How Youth Sports Went Pro

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1:05Congratulations. You made the varsity, the podcast. My name is John Aranda and I am Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. Today, Ken Belson returns to the pod. Ken is a great sports business reporter for the New York Times. And he wrote a story last week on the professionalization of youth sports that is really a must read. It gets into burnout. It gets into mental health. And really, it gets into all the money flowing into youth sports. As soon as I read his piece, I asked him to come on the varsity. But before I get to Ken, today is Sunday, January 4th, our first pod of 2026.

1:44And here's what I'm watching. It's a quick prediction for the coming year. The NFL is going to start negotiating a new TV deal this year. The league can exercise an out in its contracts in 2029, but the networks want to do it sooner, something that Roger Goodell will certainly buy into. There's a reason the networks want to open these deals early. It's the surest way to keep the streamers at bay, you know, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon. By agreeing to go early, the networks can be assured that they will keep their seat at the table. If not, they'll wait until 2029, three more years. So you should expect all the TV networks that have NFL deals, they're going to keep their packages.

2:25They'll all just pay a whole lot more. But that doesn't mean the streamers are going to sit this one out. Amazon has Thursday Night Football, of course, and will certainly keep that. Roger Goodell, he's talked about wanting to expand the number of international games that it schedules, so it makes sense to sell those games to a streamer who can, with the click of a button, hit an international audience. And it also wouldn't surprise me to see the NFL create a new package with some Sunday afternoon games that generally reach a small percentage of the country. The point is that we will see more games on streaming services once these deals are completed.

3:00Now, let's get to Ken Belson. Ken Belson, first of all, thank you for returning to the pod here. Secondly, you wrote a story just last week with a headline, as youth sports professionalize, kids are burning out fast, which I devoured. And I've been writing about sports business topics since 2006. And I get pitched multiple times a year, probably multiple times a month about writing about youth sports. And I write about them occasionally. What about this pitch drew you in to make you do this story? It's a story that I encourage everybody listening to this to go and read because you hit on so many important topics in it.

3:54Yeah, well, there's a couple of angles to it and why I think it rises to a sports business story in our business section. You know, I don't write for the sports section per se anymore. But one is it is a business and the professionalization of youth sports is well underway. way. You've got big money, private equity coming into an area that was very fragmented. Volunteer coaches, small numbers, youth teams such as they were certainly years ago were very, very local. Travel sports barely existed until a quarter century ago. And so it's the next frontier. And I've been to conferences, Aspen Institute has a very good conference.

4:41They had one this past year in March out in Berkeley. And I was shocked at the number of people I met who were basically there to monetize youth sports, gobbling up data, youth sports data, which seems sort of ridiculous, but that's an area. Youth media, youth sports media. We're going to start seeing more youth sports on television of a variety. We already see some with like the high school football championships, flag football championships on ESPN. I think it's ESPN3 or whatever, somewhere out in the dial. But that's going to get more mainstream. And then you've got merchandise, of course, all sorts of coaching, quote unquote, solutions.

5:24It's just a massive business story. And it's billowing out, I guess, is a good way to describe it. We had a figure in an earlier story of somewhere in the neighborhood of$40 billion of an ecosystem. So that's the first part. The second part is, you know, meeting our readers where they live. And a lot of our readers live out in the suburbs across America. And I can tell that story just popped up yesterday online, has more than 200 reader comments, which is quite a lot for a holiday week, a holiday Monday, Tuesday. So people are fired up about this. And many of the people that we're writing in were either coaches or parents, and we're frustrated by the whole scenario, that it has become very professional, that the numbers, you know, you're adding zeros to things.

6:11Families are foregoing vacations to make sure their son or daughter get to a tournament. So it's big money. So as a business writer, those two things together, you know, something I knew that readers were experiencing and then also that investors were piling into, that makes it kind of an irresistible topic. $40 billion. That sounds preposterous to me. Where does that come from? What's the bulk of that$40 billion that you have? Well, there's a lot of factors and the number is very broad. There's no youth sports industry per se, the way say the NFL or the NCAA might be able to keep track of things.

