Can We Make Youth Sports Fun Again?

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21:44Heidi Raykeil:orders over$65. These styles sell out, so don't sit on it. That's Z-E-N-N-I dot com slash podcast promo code podcast15. so super interesting like all the things that come together 2008 financial crisis and recession is devastating to the parks and rec budget of towns and then like as that's recovering we hit covid19 and that is like another blow and it's there's a void created where these things kind of rush in. And then we also have a new drive towards college. The idea of like college access through sports also enters the picture. Your child will be able to get a scholarship to college, which is unaffordable for the majority of people, if they are really good at their sport.

22:39Heidi Raykeil:Right. These days, college full ticket price can be$80 ,000,$90 ,000 a year at some schools, or your kid can get in a year early and go for free if they're really, really, really good at lacrosse. Right. So this drive is, I'm going to lay a term on you, Amy, I know this is going to light you up. Neglect of probability, a cognitive bias where people disregard the mathematical odds of something when making a decision under uncertainty and focus instead on the magnitude of the potential outcome. This is the lotto. It's Powerball. That's what I was like. This is a Powerball. But I might win. It's a billion dollars.

23:21Often referred to as the stupidity tax because it's like your odds are so astronomically low. But all you're thinking about is like, what would I do with 348 million dollars?

23:32Heidi Raykeil:And so year over year, you're spending. And again, I want to say, like, if your kid loves baseball, this might be the baseball that's available to them as the travel team. I wish that weren't the case. But if it is, you're spending$30 ,000,$40 ,000 a year on gas and fees and hotels and a babysitter for your other kid and whatever. But at least they might be able to go to college for free or basically free. That is a fallacy, basically. It's a fallacy. What are the statistics on that? 7.9 million high school athletes of that, let's call it 8 million kids who are playing high school athletics. 480 ,000 of those athletes compete at the NCAA level.

24:11And of those, 180 ,000 receive any form of financial aid. And full-ride scholarships, which is what people think of, my kid will go to college for free, are much, much more likely in marquee sports like football and basketball. Only a fraction of players receive full scholarships. For most others, you're talking about partial scholarships, if at all.

24:37Heidi Raykeil:So I'm looking at the total high school athletes, 2 % of the kids playing a high school sport go on to get aid for that sport in college. And even fewer than that would get a free ride. Astronomically fewer of those 2 % will get a free ride. And this is what you're being sold. So it's not wrong that you think this. So you have a huge multimillion dollar industry telling you that your kid is amazing and special. Unfortunately, not because your kid is amazing and special, because they are trying to fill those fields that they have built all over the country. A national parent survey conducted by the Aspen Institute's Project Play showed that 2 in 10, 20 percent, of youth sports parents believed their child had the ability to eventually play Division I college sports.

25:30And 1 in 10, 10 percent, think their child could reach the pros or the Olympics.

25:35Heidi Raykeil:I mean, I've had moments of this, like, my kid's really good. Of course you do. And then there is, but if it's Division I, like NCAA athletes, you have a 2 % chance of playing NCAA college sports at all. But that includes Division II and III. So Division I, your kid has like a 1 % chance of being a D1 athlete. And if they're short, less than that, right? Like there's also. Even then, they're probably only getting a partial scholarship for that. And they are not playing in the Olympics. It's just the same chances. Like, it's the same chances of winning the lotto. It's better chances than winning the lotto.

26:11But it's an extremely small chance. And listen, I have three kids. I'm convinced that, like, they're all going to be incredibly famous, successful in their field. We talked about this on another podcast. Like, what dreams are we setting up for our kids? And again, there's nothing wrong with playing youth sports. There's nothing wrong with playing travel sports. But man, is it a good idea to keep in mind what the industry is telling you, motivated by their own profits, versus what is realistic.

26:45Heidi Raykeil:So I have a kid. There's something that's missing from this list in terms of people who are making money off this. I had a kid who was in the zone to play D3 soccer in college in the like 10 percent chance, right? Like it's a possibility maybe at a certain school. COVID completely messed with it. And I'm glad it did because guess what you do when you have a kid who might play sports in college? It's a completely different process, completely separate early application process. And guess what you need for that? You need an advisor. So we had an advisor telling us this is how they have to write to coaches.

