To recap my 2022 discussion with Flanagan, since the 1970s, we’ve cut funding for parks and recreation departments, with a notable drop during the Great Recession. With the potential for billions of dollars to be made, the youth sports industrial complex became more expensive and demanding. As private travel leagues with high fees and top-caliber coaches have skimmed off the best players, it’s become a vicious cycle, with underfunded local rec leagues struggling to compete.
In defense of the parents sacrificing so much for those travel leagues, they are making a rational decision in an absurd market, one that’s particularly acute in larger suburbs.
“This is absolutely, positively 100 percent a suburban thing,” said Rick Eckstein, a professor of sociology at Villanova University and the author of “How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls’ Sports: The Pay-to-Play Pipeline.” “Rural areas, like urban areas, there aren’t these kinds of opportunities. So those folks are also left out of the mix.”
The difference between the haves and have-nots when it comes to youth sports are bracing: 34.1 percent of kids from the poorest families were on sports teams or had coaching outside of school, compared with 67.7 percent of the wealthiest families, according to the 2020-2021 National Survey of Children’s Health.
Wealthier families may also see the investment in sports as a boost into elite colleges. Last year, in an opinion essay for Inside Higher Ed, Flanagan and Eckstein called for ending admissions preferences for athletes because they are one of the reasons that there is so much money spent on youth sports. Athletes at elite schools are “disproportionately white, suburban and wealthy,” and notably, at Harvard, they argued, athletes tended to have lower academic credentials than the average admitted student. Broadly, they wrote:
This racial, geographic and socioeconomic bias feeds off the expensive and largely suburban pay-to-play pipelines dominating youth sports. College athlete recruitment at all levels now takes place almost exclusively through these channels. Children lacking resources (or accessibility) to enter or remain in the pipelines are invisible to college recruiters and are denied the astounding admissions advantages offered to recruited athletes.
Tom Farrey, the executive director of the sports and society program at Aspen, agrees that getting rid of admissions preferences for athletes “would turn down the temperature in a lot of youth sports.” It wouldn’t fix the system entirely, because “parents with money that can put their kids on these expensive teams and in these expensive programs at a very early age that have created the mania that the rest of us end up marinating in,” but if “you remove that potential return on investment down the line, I think you begin to add a little more sanity to the system.”