Host and co-executive producer of the new ESPN series, “Backstory”
Member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national, explanatory and public service journalism
Author of three books, including New York Times best-selling “First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters from Taft to Bush”
24-year newspaper career at The New York Times and Miami Herald
Oct 30, 2025, 07:00 AM ET
Federal law officers are investigating a youth baseball company owned by the Major League Baseball Players Association that spent at least $3.9 million while holding few sparsely attended live events for kids, sources familiar with the inquiry told ESPN.
The Florida-based business, Players Way, has generated barely six figures in revenue since its founding in 2019. While the union said it has put $3.9 million into the company, two sources with knowledge of union finances and who have talked with investigators told ESPN that the amount is closer to $10 million.
The former officials said Players Way funds largely paid the six-figure annual salaries of its executives and consultants. They include a handful of former major leaguers, some of whom were simultaneously working other full-time jobs outside the union.
One of the former senior union officials described Players Way finances as a “black box.”
Players Way was cited in an anonymous whistleblower complaint last November that triggered an ongoing criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, which last week brought criminal indictments against two NBA coaches, a current player and nearly two dozen Mafia-connected figures.
The complaint accused MLBPA executive director Tony Clark of self-dealing, misuse of resources and abuse of power at the union. It also alleged nepotism in his dealings with Players Way, which he helped launch with lofty aspirations to transform youth baseball across America. The MLBPA at the time denied all the allegations as “entirely without merit.”
Clark, who has not been charged with any crime, and other union officials have dismissed the whistleblower allegations as “baseless.” He declined to be interviewed for this story. In a written statement to ESPN this week, Clark said he created Players Way “as an oasis for young athletes and families who too often get exploited in today’s billion-dollar ‘youth sports’ machinery.”
Union officials declined to say how Players Way spent millions of dollars. The union told ESPN it has three budgets — one for operations ($27.5 million this year); another for MLB Players Inc., its for-profit licensing firm ($7.1 million this year); and a third players-approved “discretionary” budget for Clark to spend as he sees fit.
The union declined to say how much cash was in the discretionary pot this year, whether Players Way was ever funded from discretionary funds, or whether players specifically approved spending by the company.
“Any suggestion that Players Way has not been supported by our elected Player representatives and broader membership is patently false,” Clark said in his statement. “Players Way has been front and center at every annual meeting of the MLBPA Executive Board in recent memory, and our dialogue with Players regarding youth development continues throughout the calendar.”
Federal investigators declined to comment, citing the ongoing inquiry. Union revenues have grown significantly in recent years through the creation of OneTeam Partners, a group-licensing firm the MLBPA co-founded with the National Football League Players Association in 2019.
In May, ESPN reported that investigators from the Justice Department were looking into the unions’ financial dealings with OneTeam, which three years ago had a valuation of nearly $2 billion.
Sources interviewed by ESPN said the investigation widened this summer to include Players Way. Investigators also have asked witnesses about whistleblower allegations of excessive union spending on international and domestic trips for Clark and other senior union executives, the sources said.
One player leader, when asked about the Players Way expenditures, told ESPN, “It doesn’t matter how much we’ve made. Waste is waste.”
“And given the level of frustration we’ve had with [union leadership] about this sort of stuff, it’s going to come up,” the player said. “Whenever Players Way is mentioned, we all just nod along. But I don’t think any of us realized it cost as much as it did.”
ESPN interviewed nearly 30 current and former union officials, lawyers, players and people with knowledge of the federal inquiry, most of whom spoke only on the condition of anonymity.
Multiple former union officials said Players Way has operated without standard accounting practices and with no annual budgets circulated among senior finance officials.
An MLBPA official, in a written statement, acknowledged to ESPN that Players Way did not have its own budget but was operated as “part of the overall org budget.” “But the folks working on it were tracking and projecting expenses the way any department at the PA does,” the official said.
While public union filings show the MLBPA committed a total of only $83,550 to Players Way, nearly all the $3,891,249 the union said Players Way has spent came from Players Inc. Like Players Way, the finances of Players Inc. are not disclosed to the Department of Labor.
The union provided ESPN with an annual breakdown of money it says it spent on Players Way. In 2018, according to the MLBPA, Players Way spent $181,054, a figure that grew annually and peaked in 2024 at $1,127,656. This year, as of Oct. 6, the union said $647,058 has been spent on Players Way.
The sources familiar with the MLBPA’s financials, though, told ESPN the company received far more cash from Players Inc., including more than $2 million over one 18-month period to fund payroll and other activities. At several other times when Players Way needed to cover shortfalls, roughly $1 million of Players Inc. money was transferred to the company, the sources said.
The money spent, the former officials told ESPN, included $1.2 million from 2022 to 2024 provided by Fanatics Inc., an MLBPA licensing partner.
When the MLBPA struck a deal with Fanatics in 2021 for the exclusive license to produce baseball cards, the company agreed to pay the union $400,000 annually from 2022 to 2024 to support the union’s youth baseball initiatives, including Players Way, the sources told ESPN.
“We were and continue to be excited to invest with MLBPA in Players Way as part of our multi-billion-dollar long-term partnership,” a Fanatics spokesman said. “Youth baseball development is critical to the success of the sport and we have complete confidence that the MLBPA will invest the funds in a way that creates long-term value for all parties involved.”
Both former finance officials said they raised concerns about the Players Inc. transfers with senior leadership, but the transactions continued. One of the finance officials said Clark personally approved the transfers to Players Way, usually in six-figure chunks. “It was just money going out the door,” the source told ESPN.
Another former official called Players Way a “total waste of money.”
ON ITS WEBSITE, Players Way lists its company headquarters at 13506 Summerport Village Parkway, Suite 226, in Windermere, Florida, about 20 miles west of Orlando. It’s in a strip mall, flanked by a liquor store and a chain hair salon. But the “suite” is not a suite at all. It’s a mail box at a UPS Store where an employee confirmed to ESPN that Box 226 is registered to Players Way LLC.
The MLBPA partnered with the United States Specialty Sports Association in 2018 to provide an alternative to existing youth baseball organizations that dominate the market. Players Way was officially founded a year later, with Clark saying he wanted to fix what many in baseball see as a broken youth baseball system. His son was involved in travel baseball at the time, and Clark said he believed the sport deserved better than the high costs, long weekends and lack of regard for young pitchers’ arms that existed.
“The goal — informed by players themselves — isn’t to become just another cog in the youth sports machinery, putting profits over players,” Clark said in his statement to ESPN. “It aims higher: to meet players where they are, teach the game the right way, and to foster lifelong lessons creating lifelong fans. Future generations deserve nothing less.”
Standing in a netted indoor practice facility, in front of pitching machines, tees and L-shaped pitching screens, Clark introduced Players Way publicly in June 2020 with a video posted on YouTube. A former official said Clark viewed the initiative as an essential part of his plan to tap retired major leaguers to shape the next generation of baseball players. “Players Way was something he always brought up,” the former official said. “It was very important to Tony. It was not anything anyone paid attention to in how it was operated.”
Inside the MLBPA, employees questioned the company’s purpose and apparent lack of a business plan despite Players Way having “a voracious appetite for cash that seemed to just waste money year after year,” a former employee said.
“We had no events, we had no activities, we are not publicizing, we are not partnering with other youth groups,” one former official said. “There was no clear goal.”
Former union officials interviewed by ESPN said that Players Way appeared to be a landing spot for Clark’s loyalists — and, said one, “few players knew anything about it.”
The MLBPA’s relationship with USSSA faltered after summer 2023, when two former employees with USSSA filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit alleging a top association official was running an illegal bookmaking operation. After severing from USSSA, the MLBPA rebooted its marketing effort for Players Way in 2024, including a new YouTube channel that as of this week had one subscriber. It features a video of former major league catcher Chris Iannetta that has been viewed about 200 times. The other two videos had a total of 28 views as of this week.
Iannetta is a former MLBPA executive subcommittee member who, along with former USSSA employees D.J. Wabick and Kevin Reynolds, is on the Players Way leadership team, according to union filings. In total, the union said, six employees and contractors work at Players Way.
According to the documents, the MLBPA paid Iannetta $156,000 and Reynolds $167,000 in 2024 as union consultants. Wabick, a former Triple-A outfielder, joined the MLBPA full time as its director of youth baseball and development in December 2024 but was paid $182,623 for his work last year.
While union salaries, including Clark’s $3.4 million in 2024, are made public through annual Labor Department filings, the financial dealings of Players Way and other for-profit companies under the MLB Players Inc. umbrella are opaque. In the complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board last November, the union whistleblower alleged one of Clark’s daughters was employed by Players Way, identified in the complaint as “an MLBPA-controlled entity.”
The daughter resigned in March 2024, after union employees critical of Clark raised her employment as an issue, multiple sources said. According to union documents, she worked for five months and was paid $13,300 by the union as a consultant to Players Way.
The complaint against Clark also alleged he had “arranged for another daughter to be hired at another labor union using his influence.” That daughter has worked as membership services coordinator for the NFL Players Association since October 2022.
The whistleblower also alleged that Clark “improperly hired a family member as an MLBPA real estate agent and paid an unnecessary commission.”
Sources with knowledge of the ongoing federal probe said investigators have inquired about circumstances around the union’s securing of a satellite office in Scottsdale, Arizona, that Clark uses regularly and a new office space in midtown Manhattan.
After ESPN reported about the federal investigation in May, multiple empty offices in the New York office were affixed with OneTeam placards.
BY ITS OWN accounting, the union spent more than $3 million on Players Way from its founding in 2019 until November 2024. During that time, the union said, the company held six baseball clinics for kids, four “mental skills webinars” and several “panel discussions,” including one attended by Clark. The events could cost up to $499 to attend for a two-day camp, according to the website.
A union official told ESPN the rollout of Players Way was intentionally slow “because to figure out our rightful position within the industry without fragmenting it and without driving up more costs takes time and thoughtfulness.” Six years later, the return on the investment into Players Way has little to show.
This year, Players Way has hosted a handful of sparsely attended events for teenagers. The events, a mix of camps, competitions, showcases for those aspiring to play in college and a tournament organized with Texas Rangers third baseman Josh Jung, have drawn fewer than 500 attendees in all, according to the company website.
Jung told ESPN his event, a nine-team tournament last year, would return in 2026 and that he enjoyed the experience of working with Players Way. A union official said no further events supported by individual players are on the schedule, which, according to Players Way’s website, has seven events — with fewer than 25 kids signed up total — scheduled between now and March 21, 2026.
“I’m hoping we can expand it, and I’m hoping that we can get it out early enough,” Jung said. “You want to be able to put it on people’s radar early. And I think that sabotaged us a little bit this year. But also, they kept it pretty small just to make sure that they could run the event correctly.”
In recent months, as former union finance officials answered questions for investigators, MLBPA executives increased the Players Way slate of events and sent out promotional messages about the company’s future to player leaders.
During Labor Day weekend, Clark and Wabick, the leader of Players Way, met in Chicago and hosted a videoconference with other Players Way consultants to discuss strategy, the union told ESPN. On the same September day an ESPN reporter visited the Players Way UPS post office box in Florida, MLBPA executives sent a lengthy slide deck to players’ leadership updating them on Players Way.
A former union finance official said he told federal investigators that total company revenues over five years “barely hit six figures.” The company has canceled nearly as many events as it has held. “Players Way was a bad investment,” the former official said. “They just kept throwing money at it.”
A former major league player who worked with Players Way said the executives in charge seemed to do little and were busy working other full-time jobs.
“It was unclear who was in charge, who was running it,” said the former player, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Someone needed to be a CEO, but the people in charge said, ‘I don’t have time.’ But they were all getting paid.”
Reach reporter Don Van Natta Jr. at don.vannatta@espn.com and Jeff Passan at jeffrey.passan@espn.com. ESPN researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.
Want to learn about the variety of exciting sports available to Cambridge girls in Kindergarten – 5th grade? Join us at Cambridge Girls in Sports Night on Tuesday, January 20 at the War Memorial Field House (1640 Cambridge St., Door 15) from 5 –7 p.m.!
Research shows that girls who play sports are more likely to get better grades; have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem; develop critical skills necessary for success in the workplace; and build a larger community of friends.
At Cambridge Girls in Sports Night, attendees can:
Explore new sports and discover local Cambridge teams
Meet representatives from hockey, ultimate frisbee, lacrosse, soccer, flag football, cheerleading, softball, and more!
Participate in hands-on demonstrations
Sign up on the spot for athletic leagues
Enjoy games, pizza, and more!
The event, presented by the Cambridge Women’s Commission and Cambridge Recreation, is open to anyone in grades K – 5 who identifies as a girl or with girlhood.
Registration is required to attend. Register Here!
After the event, stay to cheer on the CRLS Girls Varsity Basketball Team at 7 p.m.! (Attending the game is free!)
Questions? Contact Adam Corbeil, Director of Cambridge Recreation, at acorbeil@cambridgema.gov.
In the summer of 2024, you couldn’t pin Khloe Ison down. But her parents, Akilah Crowner and Keemie Ison, did the best they could to keep up.