6:50And so it's definitely a moving target. And there were people who thought when that number was in the story, that original story was either higher or lower depending on where you saw it but there are evaluations now of youth sports properties um josh harris and and david blitzer uh co-owners of the washington commanders and and the sixers philadelphia 76ers have used some of their own money um to to gobble up um facilities there's a flag football facility to have out in texas that they're building or building out um they own a property in canton the Cooperstown baseball, sort of Disneyland of baseball up in Cooperstown, the Cal Ripken facilities, you start adding those things up and how much they're being sold for, resold for.

7:35Then you add some of the merchandise, the amount of media, not a lot of media money just yet. And, you know, and then you add it up. And before you know, it's truly national. I was in San Diego for this story. Soccer is huge there. And there are many, many layers of soccer that, you know, that parents pay into, both on the very local level and in these national footprint leagues. MLS itself has its own sort of academy feeder system that draws a lot of attention. So yeah, it comes from a lot of different directions. It's an imprecise number, but it gives you a good benchmark on how how fast it is so in 2006 you know about 20 years ago i i was a sports media reporter at sports business journal and for the for several years i was pitched on these stories and i did a couple of them and they they never amounted to really anything is that it was other than like a little league world series you know that that would be on espn uh there was a lot of attention, very few sponsorships, very few ad dollars, and most importantly, very few viewers, people that didn't tune into it.

8:48What you're describing now is that people are starting to tune into it and people are starting to invest in it. Was there an inflection point or was this just a slow build to get where we are right now? It's a good question. And I'm not sure there's a clean answer, AAU basketball in many ways was, was a further ahead. I think baseball has been also one of the, the forerunners of travel sports. And it started, I think one of the differences is it, it, it was always in the Southern States. I mean, I have a friend whose son played baseball and they'd take, his team would take road trips down to Florida in the winter months, made perfect sense, right?

9:31You're not going to play a baseball, baseball tournament in New York. I think the difference now is the money is pouring in so much faster now. And that changes everybody's expectations. Most of all, the investors, because they want some return on their investment. So, you know, like the Cal Ripken camp can cost quite a few thousand dollars, particularly when the parents drop their kid off for a week for fantasy baseball camp for young kids in a beautiful facility. But then they're staying there and then there's restaurants that serve the neighboring area, the hotels where the parents stay. And suddenly it's a very expensive option.

10:14And parents, it's a very, this is the difference between pro sports and even collegiate sports. When you get down to youth sports, parents want to do the right thing by their kid. And so you've got a very sticky product, right? i mean if the kid's really into baseball most parents are going to spend whatever they can afford to to make sure their son or daughter is playing the sport they love i mean that's a natural thing and i think that's where it's ripe for um i'm not saying abuse but uh but distortion um where the parents are pushing their kids uh as well because they want a quote-unquote return to well if it helps johnny get into college or even get a scholarship uh something like that well then it's all going to be quote unquote worth it.

10:55And I think that distorts the intention of youth sports, which is basically kids who should get some exercise and have some fun with their friends. That's essentially what youth sports should be. And now it's turned into a much bigger dollar sign where the notion of a payoff is supposed to result from all of this. You know what part of your story really resonated with me? I mean, they're like, from your answer there are probably 15 uh ways i could go from this but you talked about like everyone parents wanting to do well by their kids and that's a that that's a general sense but you asked also had a part in there like those same parents they're conditioned to watching you know college football is now pro football essentially they're all getting paid pro they're conditioned to watching pro football in a certain way and if you see two teams competing against each other and your son's playing on one team, you're almost watching it in a different way than youth sports should be watched in a certain sense.

11:57There are people that are out there, including former players, that are trying to refocus parents into how to watch your kids play these games. I found that part of your story to be totally fascinating. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, the quote-unquote professionalization of youth sports is both on a financial basis, but also this idea that these kids are little minor leaguers or little major leaguers in waiting. And that's really unfair. I mean, sure, when I was 10 years old, I thought I was Tom Seaver also, but that was just me in my head in the backyard, right? I wasn't fooling anybody. And certainly my parents didn't spend any extra money to make sure I can live out that dream.