27:22Heidi Raykeil:This is the place they have to show at and play in front of these coaches that are going to be showing up. And you better go because this one's going to be like we just dipped our toes in this water and then COVID disrupted the whole thing. But it occurs to me as you're saying that there's probably no chance that that advisor would say, you know what, I don't think this is in the cards for your kids. So I'm not going to, you know, take your money or your time on this. It's like, OK, we're going to run this process. And your kid is not good enough. It's not happening. So that's a whole other lane.

27:48Heidi Raykeil:And it's like AI. It's like an LLM. It's never going to tell you your kid isn't good enough. It'll keep taking more of your money and time to try to find a place where your kid is good enough. The other thing, and we've talked about this with a ton of people, is that free play. Free play means unstructured. No adult is running the show. Kids are playing. That's Amy Wilson's backyard wiffle ball game every day after school at 4 o 'clock, right? Free play. every expert will tell you is great for kids. It's problem solving. It's all these things that they need to do. And we played a ton of backyard baseball.

28:25I won't say nobody ever got hurt because my sister did break her nose. She got hit with a bat at one point when someone throng a bat in celebration or whatever. That happens at Little League too. People got hurt. But I will say Adam Gershny, our next door neighbor, was amazing. And he could hit it 400 yards further than anybody else. And he got a homer every time. And so we rotated which team he went on. Like, we couldn't figure out that it wasn't fair that Adam Gershny, who was like Adonis, you know, was playing against my four-year-old cousin. Like, we figured it out, you know?

29:00Heidi Raykeil:And I have a whole other point that just occurred to me about this. Like, Adam Gershny, like, I don't think he played for the Toronto Blue Jays eventually, right? He like went on to be an accountant. No, I believe he's a dentist. Yeah. But he had that level when you have free play and low key, like he was the king of your backyard and he had that level of achievement and he got that. I'm awesome. It's such a lower cost than, you know, the 12 year old flying to Toledo every weekend. That's such a great point that like who was the king of backyard wiffle ball at your house? I'm sure there was some kid, right?

29:35Heidi Raykeil:Like, yeah, my brother could really, um, guarantee to hit Homer. And this is a crazy story. I don't know if I've told our listeners this, like I grew up in Scranton where everybody knows everybody. My future brother-in-law was in my backyard every day playing baseball. Like I knew my brother-in-law long before he met my husband's sister. It's so funny. He was a slugger as well. So I go back with my brother-in-law like decades and decades, what, like 40 years? Yeah. Since we were playing. Yeah. I mostly watched. I didn't want to get hit with the ball or anything. You know, I was content to achieve.

30:03Heidi Raykeil:I didn't need to be a home run king of anything. But you're also like working it out. Yeah. I was just playing a lot of pickleball and the whole like, OK, you only hit it to the weakest player. Like, it's not the greatest, but like that's part of the game, too. Like, and maybe there's hurt feelings. And how do you work that out? And, you know, maybe give that person a break. They're trying to learn the game. So like if you're just like smashing balls at them and you know, they're a new like I remember that as kids like, OK, if the four year old is at bat, you walk right up to them and you pitch it easily to them and you all yell while they run around the base.

30:41Like we figured that out. We didn't need eight adults being like, let cousin Birdie get a hit. Like we did that. We figured it out ourselves. And the lessons that are being lost when we are like shipping our kids off to what are fundamentally corporate monstrosities to play with like good coaches. The loss is tremendous and something that we need to think about.

31:11Heidi Raykeil:Yes, but it's not something you can fix by yourself necessarily, right? Like, I mean, you cannot play by these rules. Your kid cannot do these things. Your kid can quit. Well, I think there is a second step, too, that like, is your rec center in town well funded? Is your rec center in town giving kids opportunities to play who might not be able to play? Is there a VIP or a special needs sport group available to you somewhere that like kids of any abilities can go out and participate in sports? Now, I live right outside of New York City, and all of those things are available to me, basically. It's not as available if you're living somewhere like a small town in the middle of somewhere far away.

31:57Heidi Raykeil:Well, sometimes you have to be the change you seek. My same brother-in-law, slugger in my backyard, now has kids who play different organized sports. And he's the coach for a lot of them. And he really is trying to instill with his teams. And sometimes there's other coaches like, OK, these kids are seven. Can we not with the yelling? Yeah. Can we make sure everybody plays? Because if you just let the five kids who are best play, the other 10 aren't going to get any better. Sure. Like the gap opens up early if you're not focused on the right things. And so you can become one of the coaches. That's a good way to affect change.

