Young Pros: How Youth Sports Have Changed

A player drives for a layup at a practice for Level Up Long Island, an AAU basketball team. Photo by Ryan Toohill.

Youth sports in the United States are in the midst of a drastic transformation, expanding beyond weekly neighborhood activities into an immense for-profit industry.

A landscape that used to be dominated by volunteer-coached community leagues has shifted into a more professionalized environment.  Children as young as seven are pushed to specialize in sports that they have only a fleeting chance of playing past the high school level.

The result is a massive market involving club teams, private trainers, year-round leagues and anything else that might put youth athletes ahead of the curve. The Aspen Institute found this year that parents with a high school-aged child spend nearly $2,000 per year on their sports, on average, and that the cost to play a child’s main sport has risen by almost 50 percent since 2019.

Nationally, participation in high school sports hit an all-time high this past year, with more than eight million athletes suiting up, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. 

To those involved in youth sports, this turn can be attributed to a variety of factors, ranging from broader changes to the American athletic landscape to pressures children face on an everyday basis.

Data visualization showing the popularity of both high school and club sports in the United States. Graphic by Ryan Toohill.

Join the Club

Children born in the 1990s were three times more likely to play club sports than those born in the 1950s.

This finding, from a paper put out in September by researchers at Ohio State University, highlights the growing influence of competitive youth sports that exist outside of the traditional public recreation and high school leagues.

Robert Zayas, the executive director of the New York State Public High School Athletic Association (NYSPHSAA), said that the rise of club sports has been the biggest change he has seen in the youth sports landscape.

Zayas, who in his role oversees more than 375,000 high school athletes, said this has led to a more competitive school sports scene.

“Years ago, students used to participate in club sports just to give themselves a better opportunity of getting a college scholarship,” he said. “Now, kids are in club sports to simply make their high school team.”

This shift is something that coaches at the high school level are seeing firsthand.

“There is this allure of being a part of one of these travel teams,” said Gil Kreiss, the coach of the varsity girls’ soccer team at Long Island’s Hewlett High School. “It’s a complicated mess with that stuff.”

Club sports have become a crucial part of the arms race for children to be at the top of their sport, and athletes are being drawn into this ecosystem at increasingly younger ages.

“Nowadays, if you're not doing specialized training at seven or eight years old, you're out of luck,” said Benjamin Carey, the president and co-founder of Long Island Elite Football, which runs travel teams that compete in New York and across the country.

He added that he sees the otherworldly skill and acrobatics of modern college and NFL players as a direct result of this system.

“[It’s] because the kids are doing very serious competitive training when they're young now,” Carey said. “It's not like when I grew up.”

Benjamin Carey, the president and co-founder of Long Island Elite Football. Photo By Ryan Toohill.

Social (Media) Pressure 

Searches on TikTok, Instagram or X will reveal an onslaught of content aimed at youth athletes.

Trainers and club teams use social media to directly reach teens, advertising programs that they say will take athletes to the next level.

The athletes use it to promote themselves as well, with bios and posts pitching themselves to college recruiters.

“Social media is the most important thing in high school football recruiting right now,” said Oliver Miller, a senior offensive tackle at Colorado’s Cherry Creek High School who is committed to play at Kansas State next year. “It's a way to advertise yourself.”

He added that seeing other high schoolers getting more fanfare online at different stages of the recruitment process was difficult.

“Watching kids from other states that are more highly recruited getting more attention, [I] was like, ‘Why isn’t that happening to me?’” Miller said.

“It's mentally draining.”

Jim Fox, the governor and boys’ basketball director for the New York Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), said that what happens online now impacts most aspects of his job.

“The impact of social media is a major force in youth sports,” he said. “The kids look for it and the businesses have to provide it.”

Fox, who is also the founder of Lightning Basketball, a Long Island-based AAU team, said that he has had to adapt and take advantage of social media to promote the AAU organization as a whole as well as his team.

“If you don't do it, you're not going to survive,” he said.

Pay for Play

For decades, the incentive to play college sports for high-level athletes was simple: a free or reduced-price education.

That all changed in 2021, when college players were allowed to profit off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), and again this past July, when an NCAA settlement let schools pay athletes directly.

This has led to an unprecedented amount of money being thrown into college athletics and for the first time being (legally) funneled to the players.  

Miller said that the financial incentives were not a huge factor in his recruitment process, but that he has heard of plenty of examples of NIL offers muddying the process for others.

“This is life-changing money right now,” he said.

On the high end, players like Texas quarterback Arch Manning are estimated to be making almost seven million dollars a year off their NIL deals. Outside of Power Four college football, though, there are plenty of examples of athletes in less popular sports taking smaller NIL deals, usually from local companies.

“You have the opportunity to not only be a scholarship player, but also to get paid for it … it's definitely a motivation,” said Jesse Winter, the president and CEO of Level Up Long Island, an AAU basketball team.

“Kids really have to go the extra mile.”

Amid the growing stakes and attention that have created upheaval across the youth sports landscape, many argue that what lies at the heart of it all has not changed.

“This sounds cliché, but it's really true,” said Fox. “If the kids are having fun, that's good, that’s the game.”