12:40You know, I wanted to hang out with my friends in the neighborhood. I rode my bike or got dropped off at most practices. My parents, I'm not blaming my parents, but most parents were not there to watch. And it was a good experience. And we all kind of moved on from it. You know, the best kids continued and then the rest of us sort of moved on other things. And, you know, when it's not fun anymore, when the parents are dumping pressure on you intentionally or not, or the coaches are pushing you in a direction that's over the top, it's not fun anymore. And then kids drop out. and that's, you know, nobody, no single person is to blame here for any of it.

13:17I mean, there are individual coaches or individual parents. The other thing I didn't even touch on in the story, which is a whole other distorting factor, which is social media. Kids are watching themselves on social media in a way that you would have had to have a high eight camera in my day to watch me at an at bat. And certainly nobody besides my family would have ever seen it. And now kids are being filmed in real time. They're checking their own statistics and the statistics of their opposing players in the dugouts during the game. So they're reading about themselves and benchmarking themselves in a way that's, you know, both revealing and helpful, but also incredibly could be damaging.

14:00just let the kids play, right? I mean, now you're suddenly saying, well, he's got an 82 mile an hour fastball with an out pitch and he's 12 years old. What am I supposed to do with all that information? What about just going up there and swinging for the fences? So, you know, again, nobody's to blame, but youth sports really is kind of a mirror of where we are as a society with technology, with money, with pressure to get into universities and colleges, which ultimately is partly about the job market and the opportunities that there exist or don't exist. And then also there's just love of sports, this adulation of professional athletes and college athletes is just to a degree that I don't remember years ago.

14:44There were always star players, but now they are somehow successful star players, right? They have money and the money goes with just being a Super Bowl champion or a World Series champion. You had another story in there that about, I believe it was in Cleveland, the CYO of Cleveland made all of the coaches go to learn about mental health and identify mental health. And I can tell you, one of the reasons I love talking to you about this is that I love youth sports. I coached my kids and I mainly coached my kids because I saw a couple other coaches that I did not want to coach my kids. So I got involved and I coached in basketball and baseball, you know, like sort of all the way through and loved it.

15:30And the idea of having that added element to give to coaches is just kind of, it seems like the Cleveland CYO, I'm sure the other ones are doing it, but that was who you referenced. It seems like they're trying to take whatever steps they can to guard against everything that you were talking about with social media and overbearing expectations. Yeah, Dobie Moser, who runs the CYO, the archdiocese there, the diocese in Cleveland, was somebody I had met through a previous story and it's very thoughtful. And he allowed me to sit in on one of the coaches' workshops prior to the season starting. And yeah, they're definitely trying to turn down the temperature.

16:14their price point is very different. They are most definitely not AAU. There's a whole series of steps they've taken to just de-emphasize, not the competition, because the competition is part of the goal, but the sort of negative or what they hope to eliminate being the negative parts of it, the sort of hyper focus. And so these coaches all go through this workshop. You know, is it extensive. I got a very thoughtful note from a reader this morning or yesterday saying, look, we're already heaped with so many other things. Adding another whole certification program for a volunteer coach is just going to be overkill.

16:53And I don't think that's the intent. It's certainly not the intent that the CYO attended. It was just common sense. Like, let the kids have fun. And let's take away the things that stigmatize the kids in a negative way or pit one kid against another let's reward good behavior not bad behavior uh so for instance one of the coaches said um the technique he uses is when um he lets the kids lead the stretching this is a i believe it's cross-country coach and he lets the kids each kid lead it and if they're particularly good at leading a certain stretch that stretch will be called the john or the ken or the whatever just to reward the kid.

17:33And it's a very subtle little thing. It costs nothing, right? And yet it will reward the kid for being proactive and being a leader. So there were a lot of nice touches, I thought, in that program that weren't overbearing. I don't think the coaches felt put out. It was a three-hour training on a Wednesday night or something like that. Yeah, maybe they would have rather be with their kids, but it's a small price to pay for potentially a healthier team. Ken, let me take a quick break. I want to come back and I kind of want to talk, spin this forward a little bit and get a sense about where we're headed with all this.

