of a collegiate career are low for most kids—but the pressure to get there can be high, ruining the main reason for enrolling a child in sports. “We lose sight of the point of youth sports,” Dr. Scott says. “Very few children will go on to play at an elite level. Very few of them will get full-ride scholarships. Some of them might get small scholarships, but it’s less than what it costs to play the sport to begin with. Instead, participation should be about teaching them the lifelong lesson that exercise is fun, because they will need that going into adulthood.”

Finally, be a parent, not a coach. (Even if you’re technically both.) With little athletes, it’s best to avoid talking about performance and how it relates to winning or losing. Don’t harp on mistakes or talk about how you think your kid needs to improve, Weldon says. That’s the coach’s job. Instead, praise effort and make sure kids know that there’s no pressure to be a collegiate or professional athlete. “Provide that support, be able to listen to them, and try to remove the pressures the coaches are putting on them as best as possible,” Weldon adds.

This be-the-parent mindset is something Dr. Scott has firsthand experience with. “My son swims, and I also used to be a swimmer, and I also used to coach swimming,” she says. But when her son took on a difficult event for the first time and his technique was lacking, she opted to say she was proud of him for trying something new—and let the coach handle the constructive feedback.

Her advice? “Think about why you sign them up for sports, all the benefits of sports. That’s what you want to talk to them about in the car ride before and after, not their performance,” Dr. Scott says. “The coach is going to call out their performance issues and their technique issues, and they don’t need the parent doing the same thing. They need the parent saying, ‘Hey, I’m glad you tried that new position you’ve never done before,’ or ‘Hey, I’m glad you kept giving your best.’”

There’s no doubt that parents are in a difficult position when it comes to youth sports today. Before their kids started playing sports, Cox and her husband rarely had reason to fight; now, their difference of opinion on athletics takes center stage when they do get into a tiff. While it may seem as if the industry has blown up beyond any one family’s control, it’s worth noting: There’s a growing mass of frustrated parents and families who are desperate for a different path. After Cox and her husband, Terry, posted a video on Instagram talking about the challenges of youth sports today, they were met with a barrage of enthusiastic comments from fellow parents, many arguing in favor of sticking to rec sports (and one commenter aptly noting that “someone could campaign for public office on this issue alone”).

As for Cox, her children are wrapped up in all the demands of the travel sports life, but as a family, they’re evaluating their involvement every day, she says. “I’m learning as a mom along the way, making a lot of mistakes, I’m sure,” she says. “But the important thing is that I’m very close to all of them and we talk about everything.”

You Might Also Like

• I've Tried Hundreds Of Clothing Brands, But These 10 Are My Favorite
• A Doctor Shares The 3 Most Important Changes For Losing Fat And Building Muscle
• This Fitness Tool Adds Resistance To Cardio And Strength Training—Here Are 3 I Recommend To Clients