While Baltimore basketball prodigy Ison was traveling with Team Durant — NBA star Kevin Durant’s Nike-sponsored Elite Youth Basketball League team — her parents were paying and coordinating their own way to get to her games and tournaments.
First were the round-trip rental car trips to Albany, New York, for a warmup tournament and Hampton, Virginia, for the first EYBL event, arriving on Thursdays and back home on Sundays. Then it was a round-trip flight to Iowa for the next EYBL long weekend, followed by a quick run down the road for another three-day tournament in Philly.
Next up was Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for a Team USA event. The third stop on the Nike tour was Lexington, Kentucky. With the EYBL finals in Chicago that very next week, they chose to stay in Lexington a few extra days before flying to the Windy City on a Thursday and heading back to Baltimore on Sunday at the end of July.
The next weekend was the Blue Star Camp in Indianapolis, an invite-only affair for the country’s best seventh and eighth graders.
It was an exhausting — and expensive — schedule.
The average American household, according to a recent Aspen Institute study, spends $1,016 per year on their child’s primary sport. But that number pales in comparison to what’s spent on the most elite kids who have realistic dreams of college and pro stardom.
Over the past two years alone, Ison’s parents conservatively estimate they’ve spent over $20,000 on their daughter’s basketball pursuits, factoring in line items such as gas and car repairs from running up and down the road for practices and games, healthier grocery shopping lists, rental car fees, airline tickets, individual training sessions, massages, cryotherapy, and dining out on the road, among other expenses.
Because of her stature as a top national prospect, all of Ison’s airfare, lodging, equipment, shoes, apparel, meal stipends, and tournament entry fees are bankrolled by Team Durant’s Nike sponsorship.
But even with Nike’s largesse, which also covers Crowner and Keemie’s hotel fees when the team plays out of town, they’re on their own for airfare, ground transportation, meals, and other ancillary expenses to occupy their other kids while on the road.
Those numbers add up quickly.
Factoring in everything over the last six years starting from that very first travel tournament, way before that Nike EYBL money kicked in, they’re looking at a tab that easily runs into six figures.
“Vacations?” said Crowner, a technology systems engineer. “We’ll do something while we’re on the road to make it feel like a vacation.”
And for the tens of thousands of other kids that are not in that elite Nike EYBL stratosphere, playing on a plethora of less heralded youth teams and circuits all over the country hoping against the greatest of odds to be noticed by a college coach, all of those fees come out of their parents’ own pockets.
“We’ve sacrificed and put everything to the side,” said Keemie, who teaches physical education at Collington Square Elementary. “Her mom goes to all of the tournaments. And if she can’t go, I go.”
But it’s worth it. For Ison, the St. Frances Academy freshman phenom, it’s the path to greatness. In the prep basketball world, the preternaturally gifted point guard is among the country’s top ranked players in the Class of 2029.
Khloe Ison in the St. Francis basketball court. Credit: Faith Spicer
When she was finally back home after the summer season, it was time to rest. But Ison was still working out with trainers and refining her skills. About to enter eighth grade, she was already facing a dizzying array of high school tours and recruitment visits throughout Maryland, DC, and Northern Virginia.
And the recruiting wasn’t simply limited to the prep level. That summer, a full year before graduating from middle school, she received full scholarship offers from the University of Wisconsin, University of Maryland, and George Mason. Georgetown, Providence, and other colleges have since been added to that list, which will likely grow exponentially over the next few years.
As her family weighed their options on where she’d attend high school, their trip to IMG Academy, the private Florida boarding school where Maria Sharapova, Carlos Alcaraz, and Serena and Venus Williams honed their adolescent tennis skills, was especially memorable.
The scenery was tempting, with a lushly manicured 600-acre campus, practice facilities that put some NBA franchises to shame, and a promise that Ison would start on the varsity squad as an eighth grader. But her parents couldn’t quite fathom heading back to Maryland without their 13-year-old daughter.
“The visit was amazing, but she was just too young for us to consider leaving her there to attend IMG in the eighth grade,” said Crowner. “Then the tropical storm hit. Every flight out from Sunday to Tuesday was cancelled. We had to pay to stay three extra days. I couldn’t take another night sitting in that hotel room, we had to get out of there.”
So Crowner and Keemie rented a car, during Hurricane Debby, and drove 14 hours back to Maryland.
They eventually settled on attending St. Frances, the country’s oldest continually operating predominantly African-American Catholic high school, which has produced two of the greatest players ever from Baltimore: Angel McCoughtry and Angel Reese.
