Built to Exclude

Then, in my senior year, after seasons of poor coaching and absent adult leadership, I walked away as the starting varsity setter. That’s when I found the sideline and discovered I had something entirely new to give to sports. I studied as an athletic trainer, earned a scholarship in a Division I program, got my degree in Physical Education, and spent years coaching, teaching PE, running YMCA programs, and working in sports retail. Sports didn’t leave my life. They just found a different shape.

Eight years ago, Every Kid Sports was a small organization based in Central Oregon — four employees, a clear mission, and a belief that no kid should be left out because of what it cost to play. When they were hiring, I decided to come off the bench as a new stay-at-home mom; I was ready to get back in the game — outside the red tape of school systems and organized leagues. I took the job at a significant pay cut. The mission was aligned with everything I had grown up doing, knowing, and working toward.

Every Kid Sports was founded by parents who started coaching their own kids and kept seeing the same thing: children being left out not because of talent or desire, but because of cost. In Bend, Oregon, it costs thirty dollars to register for recreational sports. That was the barrier. They didn’t just talk about it; they acted and built something. Today, that thirty dollars has become one hundred and fifty dollars, three times a year, in all fifty states. We have distributed more than twenty-three million dollars and supported more than one hundred and eighty thousand kids across seventy-five sports and activities.

The barrier has not gone away. It has multiplied.

Two years ago, I became Executive Director. I am also now the mother of two girls, ages eight and nine, who have played more than thirteen different sports — because I know firsthand what it costs a child when the system decides they have to be one thing, and I refuse to let that be their story.

Invested, exhausted, and blamed. That is the youth sports parent experience nobody is writing about. This paper is for them — and it is written by one of them.

We are all more than one thing. Parents. Employees. Caregivers. Executives. Grandparents. Siblings. Rich. Struggling. Deeply opinionated and completely exhausted. The youth sports system treats families as a single variable: paying customers who need to be managed.

We are not. And this paper is written from that understanding.

Our founders stood on a sideline and decided to say the thing no one was saying. That’s what Every Kid Sports has always done. It’s what this paper intends to do.
The problem is not parents. It never was.

— Eleana Fanaika, Executive Director, Every Kid Sports

SECTION 1

THE SYSTEM WAS NOT BUILT
FOR YOUR FAMILY

The Narrative We Were Handed

For the past two decades, the dominant conversation about youth sports behavior has been about parents. Parents are too loud. Too emotionally invested. Too competitive on the sidelines. Too dysregulated in the parking lot. The coaching community, sports media, and parent behavior programs have built an entire industry around managing, correcting, and educating the sports parent.

What this narrative does not ask is: what is producing all that emotion?

Parents who have spent thousands of dollars, reorganized their family life, surrendered weekends and vacations, and still watch their child get benched, cut, injured, or quietly excluded from the inner circle of a travel team — those parents are not behaving irrationally. They are responding rationally to a system that took a great deal from them and delivered something far less than what was implied.

The youth sports industry profits from parental anxiety. Emotionally activated parents are paying parents. Parents who worry their child will fall behind if they opt out are parents who keep re-enrolling. The carrot is always just close enough. The blame is always placed just far enough from the system itself.

The problem is not parents. It never was. The problem is a system designed to extract maximum investment from families while placing the burden of its failures squarely on their shoulders.

How Exclusion Gets Built In

The exclusion of children from youth sports does not usually look like a locked door. It looks like a series of reasonable-sounding requirements that compound until the door closes on its own.

It begins with cost. Registration fees, equipment, uniforms, travel, hotels, tournament entries. For many families, this is where it ends. Every Kid Sports exists precisely because financial exclusion is the most visible barrier — and even with support, it is only the first one. The Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2025 found that children from the lowest-income households played sports at half the rate of those from the highest-income group — and that the participation gap between low- and high-income families has widened from 13.6 percentage points in 2012 to 20.2 points in 2024. The system is not accidentally excluding children. It is doing so at an accelerating rate.

Then comes time. