Recently, Pastor Chase Davis wrote a series of articles (here, here, and here) on the need for a “right wing John Mark Comer.” Davis argues that Comer’s vision of spiritual formation connects with millions of modern people because it speaks to modern rootlessness and disenchantment, provides people with ritual and spiritual disciplines, and offers resources from Christian history for those who want to take their faith seriously. The problem, according to Davis, is that Comer’s vision is disembodied, sentimental, and de-masculinizing. In short, it’s spiritual formation in a therapeutic key, one that results in an enervating passivity.
Consider something they might say, “We don’t need to try harder. We need to surrender deeper.” This kind of language is endemic in spiritual formation spaces. It sounds humble, but often functions as a dodge from repentance, mortification, and obedience. It recasts sanctification as a passive letting go, not an active fight.
Davis offers his own prescription for a “Right Wing John Mark Comer,” one that emphasizes duty over mere emotional experience and expression, agency over passivity, masculine strength over emotional flattening, and historical continuity over therapeutic novelty. But I want to extend Davis’s reflections in a different direction, and connect the dots between our view of spiritual formation, debates over worship music and style, and the controversies over Christian Nationalism (with some reflections on male friendship and youth sports thrown in for good measure).
Comer’s Slide
Let’s begin with Comer’s recent recommendation of a book that he regards as the “biblical/exegetical knockout blow” to penal substitutionary atonement. Pop theologians have been declaring penal substitutionary atonement dead for as long as I’ve been alive, so Comer’s statement is nothing new. It does, however, vindicate Davis’s sense that Comer’s therapeutic vision of spiritual formation soft-sells sin. (A recent review of Comer’s latest book echoes this criticism).
Comer, it seems, is sliding down the same well-worn slope as Brian McLaren and “Farewell” Rob Bell. The therapeutic gospel reframes sin as brokenness, and the angular parts of the Christian faith are pared down or buried. The sovereignty of God, penal substitutionary atonement, the exclusivity of Christ—all of these are “questioned,” “re-imagined,” or outright ignored. In fact, if my Deconstruction Train Schedule is up to date, Comer’s next stop ought to be questioning the doctrine of Hell.
Now, whenever conservative evangelicals are faced with a slide like Comer’s, they are more than ready to offer the necessary biblical and theological correctives. But I want to suggest that many of these same conservative evangelicals—the kind that believe that sin is fundamentally against a holy God, that Christ died to satisfy God’s wrath against sinners, that Christ alone saves, and Hell is real—actually have something very important in common with Comer.
The Problem of Absence
To understand precisely what, let me offer a basic claim: The problem with many theological paradigms is not what’s said, but what’s not said. It’s not the presence of certain truths or practices, but the absence of others. To illustrate, let me appear to change the subject and talk about worship music.
One of the longstanding criticisms of evangelical worship is that it is effeminate. We’re all familiar with the “Jesus-Is-My-Boyfriend” songs. More than that, even songs that may contain better lyrics still sometimes operate in the same emotional register—highly emotive and expressive, sentimental and breathy, with lots of longing, aching, and desperation expressed.
Now, in response to such criticisms, many have pointed out that if you don’t like songs that express longing for God, take it up with the psalmist. The Psalms are filled with intense emotions, with longing for God, with tears poured out, hands clapping, and desperation expressed (not to mention repetitive choruses as in Psalm 136). And all that is very true.
But my longstanding contention is that the problem with evangelical worship is not the presence of the emotion, the longing, and the aching (in appropriate measure), but the absence of other crucial biblical elements, most notably, the martial notes of defiance, aggression, and imprecation that are scattered throughout the Bible.
This is because the martial and masculine elements help to situate the softer and expressive ones (and vice versa). The same psalmist who prayed “My soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you” (Psalm 63:1) also prayed, “Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war” (Psalm 144:1).
Consider our selective use of Psalm 139.
O LORD, you have searched me and known me!
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
3 You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.
5 You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it. (139:1-6)
These sorts of truths are celebrated in evangelical circles. Portions of Psalm 139 regularly appear on Christian kitsch. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (139:14). “How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you” (139:17-18). But how many evangelicals would include Psalm 139:19-22 on greeting cards or in their worship songs?
19 Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!
20 They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
22 I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
Or take Psalm 149. I can easily imagine a modern songwriter adapting portions of Psalm 149 for evangelical worship. “Praise the Lord…Let Israel be glad in his Maker…For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation…Let the godly exult in glory.” Until the middle of verse 6:
Let the high praises of God be in their throats
and two-edged swords in their hands,
7 to execute vengeance on the nations
and punishments on the peoples,
8 to bind their kings with chains
and their nobles with fetters of iron,
9 to execute on them the judgment written!
This is honor for all his godly ones.
Praise the LORD!
The fact that, outside of small corners of the church that sing the whole counsel of God, few Christians can imagine singing about the honor of executing the Lord’s vengeance on his enemies is precisely my point. The issue is not what is present, but what is absent. It’s not what you can sing, but what you can’t (and never do) sing.
Moving out and applying this principle, we can reconsider Comer’s therapeutic vision of spiritual formation. The problem is not that he frames sin as brokenness and salvation as healing. The Bible does (at times) speak that way. The problem is the abandonment of sin as rebellion against a holy God and salvation as wrath-propitiation (And even if sin is acknowledged as worthy of eternal torment, it is a reluctant acknowledgment, with plenty of hemming and hawing. Angular truths are sidelined and de-emphasized (at least at first), until eventually they are abandoned altogether. So mark down the principle: the problem is not what’s present, but what’s absent.
The Trouble With Christian Nationalism
Which brings me to the trouble with Christian Nationalism. A fundamental dimension of all of the intra-Christian conflicts over “Christian Nationalism” is the legitimacy of corporate Christian agency. To be more precise, it is over corporate Christian agency, expressed in a masculine key, and applied to social life in this world.