The transition has been seamless.
“Khloe’s personality reminds me of Angel Reese, who I coached here for four years. She will challenge anyone, including the coaches, going over every play and wanting to know what she can do better. She’s a natural born leader,” said St. Frances Associate head coach and Dean of Student Engagement Nyteria Burrell.
“It’s great to have a boisterous point guard that will not back down to anyone, no matter how young she is. We’re not asking her to come in and find her way, we’re asking her to take over, ”
And Ison has proven up to the task thus far.
“She’s calling me at 6:00 a.m. to open the gym for her, and she’s bringing her teammates with her,” Burrell continued. “She’s the best player on our team right now, her talent is unmatched. Last year, the bus rides were quiet. Now they’re laughing, singing, dancing and being playful. Sometimes I have to say, ‘Chill out! Be quiet!’”
That exuberance and joy was evident from the earliest days of Ison’s sports journey, which started with dance and gymnastics at age four. And from the outset, she was conspicuously different.
“She would watch the older kids for a few minutes, then replicate everything they were doing without any practice,” said Crowner. “We’d be watching her like, ‘Wait, did you just see that?’”
Her hoops journey began similarly. Without any prior training other than shooting around for fun, she tore up a local co-ed basketball league as if she’d been playing for years.
Two-year-old Khloe working on her handle. Credit: Keemie Ison
“She was six years old, playing with boys and scoring whenever she wanted to,” said Keemie.
“Her instincts were different from the other kids,” said Crowner. “It was weird. She already had this advanced basketball IQ. I’d be asking myself, ‘How did she know how to do that?’ Her father and I agreed that we needed to figure out what to do with her.”
As a fourth grader playing against top-rated sixth-grade boys, she stood out. The summer prior to starting fifth grade, at the Battle of the Bull youth tournament in Indian Trail, North Carolina, she and Keemie bopped into the expansive Carolina Courts complex when an unfamiliar man walked past them, stopped dead in his tracks, and yelled, “Khloe!”
Keemie was taken aback. He eyed the stranger skeptically and asked, “How do you know my daughter?”
“I was coaching a boys team in Maryland two years ago and she absolutely killed us,” Caesar Harris, the founder of Triple Threat, a boys team in Howard County, explained. “I’ve been looking for her ever since!”
Harris told Keemie about a new girls squad he was putting together called Lady Threat.
“I’d never seen a kid that young, male or female, who played with that level of skills, intensity, and energy from start to finish,” Harris said, recalling his first glimpse of Ison as a third grader. “I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was living in my brain.”
The inner hunger is natural, latent in Ison’s DNA. It’s an heirloom of sorts, passed down from the difficult circumstances her parents endured.
Keemie was raised in West Baltimore’s Garrison Boulevard corridor, nurtured by a grandmother who held it down while his father was incarcerated and his mother struggled to maintain her footing. He showed promise as a raw, athletic player at Douglass High School. But he was more interested in the drug game at the time.
From 2000-2001, he resided in the city jail, which ironically sits ominously across the street from where Ison now attends school at St. Frances. Locked in his cell 22 hours a day, he had the dual gifts of desperation and time.
Upon his release, he worked days sweeping streets for the Downtown Partnership. But on nights and weekends, he was putting in real work against some of the city’s top ballers at the rugged, legendary playground on Dukeland Street known as The Cage. He was offered an invitation to play junior college ball in Kansas solely based on his playground exploits and eventually earned a Division I scholarship to Robert Morris University.
“Getting that scholarship, I had tears in my eyes,” said Keemie. “I was in a place where I didn’t have to watch my back in college. As I was getting a new chance at life, my boys back home were getting murdered. I had to run back and forth for at least five funerals.”
After one year at Robert Morris, he transferred to play his final college season at Hawaii Pacific University in idyllic Honolulu. Prior to leaving for Hawaii, the debonair college man was at a lounge on Guilford Street when he met a beauty who’d recently graduated from Morgan State. Her friends called her Kiki.
Akilah Crowner also grew up on the west side, with her own hardscrabble story. Her family dynamics fractured when she was nine and placed in foster care. Yet she thrived in school, dedicating her time equally between academics, the xylophone and flute, winning oratorical contests, and excelling in sports.
“I lived in 14 foster homes, seven group homes, and one homeless shelter before I eventually found a foster family in high school that I consider a real mother and father who put their whole soul into me,” said Crowner.