32:31Heidi Raykeil:But that's a lot of time and investment and knowing how to do the sports. These stats can be very frustrating and these systems that we have these conversations all the time and I always worry about them. And thinking about this topic, I was like, oh, here we go again. You are at the mercy of systems that are 400 times bigger than you in all of these things. Right. Like we don't have good maternal health care. There's no social safety net. Like it's like, OK, great. Tell me what else. Like, I guess I'll write my congressman at the end of my long day of making dinner for three kids, you know. But I do think that knowing the water you're soaking in is super, super important.

33:11And knowing that the end of all of this is like corporations taking your money is really, really a useful thing to understand.

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35:56and now the types of moms you will meet at your kids sporting events from the what fresh out podcast the mom who really doesn't get the sport oh look at all this kicking and running

36:09Heidi Raykeil:when does somebody score a goal the mom who really gets the sport okay so the next kid at bat is this kid from field crest he was batting 300 last year but i heard he might have pulled a hammy in the offseason, but still, I'd throw a slider knowing this kid's offensive capabilities. The pusher. You should see what my kid is bringing to the field this year. He's been doing offseason pro camps, and the coach said he's going to be starting all year. You should come over and see some of his game films sometime and see what he can really do. And at only six years old. The back in my day mom. Back in the day, we didn't have all this sitting around on the sidelines and supporting our kids.

36:43Heidi Raykeil:You think my mom ever came to a peewee football game? Answer, no. We walked to school. We kicked a ball around. I'm going to have referees. This has been the types of moms you will meet at your kids' sporting events. From the What Fresh Out podcast. So one thing to understand is that this is not normal. During the World Cup, there was a lot of talk about this, about how youth soccer training, travel teams, premier coaching in the U.S. are privately funded, out-of-pocket sports for families. In most of the world, there are public recreation fields where kids grow up playing soccer. And then there are clubs that exist in the towns that move regular kids through the system at no cost or lower cost than here.

37:29And so there was an argument being made that, like, the U.S. team is not the best soccer players in America. The U.S. team is the best soccer players who could afford to play soccer in America.

37:42Heidi Raykeil:And we haven't even talked about that, like the wealth gap that this creates, that if your kid has to have a pitching coach to play high school baseball, Only the kids who have that sort of disposable income get to play at all. Right. But there is another system, right? Which is like when you think about basketball, right? Every urban park, they may be cracked. They may be have weeds coming up through them. But there are basketball courts where kids can go play. Right. And people come up and they get scouted and recruited off of. And then they probably get fed into a system. I don't know anything about professional basketball.

38:16I'm sure by like age 11 and 12, the kids who are great at basketball are getting like. They're going to Germany and yeah, yeah. They're playing special schools. They're getting spotted by people and figure this out. But that's the thing. If your kid, like I was thinking about something for some reason. If your kid wants to be a model, they will be discovered walking down the street because they will be six foot tall. They will be severely underweight, naturally extremely thin, and they will be six feet tall and have a gorgeous face. Like, you don't have to go out and pay somebody to be like, my kid wants a model.

38:50This is still true with every sport. If your kid is the best soccer player in a 400-mile radius, someone's going to find out about it. If they're the best singer in a 400-mile, like, there is a natural selection process that is going to happen whether or not you pay$3 ,000 to a coach.

39:09Heidi Raykeil:So how do we make sports more accessible to our own kids and all kids in gentler ways? I talked to Dr. Stuart Slavin about this, a fresh take a couple of weeks ago. So we should link to that. I told him the story of like going to a coach and saying like, you're kind of mean, you kind of yell. The end result was us leaving. Like that was not something they were interested in. And the other parents, he said, are fine with it. Like we're tough. And that's what Dr. Slavin was saying. Like if you go one person at a time to these places, like, no, no, no, we grow them tough here. And that's how it is.

39:38Heidi Raykeil:You have to organize the other parents if you want to have change. And this is happening in places. And it doesn't mean you don't have to go out and start a recreational sports league. You don't. But I think knowledge is power. Like knowing these things. Great story in the San Francisco Gate, which we will link to, about Oakland Parks started a recreational program where there was a play lending library. So you could go and instead of getting a book, you could get sports equipment. and there's a field out back and it's like kids show up, pick up a baseball bat and baseballs and gloves and like go out back and play together.

40:17Whoever happens to be around, like just reformatting our ideas around sports. And let me tell you, if you're Jackie Robinson and you're doing that, someone's going to find you. You don't have to pay$9 million to the coaches. Like if you are naturally the world's greatest Oakland football, baseball player, Someone's going to figure it out. They're going to find you. Yes, you need the opportunity. And I'm not trying to be super facile about it. But it is also okay to be like, my kid who wants to play lacrosse, let me post on Facebook, get you a used stick, and go play with your friends every day after school and just play.