Many are comfortable emphasizing Christian agency. Read your Bible. Pray without ceasing. Pursue personal holiness. Of course, obedience to such commands must flow from a living faith, but there are still evangelicals who have resisted the antinomian tendency to divorce justification from sanctification. There are still plenty of evangelicals who are comfortable issuing imperatives (even Comer would likely see his project as active in this sense; “practice the way of Jesus” through love and service to others, etc).
Likewise, many evangelicals are more than ready to emphasize the corporate dimensions of the Christian faith. Don’t neglect meeting together (as long as the CDC says it’s okay). Word and sacrament with the gathered people of God. Moreover, there are plenty of evangelicals who lift up the banner of corporate Christian mission, whether in its cross-cultural and international dimension (missions) or its domestic church-planting dimension. These are exercises of a distinctively Christian corporate agency.
And others would still do so while striking a decidedly masculine note. “Don’t waste your life.” “Wage war on sin.” One of the reasons that John Piper resonated so strongly with the millennial generation is that biblical truth and calls to action that he issued were delivered with masculine conviction, rhetoric, and intensity.
Thus, it’s possible to find various combinations of corporate Christian agency in a masculine key. But the kind of spiritual agency permitted is generally targeted at personal holiness, with some extension into private social relations (such as the family and the congregation).
But remember the principle: the problem is not what’s present, but what’s absent. And what’s absent from many evangelical paradigms is a vision for corporate Christian agency, expressed in a masculine key, and directed to social and cultural life in this world. In other words, if you try to robustly use masculine agency, in groups, to exercise social or political power in this world for the glory of God and the good of your neighbors, expect to be kneecapped by other evangelicals.
Kneecaps and Propaganda
The kneecaps, of course, will vary. There is the therapeutic kneecap (“Exercising power is not the way of Jesus”). There is the pietistic kneecap (“My kingdom is not of this world”). There is the academic kneecap (“You’re not allowed to use the Christian tradition that way”). There is the Longhouse kneecap (“This sounds scary and I’m very concerned”). There is the pre-millennial kneecap (“We lose down here”). There is even a postmillennial knee-cap (“Christendom can only come from the bottom up; all top-down efforts are illegitimate”).
The common thread in all of these is the attempt to check masculine corporate Christian social action (e.g. Christian Nationalism) with some form of what Michael Clary calls “loser theology.” All of them are, in some way, regime-friendly. This is because, as Jacques Ellul argued in his work on Propaganda, the system doesn’t primarily care what you think; it only cares how you act (or don’t act). The reasoning (or rationalizing) that a person uses to justify the (in)action is irrelevant; what matters is restraining corporate Christian agency, in a masculine key, as applied to social and cultural life in this world. The one thing that must not be done is Christendom.
Of course, the exercise of corporate male agency in society is inevitable; nature can only be suppressed for so long before she takes her revenge. And so there are select outlets available, various pressure relief valves. One observation from ten years of coaching youth sports is that coaching youth sports functions as a pressure relief valve for the enervating egalitarianism of modern society. Youth sports (from travel baseball to high school football) is one of the last places that corporate masculine agency is permitted and given (almost) full rein. Fathers and sons, coaches as brothers-in-arms, working toward a common goal involving courage, ambition, strength, and excellence. But in itself, it poses no threat to the secular and egalitarian status quo. It’s regime-friendly, safely quarantined where it can’t do any damage, a pressure release for the Total State (unless, of course, it becomes a training and proving ground for virtues that will be exercised in the renewal and rebuilding of Christian civilization).
The fact is that C.S. Lewis knew that society looks with suspicion on groups of friends (especially groups of male friends).
It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. In each knot of Friends there is a sectional “public opinion” which fortifies its members against the public opinion of the community in general. Each therefore is a pocket of potential resistance. Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or “get at”; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt. Hence if our masters, by force or by propaganda about “Togetherness” or by unobtrusively making privacy and unplanned leisure impossible, ever succeed in producing a world where all are Companions and none are Friends, they will have removed certain dangers, and will also have taken from us what is almost our strongest safeguard against complete servitude. (The Four Loves, p. 80)
Alastair Roberts has capably identified some of the distinctive features of male friendship and male groups. Whereas women tend to view friendships in terms of intimacy and emotional support, “Male groups have a greater tendency to socialize and bond around agency, ritual, competition, and external action. Men most particularly connect through shared action and competition.” The sparring, banter, jesting, and roughness that mark male groups are ways of testing the strength, honor, and fortitude of our fellows, to see whether they are reliable and trustworthy, or whether they will fold in a fight. Male groups tend to be broad (if sometimes shallow) and comfortable with hierarchy and status. As a result, male groups are power-generating and thus a potential threat to the status quo.
In sum, the missing piece in many approaches to spiritual formation is an overt embrace of corporate Christian agency, expressed in a masculine key, and applied to social and cultural life in this world. Yes, personal holiness is non-negotiable. Bible reading, prayer, word, and sacrament with the gathered people of God—these are essential for forming Christian communities. As we’re fond of saying, worship is the heartbeat of Christian community. It pumps blood to every part of the body. Unless you apply a tourniquet to keep it from flowing to a limb.
The temple of the Lord is at the center of the city of God, and from it flows the river of life to the rest of the city. Unless you dam it up, so that leaves of the tree of life designed to heal the nations withers.
So remove the tourniquet. Blow up the dam. Pursue the righteous exercise of spiritual, social, cultural, and political power and authority in this world. Start with yourself and work your way out, taking responsibility for what God puts before you. Have the courage to build and fight, for the glory of God and the good of the world.
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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