A volleyball, basketball, and track star at Milford Mill High School, Crowner played hoops as a freshman at Essex Community College before transferring to Morgan. The demands of being a teenage mom along with majoring in engineering dashed her college sports dream. She worked full-time as a database engineer to pay for school while also juggling a full undergraduate course load.
Starting her career in the Information Technology field while Keemie went back to school, the two stayed in touch and connected again a few years later. Ison was born in 2011.
Ison’s parents drive her ambition — when she was a sixth grader playing against high school freshmen, Ison and her father would often be seen doing sunrise conditioning at Lake Montebello, running hills and doing ab work, lunges, push-ups, plyometrics, and calisthenics.
Khloe Ison sitting down on bleachers in the St. Francis basketball court. Credit: Faith Spicer
“Even as the competition got better, she was always one of the best players out there,” said Keemie. “You could see she was special.”
Despite her accolades and burgeoning national profile, Ison is still a young girl, adjusting to the realities of life on the road and away from her family.
When her mom informed her that she wouldn’t be in attendance to watch her national high school debut in Las Vegas in early October, Ison stood momentarily frozen.
“I told her I was going to her brother’s final homecoming football game at Merrimack College in Massachusetts,” Crowner said. “Khloe didn’t know how to respond.”
The initial shock turned to disbelief. Then denial.
“Wait, what? Nobody’s coming?” Ison asked through soft sobs.
“I just assumed my mom was going,” Ison later said. “I was upset. Then I thought about my brother, and realized my mom couldn’t be in two places at once. But for the longest time, I guess I thought she could.”
When Akilah called Keemie, they shared a laugh about their daughter’s mini-meltdown.
“The funny thing is, when we go to her tournaments, she pays us absolutely no mind, like we’re not even there,” said Keemie.
St. Frances went undefeated in Las Vegas at the Border League in early October. Ison played well despite struggling with a cold, locking down on defense, distributing the ball, and attacking the hoop when a crucial bucket was needed.
She got over the initial shock of not having her parents physically present, FaceTiming them throughout.
“Sometimes you have to remind yourself that she’s still a young kid who’s gonna do freshman stuff,” said Burrell. “She was missing her parents, being a little clingy, falling asleep in my room before waking up and going back to her own room.”
“She obviously still has a lot to work on but if she continues on this path, she’ll eventually be the #1 player in the country before her high school career is over.”
Ison’s thinking extends slightly further ahead.
“When I’m finished here, I want to be in the St. Frances Hall of Fame, make an impact on my school and my community, and be the next one to come out of Baltimore and make it far.”
Lindsey Rector added up the costs as she waited for her son to finish his baseball lesson.
That was $60 a week right there. A new bat: $500. His club baseball team in Boynton Beach, Florida, and its three practices a week were $3,000 a year. Out-of-town tournaments cost extra. Last summer, the team traveled to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. This summer, it will be Cooperstown, New York. She figures she spends at least $8,000 a year on baseball for her 12-year-old son, Cruz Thorpe.
She knows he loves the game. She’s less certain she can afford it.
“You’re just trying to do everything you can to make these dreams come true for your child,” Rector said. “But it’s just so money-driven.”
She even tried a GoFundMe campaign to raise some of the $4,000 she’ll need to reach Cooperstown Dreams Park, where preteen baseball teams from across the country flock each summer for weekly tournaments. A single mom working for an online education platform, she felt a little guilty asking for help. But she’s not alone: GoFundMe said “competition travel” was the top sports fundraising cause in 2025.
Youth sports has transformed over the past two decades, shifting from low-cost grassroots programs run mostly by local groups toward a high-priced industry filled with club teams, specialized training and travel tournaments staged at gleaming youth sports complexes – changes fueled, in part, by private equity and venture capital investment.
It’s a supercharged “pay to play” model that promises better opportunities and college recruitment, with little evidence to support it. But parents find it hard to resist, despite the sticker shock.
Many parents are struggling to keep up, according to a survey conducted by the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program in partnership with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University. Family spending on youth sports jumped 46 percent from 2019 to 2024, the survey found, reaching an estimated $40 billion a year. That’s more than the annual revenues of the NFL and NBA combined.
The impact on a family’s pocketbook varies, with costs rising for older kids and those participating in activities such as ice hockey or gymnastics. The Aspen Institute found families spent an average of $1,016 a year for one child’s primary sport, while other surveys have reported that the average youth club activity costs $3,000 to $5,000 a year.
