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When Aly was a little kid, “sports” consisted of playing on a playground or maybe standing in a hockey goal in the driveway while her big brother shot pucks at her face.

The latter might have served as “organic training,” she told me. Aly became a multi-sport athlete — running, swimming, and, ultimately, playing Division I college lacrosse in the early 2000s. But her early sports experience “was all play-based,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t always fun (I, for one, would prefer hockey pucks stay out of my face), but it definitely wasn’t serious.

Today, Aly, who asked that I use only her first name to protect her family’s privacy, has three kids who are starting to play sports themselves. What they’re experiencing is a world away from the casual driveway games of her youth, she told me.

Over the last few decades, youth sports in America have become big business. Free park- and community-based teams have increasingly been replaced by private pay-to-play options, which can be expensive. A survey by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative found that the average family spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46 percent since 2019. Some families spent nearly $25,000.

The stakes have changed, too, with more families viewing sports as a child’s ticket to college and a comfortable life, rather than just a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. And as pay-to-play programs crowd out other options, families can find themselves priced out — or sucked in — even if they’d prefer a more relaxed approach.

The result is bad for kids, both those excluded by the expense of the pay-to-play system and those whose families succumb to its pressures, putting them at risk of depression, anxiety, and overuse injuries. It’s bad for parents, whose lives increasingly revolve around shuttling kids to sporting events. And it’s bad for all of us if youth sports becomes a culture-war obsession and a decidedly imperfect substitute for a working safety net.

“Sports are not that important,” said Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters. “The idea that athletics should be the organizing principle of family life is crazy.”

Why grown-ups started panicking about youth sports

The professionalization of youth sports, as many observers call it, began in the 1970s, as inflation led municipal recreation departments to cut their budgets and get rid of free sports programs, Flanagan said. Private companies and nonprofit organizations filled the void, often charging fees.

At the same time, the cost of college was going up, and admissions were becoming more competitive. Parents were increasingly desperate for an edge.

Sports offered that edge in two ways, said Jessica Calarco, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School. Talented athletes whose families couldn’t afford college could aim for athletic scholarships, and middle-class kids who couldn’t get in to the college of their choice could lean on sports as what Calarco calls “an underdiscussed form of affirmative action.”

What parents are buying when they shell out thousands of dollars for kids sports is “a chance to help their child get into a school that they couldn’t get into on their academics alone,” Calarco said.

As it turns out, sports are different when they’re a means to an end, rather than just a fun activity. Today, kids are encouraged to specialize in a single sport, and to play it year-round, rather than in a single season, Aly said. The pressure can start as young as 4 or 5 years old.

Youth sports are also more focused on winning and skill development instead of recreation and enjoyment, Flanagan said. In some cases, rest, unstructured play, and even practice time give way to constant competition. “There’s literally just play, play, play as much as you can,” said Luka Ojemaye, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford who has studied athletes’ mental health.

Essentially, kids’ sports have gone from “child-driven to adult-driven,” Flanagan said.

How youth sports today are failing kids

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shift to an adult-driven model of youth sports has not been good for kids. Injuries are on the rise — the result of “playing too much in a structured setting,” Flanagan said. ACL tears, which are particularly concerning because they can lead to arthritis, increased 25.9 percent between 2007 and 2022, according to Project Play, with girls especially at risk.

Young athletes’ mental health has also suffered. Sports can be protective for kids’ mental wellbeing, providing opportunities for physical activity and being with friends, Flanagan said. But those benefits are squandered when young people are under too much pressure. Anxiety in high school athletes has been increasing over the last decade, and one study found that more than half of such athletes reported stress, with 15 percent saying they were “very” or “extremely” stressed.

Enjoying multiple sports helped Aly stay grounded as a student athlete, she told me. “I played lacrosse in college, but I never put all my self-worth into that sport, because I played so many other sports that brought me joy,” she said.

Aly worries for kids who are encouraged to choose one sport to play year round when they’re in kindergarten. She wants her own kids to have the same relaxed, play-based experience she did, but her 7-year-old loves lacrosse. If year-round teams are where her peers are, it’s going to be hard to say no. “We’re all getting sucked into it,” Aly said.

The professionalization of youth sports is bad for young athletes, but it’s also bad for kids who never get the chance to play at all. Pay-to-play teams have crowded out many of the remaining park- or community-based leagues, making it harder for families to find affordable options. “It’s a self-reinforcing cycle,” Calarco said.

The result is a class divide in sports participation and physical activity that’s been growing wider over the last 10 years. One study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 70 percent of kids from families making over $105,000 a year participated in sports in 2020, compared to just 31 percent of kids living at or below the poverty line. In short, lower-income kids are losing access to the physical and mental benefits that sports once provided, and they’re missing out on the pathway to college that sports can (sometimes) provide today.

Youth sports matter for everyone

The transformation of youth sports into a serious, adult-driven concern is part of a larger shift in American life, experts say. “We live in a society without a sturdy safety net,” Calarco said, which “creates a lot of precarity and a lot of inequality.” Parents, fearful their kids will fall down a rung on an increasingly rickety class ladder, are ever more obsessively seeking ways to maintain a sense of security.

That’s getting even harder now that the Trump administration is chipping away at funding for higher education, Calarco said, including attempting to reduce the size of Pell grants for low-income students (something Congress has blocked so far). With education increasingly uncertain and unequal at every level, excelling in sports may seem like a more reliable ticket to a good life.

The focus on youth sports as a way to get ahead may be part of why Republicans have had so much success stoking fear around young trans athletes, some say. “If families can use these sports as a tool to help give their kids an edge in a highly competitive, highly unequal society, then it can feel like a threat if it seems as though someone is cutting in unfairly,” Calarco said, likening concerns over trans athletes to lawsuits by white students over affirmative action.

Given the forces behind the rising professionalization of youth sports, it’s hard to imagine turning back the clock. But some parents are getting tired of the expense of pay-to-play teams, Flanagan said.

The reality is that these teams probably aren’t a good investment. Only about 6 percent of high school athletes go on to play in college, and only some of those get scholarships. If what families care about is college, they might be better off investing the money they spend on sports in a 529 account, Calarco said.

Ideally, changes in youth sports would come from a collective understanding that all kids deserve access to fun, low-pressure physical activity. But failing that, maybe sports can be fun again if more parents recognize that they are not, in fact, a particularly good way of safeguarding class position. As Flanagan put it, “parents are going to have to vote with their feet.”

Ohio and other states are working to give young children with disabilities better access to child care centers, but cuts to Medicaid could complicate those efforts.

Medicaid cuts could also hamper K-12 schools’ ability to offer services like counseling and speech therapy to kids.

On a happier note, an “Intergenerational Summer Camp” in Fullerton, California, brought 8- to 14-year-olds together with volunteer grandmas to help combat loneliness.

My little kid has moved on from We Are in a Book! to There Is a Bird on Your Head, which is about exactly what it sounds like.