By Todd C. FrankelThe Washington Post
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.”