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18:51More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life. because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts. So as I was reading through your story, you hit all sort of the flashpoints. You know, they're just mental health issues, just so much in terms of expectations. But, you know, the sense that I got is that money is coming in and these are not dumb investors.

19:37These are smart investors and everything that you're almost describing where we are now. but the professionalization of youth sports doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. Where is this headed? How much more, what more can we see? There's a lot more out there. And, you know, I've written about private equity over the years. And look, the private equity model, there are many models, But one of the one of their things they look for, investors look for, is a fragmented industry. They could buy cheap and put into a bigger pool and then either break up. That sounds like you sports to me, Ken. Well, exactly.

20:23And so, you know, Little League Little League Baseball, capital L, capital L is an institution. It's a nonprofit. But there are many baseball leagues out there. There's Pop Warner. Pop Warner only has another. I haven't checked the statistics lately, but let's, for argument's sake, I believe it's around 20 % of youth football players play with Pop Warner. And there's AYF, American Youth Football, and there's other leagues out there. But collectively, maybe they're at 50%, 60%. So there's a ton of small business opportunities. And then you add what I think they're trying to sell, which is a more premium experience.

20:58Where have we heard that before? So the Cow Ripken camps, which really are very nice but they come at a price right they're not for every kid so uh they're rolling up a lot of these smaller businesses buying properties literally properties which are essentially fantasy camps for kids and they might have 16 ball fields on them i was out this summer at the field of dreams this was a different youth sports story i was doing was uh to turning the field of dreams movie site the adjoining areas into a youth sports baseball facility or facilities and you know they're trying it out in the middle of Iowa basically this is not private equity money coming in although there were investors originally invested in it and so there's there's a lot of sweeping up of properties sports properties that's the first thing and I think what's going to happen from that is the cost is going to go up these are investors you're going to want return on their investments and so that's going to price out a lot of people and the theme which i did not get into here and maybe it was a little far afield of the mental health issue is just the inequities in youth sports um i met the parks and rec association director and park just park departments across america are hurting because municipal budgets are being slashed and that's where a lot of kids just pick up bats and balls and play with their friends right and some of that opportunity is disappearing now as pickup leagues, sandlot leagues are disappearing.

22:28And so that's another whole issue is who gets to play youth sports in the future. There's a parallel in professional sports. So the days when you used to just go to a stadium and buy a general admission ticket, they're harder and harder to come by, you know, or at least that general admission ticket is more than babysitting money, the babysitting money I used as a teenager to go to games. So, So, you know, everything has gotten more expensive. And I think youth sports is going to suffer from that as well.

22:58One of the areas that you wrote about was, you know, the burnout that happens, of course. Like, naturally, if you do anything at that level at a young age, eventually people are going to burn out. Are there stats or is it just anecdotal? Is there more burnout today than there was a decade ago than there was in the 80s? Because it does seem like growing up in the 80s, I knew a lot of people that played youth sports had stopped in high school or played a little bit in high school and then stopped going to college. So I'm not sure if I would describe it as burnout as much as like, yeah, I just got other interests.

23:38I'm a kid, right? yeah there is a natural attrition and the stat in the story about 70 up to 77 percent of the kids stop playing by 13. a good portion of that may just be as you're saying natural attrition kids growing out of it um there is also a selection process right when you're when you're young and in little league every kid basically gets to play but when you get to junior high school now there's varsity and junior varsity and then there's pretty much not much room for everybody else. So, you know, our sports system in America is kind of a dog-eat-dog world. And I did start to look, and maybe it's worth another story about how youth sports is done in other countries.

24:16And it is very different. We don't have a ministry of sports that oversees the sports world and certainly not youth sports. So we don't really have a system or anything systematic and each sort of sport is left to create their own system and and so there isn't a pathway or there's a pathway to about 12 years old and then you're fed into the vfw teams your school teams and then travel ball and once you're in travel ball full-time travel ball it's competitive coaches are going to drop you if you're not keeping up uh there are tryouts every year. You know, the offseason starts whenever baseball ends, the offseason starts, you're training for the tryouts for next year's team.

