To recap my 2022 discussion with Flanagan, since the 1970s, we have cut funding for parks and recreation departments, with a notable decline during the Great Recession. With billions of dollars in earning potential, the youth sports industrial complex has become more expensive and more demanding. As private travel leagues with high fees and high-caliber coaches have eliminated top players, it has become a vicious cycle, with underfunded local recreational leagues struggling to compete.
To defend the parents who sacrifice so much for these travel leagues, they are making a rational decision in an absurd market, particularly acute in the large suburbs.
“This is absolutely 100 percent a suburban thing,” said Rick Eckstein, a sociology professor at Villanova University and author of “How College Athletics Are Hurting Girls’ Sports: The Pay-to-Play Pipeline”. “Rural areas, like urban areas, don’t offer these kinds of opportunities. So those people are also left out of the mix.
THE difference between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to youth sports: 34.1% of children from the poorest families were part of sports teams or trained outside of school, compared to 67.7% of the poorest families. richest, according to the 2020-2021 survey. National Survey of Children’s Health.
Wealthier families may also view investment in sports as an asset to elite universities. Last year, in a review essay For Inside Higher Ed, Flanagan and Eckstein called for an end to admissions preferences for athletes because they are one of the reasons so much money is spent on youth sports. Athletes at elite schools are “disproportionately white, suburban and wealthy,” and notably, at Harvard, they argue, athletes tend to have lower academic credentials than the average admitted student. Basically, they wrote:
These racial, geographic and socioeconomic biases feed into the expensive, largely suburban ticketed circuits that dominate youth sports. Recruitment of college athletes at all levels now occurs almost exclusively through these channels. Kids who lack the resources (or accessibility) to enter or remain in pipelines are invisible to college recruiters and denied the incredible admissions benefits offered to recruited athletes.
Tom Farrey, executive director of the sports and society program at Aspen, agrees that removing admissions preferences for athletes “would lower the temperature in many youth sports.” It wouldn’t completely fix the system, because “parents who have money can sign their kids up for these expensive teams and these expensive programs at a very young age that have created the mania that the rest of us end up in.” by marinating,” but if “you take away that potential ROI down the line, I think you start to add a little more common sense to the system.”