A New York Life survey in 2025 found 20 percent of parents said money worries had led them to reduce or drop their child’s participation in youth sports, and nearly 60 percent of parents in a 2022 Lending Tree survey described youth sports as a financial strain. A 2019 Harris poll for TD Ameritrade showed that even wealthier parents – those with more than $25,000 to invest – who had kids in a club sport were stressed, with 1 in 3 taking fewer vacations and 1 in 5 finding a second job to afford it.
“Nobody is all that happy with the current system,” said Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute sports program. “It’s broken at best.”
The costs of youth sports go far beyond paying for teams. Parents now have to pay fees for their kids just to try out for teams – $50 is not unusual – or even to watch them play.
“BIGGEST SCAM EVER,” said a mother online about being charged an admission fee to a club volleyball tournament she was already paying for her child to play in.
Some youth sports companies have been sued over the sky-high fees they charge, with the competitive cheerleading company Varsity Brands reaching a $82.5 million settlement in 2024 after a group of parents alleged it used anticompetitive tactics to raise costs for its competitions, camps and apparel.
And parents sometimes are banned from live-streaming their own child’s matches because the game rights have been sold.
That’s what happened last year to Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, who was told to stop using his phone to live-stream his youngest son’s ice hockey game or “my kid’s team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings,” he recalled during a speech on corporate concentration that was noted in a report by online news site the Lever.
“You can’t videotape your child’s hockey game to show to their grandparents!” Murphy said.
Black Bear Sports Group, the nation’s largest owner-operator of hockey rinks, said in a statement its policy applies only to parents broadcasting games on their phones, which it calls a “significant safety risk” without the consent of the other players. Its streaming service charges $14.99 to watch a single hockey game.
While “pay to play” has been a concern in youth sports since at least the early 1990s, it has taken on new dimensions in recent years.
“It’s wildly out of control,” said Jeremi Duru, an American University law professor who directs the school’s Sport and Society Initiative. “It’s sad. I feel like the joy of youth sports has been corroded.”
John Engh, executive director of the National Alliance for Youth Sports, a nonprofit focused on recreational sports, said youth sports has flipped from being run mostly by local rec programs to being dominated by club teams.
Farrey of the Aspen Institute said club sports start to peel off players from low-cost community teams in the second grade. By the fifth grade, he said, parents often feel they have no choice but to make the switch, too, as their child’s friends leave and the number of players dwindles.
Katherine Van Dyck, a senior legal fellow at the left-leaning American Economic Liberties Project, told House members during a recent hearing on the cost of youth sports that local and state parks and recreation budgets were slashed after the 2008 financial crisis. She said private equity investors, which tend to be driven by profit, filled the void by bankrolling club teams and travel tournaments.
A market report from business consultants Red Chalk Group in April said youth sports has become “a magnet for investment activity” as firms look “to capitalize on this growing demand.”
Outside the hearing, Farrey said many of the problems with youth sports existed before private equity, “but it’s gotten a lot worse since then.”
Rector grew up in an era when sports mostly meant local rec teams with volunteer coaches.
She recalled playing low-stakes softball and basketball as a child. It cost something like $80 a season, and she just had to turn up on Saturdays. She also did competitive cheerleading, which required some fundraising and travel to regional tournaments. But the scale was different: She and her friends got by with car washes and “canning” – standing in the street and asking drivers for spare change.
“It just wasn’t as intensive,” she said.
Investors have poured money into youth sports leagues as well as megaplexes where teams can compete on the road.
Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris and his private-equity business partner David Blitzer in 2024 launched Unrivaled Sports, buying nearly 200 youth flag football leagues, along with the baseball tournament operations of Cooperstown All Star Village and Ripken Baseball. Unrivaled declined to comment. The company does not share revenue numbers, but Dick’s Sporting Goods paid $120 million for a minority stake in Unrivaled in May.
Another private equity-backed firm, 3STEP Sports, has rolled up more than 1,000 youth sports clubs and leagues across the country in recent years. The company, which is also private and does not publicly disclose its revenues, did not respond to a request for comment.
Later this year, a youth sports megaplex is set to open in Springfield, Illinois, boasting the world’s largest air-supported dome, with room for more than 12 volleyball courts, six basketball courts and two softball fields.
“I don’t know of one community that isn’t thinking about optimizing their parks and recreation assets,” said Jason Clement, CEO of the Sports Facilities Companies, which operates roughly 50 properties focused on youth sports tourism. Those facilities can host tournaments 50 weekends a year – a big boost to local sales tax and hotel tax revenue.