25:00There's not really a lot of downtime. And so it gets very competitive. I think this is a, you know, again, a whole feature that we have here that in a lot of other places they don't have. Maybe in Europe they have with the academy teams in the soccer world. But I was just going to say, like, this is anecdotal, but like, you know, arsenal has their kids team or in the manchester united has their academy teams but they all they don't seem to have youth sports basketball or ice hockey or cross country and so the the tentacles in the states seem to go a lot further it seems yes and and it's worth noting that the arsenal teams the kids aren't paying to play for arsenal the the arsenal franchise or team uh company whatever pays for its own feeder system so to get picked up in the arsenal team means you're not paying for youth sports essentially um uh so so they they have their own minor league system and uh whereas in america you you have to pay uh as a parent um there are scholarships in certain places but by and large parents are footing the bill and that means certain parents aren't going to be able to afford it um another thoughtful reader mentioned to me uh that um or highlighted something that which i had written about previously but neglected to put in this story that for some families getting a scholarship to college is maybe the only way their kid can afford to get to college and i i saw families and met families in texas years ago where the parents were talking about um the dangers of putting their kids in in tackle football and they said but at the end of the day if it helps my kid get an education in college it's going to be worth it and so there are families that are betting on sports as their financial lifeline which seems to invert the whole model um but again it goes back to this idea that there's quote unquote a payoff in sports and um you know that's that's kind of a sad way to look at it in a way right because shouldn't sports just be fun and i think that's what's uh what a lot of people tell me is missing from youth sports right now or is increasingly missing.

27:05As for the accuracy of this, again, we don't have, we have fragmented data along with fragmented sports leagues. And so the 70 % number is very much a guideline. It's not a precise number. Let me ask you about a complaint I hear all the time. This is about ESPN and the Little League World Series. And, you know, they're showing the athletes as as they play and you you want to talk about pressure like like losing on national television is pressure um however i i have like a kind of a firsthand experience with this my my son was lucky enough to represent dc in the little league world series about uh 13 years ago uh went up to bristol and they were one win away from competing on espn and the excitement of all the kids about like trying to play they lost that game unfortunately i think it was pennsylvania that beat But the excitement about possibly playing on there.

28:03So I saw like a genuine excitement, like childlike excitement about playing on there. But I hear consistently from people that are watching kids cry, having given up a home run or whatever, that sort of the big national media getting involved in some of the youth sports is a net negative. Well, I mean, I don't know how many times I cried in sports, but I certainly watched teammates cry. None of it is on video, Ken. Yeah. Well, that's so that's my point, is that kids have cried by giving up the game winning home run forever. Right. The difference is this is now on national TV and there's a permanent record of it.

28:46And so we're exposing young kids to public scrutiny in a way that did not exist years ago. and i mentioned social media earlier where every kid is a cameraman um and so you know i mean look this is the world we live in we can't put that genie back in the bottle but i i you know i would hope espn is somewhat um judicious with some of the camera work they do i know i don't get far afield but the whole green room at the nfl draft where aaron rogers is sitting there alone because He's not getting picked. You know, it's ghoulish, right? I mean, you're seeing this guy's, I mean, Aaron Rodgers worked out, but there have been other players, Geno Smith after that.

29:27And, you know, guys' lives are melting on national TV, and we're having it. It's sport. You know, it's, quote, unquote, fun to watch. And is it? I don't know. I mean, I could see why players don't want to go to the draft anymore if they risk that kind of embarrassment. And we're imposing that on 12-year-olds. And is that the best thing we should be doing? I don't know. You know, there's no need to answer. It's also great for the kids who win and even the kids that win one game and it's nationally televised. That's a lifetime moment for sure. Ken, I'm going to appoint you as the czar of youth sports just in general.

30:06What changes, what are the immediate changes that you would make to youth sports if you had such a role and such power? Well, I think there needs to be more national coordination. It's very un-American at this point to even suggest that we should have any sort of agency that comes up with best practices or best standards that can be applied across youth sports. There's pieces of it, obviously. I look at USA Football and their concussion certification program to help coaches at the very least spot a concussion and pull a kid off a field. Okay, that's one little example. The CYO program I saw in Ohio where they're taught, you know, in literally just a three hour session, just some of the basics, some of the bullet points to take with them to keep in mind.