40:53Put a game together or just play. Encouraging free play. I used to, on Friday nights, have an open backyard. We have a really nice yard. And, I mean, nice. It's not a groomed backyard. Just a big backyard. And like whoever wanted to come over could play. And there was like skateboards. If you want to ride down the little hill, there was just different equipment out. And like come over and play on Friday afternoons. It's like I just try to orient towards open play as a default.

41:22Heidi Raykeil:Yeah, I think that's probably what's going to save it because it's not these entities. A money making entity might want to take on a prodigy for free because they can say that that kid came through the program. So maybe that kid gets to go for free. But the rest of us, they're not going to do a half-price program so more kids can join. They're not going to. Why would they? Other solutions that I like, play with your kids for the sake of play. Go out and throw a football with your kids. Go out and, like you said, like we're just spending a day together. And it's like, all right, let's, what are we doing?

41:51You want to play pickleball? You want to ping pong? Like, let's do something. Let kids explore at their level. We were playing a lot of pickleball this summer. And like, it makes me nuts that like some of the kids just want to hit it as hard as possible. Some of the kids want to like show off their amazing like spin skills. And it just makes them stink at pickleball and it makes them not fun to play with. But let them explore. There's a whole story about how pickleball was invented. Basically, people who were getting too old to play tennis and they wanted something a little bit easier. And now it's like this craze.

42:22Now they're making pickleball way too intense and serious too. I know. Now corporations, because of course, what happens? Then the corporations come in and they're like, here's a bubble and you can do it and you can get a coach. Go play for the sake of playing. And show your children that play for its own sake is extremely valuable. Put a badminton net up. Put a volleyball net up. Get the skateboard. Play is play. And then as they get involved with sports, we've used this phrase a million times, I love watching you play is the greatest response you can give. I'm not amazing at this. I'm a teacher by nature and I'm always kind of like, you know, if you would stop trying to slice it, you would have better results.

43:00No, play for the sake of play. Local rec teams, backyard games. What if you were forbidden from spending money on sports? Just a question to ask yourself. What would that look like? If you were forbidden from spending money, what would your life look like? It would look like going on Facebook and getting a used hockey stick and saying Friday nights at four, my driveway is hockey.

43:24Heidi Raykeil:And the last one, I think, is you can be good at something. You should want to get good at something. You should improve. You should encourage other people around you to improve. And because that is an end in itself. Right. When I get better at pickleball, then you're going to enjoy playing with me more. So don't be a jerk. Like, help everybody else around you get better because then we'll all have more fun. That's true. That's not just a Hallmark card. And here's the thing. Sports is inherently competitive. It's already baked in. The competitiveness, we don't have to be layering onto that. You know, people will be like, oh, Travis Kelsey is making$35 million a year.

43:58That doesn't change the way he plays the game. It's a benefit of being one of the greatest tight ends in history. But he doesn't play harder the more they pay him, right? Like, it is inherent in every cell of his DNA to play competitively. We don't have to layer that on top of it by screaming in kids' faces. Right, by yelling at seven-year-olds. It's competitive. I go out and play pickleball and I'm like, I will crush you, four-year-old nephew. And I have to turn it off because that's already there. We don't have to chase that part of it.

44:30Heidi Raykeil:Well, I think we solved it. I think sports are going to go back to the egalitarian, fun thing that they used to be instead of the intense, expensive, not fun thing that they've become. And if you do feel like writing a letter to your congressperson, federal sports betting taxes should be going to close the gap in youth sports. Amen. They shouldn't be sports betting. But if there is, let's put that money towards. Federal sports betting taxes should only go towards low income and closing the gap sports programs. So go ahead, write that letter if you want. That's our takeaway. Yeah, you don't have to follow us.

45:04Public funding is crucial to sports equity. And if we don't have public funding, then we have rich kids playing sports. And guess what? We have a source for it. Federal sports betting taxes, people.

45:18Heidi Raykeil:Write a letter if you want. I want to give another shout out to Caitlin Moscatello. Her article is called The Pay to Play Childhood from New York Magazine. We'll link to it in the show notes. Such an illuminating article. Please check it out. It was the whole inspiration for this discussion. And it's a discussion we need to keep having. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next time.

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