But it’s not clear that these pricey new options make kids into better athletes, especially since club sports often come with year-round commitments requiring a focus on a single sport from an early age. Experts say that can backfire, citing studies that show specialization, especially before the teenage years, hurts performance in most cases.
“There’s a huge industry that sells parents on the idea of what develops kids and gets them ready to be elite athletes, but it doesn’t bear out in the evidence,” said Eric Post, manager of sports medicine research at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
Joseph Guettler, an orthopedic sports surgeon in Bingham Farms, Michigan, who treats kids with overuse injuries, said even he “drank the Kool-Aid” and started his four kids in club sports early.
Parents want the best for their kids, he said, “but maybe we’re not pushing them necessarily in the best way.”
If you’ve been to a San Francisco 49ers home game in recent years, Aubrie Tolliver (SSU ‘16) is a familiar face. Sometimes described as “the voice of Levi’s Stadium,” since 2022 Tolliver has been the in-game host, leading fan contests, on-field promotions, and segments to entertain and inform the in-stadium audiences. Her objective: Engage and energize the crowd to gain home-field advantage for the 49ers.
Tolliver hails from Sunnyvale, California and went to Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, not far from today’s Levi’s Stadium. She comes from a family of 49ers superfans who have been season ticket holders for 50-plus years, making her current game-day role a natural fit. The video below shows Tolliver’s 49ers game-day routine.
Video file:
A self-described “travel ball softball kid,” Tolliver was drawn to Sonoma State by the opportunity to play at the collegiate level. She went on to captain the team as its catcher. While at Sonoma State, she also wrote for the Sonoma Star and developed a passion for sports journalism.
It was in one of her SSU Communication Studies classes, however, that she found her specific professional inspiration.
“I wanted to be Amy G,” Tolliver said, referring to Amy Gutierrez, the Emmy Award-winning producer and reporter well-known for her work covering the San Francisco Giants. “She came to speak to one of my classes, and I remember thinking, ‘She has exactly the job that I want.’”
Tolliver recalls staying after class to ask Gutierrez, now a lecturer at Sonoma State, what she might do after graduation in order to set herself on a similar path. The advice Gutierrez gave inspired Tolliver to apply to Syracuse University’sS.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she got her Master of Science degree in broadcast and digital journalism.
Tolliver returned to the Bay Area after completing her master’s and went to work as a co-producer and co-anchor of the 49ers’ “Cal-Hi Sports,” a weekly hour-long broadcast covering high school sports across the Bay Area.
When she is not hyping Levi’s Stadium crowds, she can be found shooting, writing, producing, and editing news and feature stories about youth sports competitions, athletes, and their coaches. Over her eight-year tenure she has produced more than 500 stories for “Cal-Hi Sports.”
During the spring and summer – NFL offseason – does she have time to slow down? Not exactly.
Since 2024, Tolliver has also been a game-day host for the Oakland Ballers, the popular independent baseball team across the Bay that plays in the Pioneer League.
“It was really exciting to get involved in this way in the team’s first season, as it taps into my early love of baseball,” Tolliver said.
Learn more about Tolliver’s professional journey in sports broadcasting when she joins SSU alumni for an Industry Insights webinar on February 10.
On January 13, 2026 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases—West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox—about the freedom of transgender youth to participate in school sports and to learn the life lessons those sports teach. We know this topic can fuel heated debates and spark strong opinions.
That’s why talking about this can feel tricky—but the Lambda Legal Trans Youth in Sports Conversation Guide is here to help. Whether that’s with loved ones or coworkers, this guide gives ideas for how to answer hard questions, ask thoughtful questions in return, and use these moments to build connection rather than division.
Our advice: it’s not about finding the “perfect” thing to say. It’s about saying something that helps people see and celebrate trans youth for exactly who they are. These policies aren’t just about who gets to play soccer or run track—they’re about who belongs, and who gets left out. We won’t stop fighting until every transgender kid feels seen, celebrated, and loved for exactly who they are.
The City of Arkadelphia’s Parks and Recreation Department has adjusted the start of its winter youth basketball season by one week.
The season will now begin on January 17 instead of January 10 and will conclude on March 7.
This adjustment is due to team jerseys not yet arriving because of shipping delays related to the holiday season.
Parks and Recreation expects the season to begin as scheduled on Saturday, January 17. Any changes will be communicated through the City’s social media channels at @arkadelphiaar.
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