How We Can Narrow the Widening Gap in Youth Sports Participation to Support Student Success

While driving home from my daughter’s water polo tournament on a recent Saturday evening, the bright lights shining down on a youth league soccer game reminded me how lucky so many Bay Area kids are to have access to youth sports year around. The brief glimpse of that Palo Alto soccer field also reminded me how my youth sports experiences were initially shaped, initially by the early morning basketball scrimmages with my elementary school classmates that were enabled by a thoughtful P.E. teacher, and a later by the many seasons of town sponsored youth sports baseball, basketball, and football leagues that taught my siblings and me so much.

But those days are long gone for the vast majority of today’s youth. As Linda Flanagan’s recent article in The Atlantic highlights, youth sports in the United States continues to evolve rapidly towards a state of “haves and haves not” when it comes to access and participation. And unfortunately, though the benefits of sports participation are widely understood and accepted, many kids are missing out on the long-term benefits that stem from playing youth and high school sports. Despite this trend, however, there are a few specific ways we can turn the tide here and invest in youth sports so that all students can play and realize the benefits that playing sports delivers well beyond the results that take place on fields and courts.

First, let’s acknowledge the transformation that’s taking place in the U.S. when it comes to youth sports. Yes, youth sports has become very big business — a $15B industry with participation increasingly skewed towards more affluent families chasing sports excellence. What’s more troubling, fewer opportunities are now available for non-affluent families given that 21% of kids live below the poverty line and many more likely don’t have family finances or the parental availability to support a club sport commitment. As Flanagan notes: “Compared to their peers whose families make more than $100,000, children ages 6 through 12 whose family income is under $25,000 are nearly three times as likely to be “inactive” — meaning they played no sport during the year — and half as likely to play on a team sport even for one day.” And saddest of all is the statistic that by age 13 fully 70% of kids exit competitive sports participation entirely.

Why is this growing division so bad for kids in the long run? Flanagan’s story enumerates the long list of benefits our youth gain by playing sports including health benefits such as “longer life expectancies…improved mental and physical health…” as well as cognitive development in “…discipline, teamwork, and resilience.” The research supports how important extracurricular sports participation can be for students. By far, however, the most compelling reason for supporting sports across the socioeconomic spectrum through high school is the fact that playing sports has such powerful impacts on student success. As Flanagan writes: “Compared to those who don’t play sports, students on high-school teams graduate at higher rates, perform better on tests, secure higher grades, and are more apt to aim for college.”

Bingo! So if we all buy into the positive impact sports participation has on student success, what can we do to bring this correlation to life for more kids? Let’s be realistic, we aren’t putting the club sports genie back in the bottle, not when big time college sports and pro sports are such a siren song for kids and their parents. That said, we can invest and prioritize youth sports participation to help ensure that their benefits inure to all kids during their formative middle and high-school years. Here are three simple investments worth considering:

• Open up schools in the mornings and evenings so kids can play and practice together more often. One of the biggest barriers for kids is having access to other kids, courts, and fields to just flat out play. They don’t need structured leagues, games, or even officials. Playing pick up games is in many ways enough structure to begin yielding the physical and cognitive benefits that sports deliver. Yes this might require extending hours that schools are open and drive the need for more budget dollars going to teachers or coaches to keep an eye on kids, but the return on investment will be hard to dispute.
• Aim financial support — specifically that collected by programs sponsored by the NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. — at organizations already providing access to sports teams and leagues for local kids who don’t have the means to play on a club team. The platforms that groups like YMCA, Boys & Girls Club of America, Little League Baseball, and AAU (to name just a few) have developed are built to support sports participation in conjunction with local schools. Further, Flanagan’s piece highlights other important groups like Eugene, Oregon’s Kidsports who specifically focus on “sports options for 14,000 kids in grades kindergarten through eight, regardless of income or athletic ability.” Finally, we should also be supporting organizations like Oakland, California-based Coaching Corps whose mission it is to train and enable coaches for many of these organizations since oftentimes the biggest obstacle to youth sports participation is finding qualified coaches to lead teams. [Editor’s note: I have served as a board member for Coaching Corps since 2014.]
• Take the more dramatic (and granted, more costly) effort to require every middle and high-school student play a sport at least one season every year from their junior-high years through their senior year. This commitment need not excessively ramp expenses at schools as many of the sports, teams, and “leagues” that might be added to support participation would indeed be “hyper-local”. This means that extending the opportunity to play could be built around the idea that these teams/individuals compete against other local schools to reduce travel expense, compete against teams/individuals in their own school “league” (e.g. think intramural sports for high school), use coaches to officiate games, and rely more on practice time and scrimmages to elicit the true benefits from sports participation versus focusing on “wins” and “league championships”. For sure this would be a commitment from schools. It would require that “no cut” clauses extend beyond freshman year, and schools would likely need to encourage current staff members to help coach school teams or officiate competitions. It might even spur some schools to rethink the implementation of their physical education curriculum towards this more structured sports participation framework in an effort to augment their academic efforts tied to delivering student outcomes.

These are just three simple ways we could invest in the connection between sports participation and student success. We should explore as many other ways possible to keep kids playing a sport all the way through high school. Flanagan’s story references a gathering last month at Aspen Institute’s Project Play Summit where many of the aforementioned organizations met to share ideas of how the widening division within youth sports participation might be closed. I hope that school leaders are included in this discussion moving forward. Given that the stakes are so high — and the benefits so obvious — we need to rely on the contributions educators can make to connecting kids to sports participation based on the expertise they bring to getting this important equation right.