As Education Evolves, Access to Sports Must Remain a Priority

The 2020–21 school year will go down as the year of no sports for many youth athletes. Player “bios” will be represented as just a big white space this year, perhaps memorialized with the simple line: “No Season — COVID-19 Pandemic”. These empty bios will serve as a permanent reminder of what the pandemic has done to the millions of students for whom competing in sports is a central part of their educational journey.

But the coronavirus pandemic, while devastating for so many athletes, pales in comparison to the continued systematic “pandemic” that has been plaguing youth, high school, and increasingly college sports for decades. The cultural demand for sports elitism — most evident in the businesses built around professional leagues and Division-I college football and basketball — continues to drown out investments that support access to sports experiences for the massive tier of non-elite athletes. Data from multiple sources confirm that declining youth sports participation levels (including at the high school level) paints a worrisome picture for the future of all youth sports participation as defined by the layers below professional and Division-I college football and basketball:

• Youth sports participation rates are declining for both kids age 6–12 and for high school athletes,
• Independent club sports participation continues to grow for those kids whose families can afford it,
• Education institutions (particularly public K-12 middle and high schools) find themselves more financially constrained than ever in their ability to support a full range of individual and team sports (outside of the essentially professional Division-I college football and basketball programs), and
• All of these trends in youth sports participation are hurtling towards a future of education that will no doubt accelerate its delivery mode to digital in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The reality for youth sports is that as the collision plays out between a “top of the pyramid” youth sports system focused on elite athletes and the increased digitization of education, we will witness continued declines in the opportunities for kids to play youth sports (again, other than in D-I football and basketball). If the goal is to enable more youth sports participation — for more kids and for longer e.g. through HS and beyond — then how do we make this a reality over the next 10 years?

Here are a few ideas, but certainly not an exhaustive plan. Some of these efforts will require private-public partnerships that transfer wealth in order to support youth sports as a public good.

• First off, don’t fight the magnetic pull from football and basketball. That genie is out of the bottle so let the NFL and NBA/WNBA keep their tacit relationship with Division-I power conferences as it relates to the professionally run football and basketball programs on these campuses, and the deep rooted economic model that’s been constructed for more than a century. [Not for this post, but there’s a more comprehensive framework highlighted in David Ridpath’s book “Alternative Models of Sports Development in America: Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health” that should be considered for the Division-I football and basketball layer of youth sports.]
• Shift the rest of college sports to the model that Ivy League and Divsion-III colleges pursue in which athletes fund their college education absent of athletic scholarships. Under this framework, colleges can still field teams in a wide range of sports — including football and basketball — but the financial contribution afforded any athlete is based on academic merit and/or financial need. The youth sports fund (outlined below) could earmark dollars to colleges who do not maintain an endowment above a specified amount (that said, all college institutions should increase their alumni donor efforts when it comes to sourcing need-based funds for athletes). Finally, under this approach, it’s imperative that colleges ensure equitable access to sports teams in a way that mirrors commitments to equitable access for non-athletes — both in terms of academic support and access to non-loan financial aid for every student-athlete.
• Establish a national youth sports foundation whose singular goal is to maximize the metric of “youth sports participation seasons per child”. Funding for this foundation would be multi-channel: federal government (as a public health investment), meaningful contributions from professional leagues and media companies (beyond the promotional programs supported today), progressive contributions from professional athletes (perhaps only from players who earn more than league minimums), and mandated contributions from every company who sponsors or advertises during professional and Division-I college football and basketball competitions. This youth sports foundation would contribute 98% of its fund to support after school sports programs for elementary and middle school aged athletes, and to support expanded access to high school sports programs.
• At the high school level it’s clear that the club system isn’t going away, and it won’t so long as a clear connection exists between club sport development and access to an academic institution for higher learning. We’re already seeing public school spending being spread too thin to support full sports programs, and as a result parents are being asked to help close the widening funding gap. One way to bolster high school sports would be to allow club programs to play a bigger role in supporting how public high schools deliver sports programs. Again, funding from the youth sports foundation, as well as directly from parents based on need, could be funneled to club sports platforms who in turn would operate more teams (not just the varsity team with 12 players) and provide more expertise from coaches and training for all players. Re-wiring high school sports might widen the top of funnel for athletes who then seek opportunities to play in college — exposing students to more options after high school, and options that could enable them to continue playing a sport they love while pursuing their post-secondary education.
• Finally, a youth sports fund — along with re-defining the college and high school sports models described above — could trickle down to bolster participation at the earliest stage of our youth sports ecosystem. Parents will still be asked to contribute, but this should be need-based so that no child is turned away from playing youth sports. Funding could be utilized to ensure that coaches, officials, and facilities are fully available as these are too often the bottlenecks that stand in the way of sports participation for our youngest athletes. For many kids, that youth soccer or t-ball team they play on as a kindergartener would represent the first of what becomes dozens of “youth sports participation seasons” they play in their lifetime.

The digital transformation of our K-12 and higher education ecosystem will continue to accelerate changes to not only how learning is delivered to kids, but it will serve to catalyze a resurgence in how we deliver youth sports to the masses. This doesn’t require an overhaul of our penchant for elite professional and Division-I football and basketball. It will require some fine tuning of how other sports are delivered at the college level from Division-I on down (except for football and basketball), how funding could be sourced from multiple channels to enable non-club youth sports across the country today, and how the club sports ecosystem might come into closer collaboration with scholastic sports at the high school level to bolster participation while simultaneously allowing the public education system to focus its finite resources on constructing the digitally delivered personalized learning system of the future. Imagine if every kid could play a sport they loved through high school and beyond — imagine the public health and educational outcome benefits we could amass if we fully maximized the potential of youth sports participation.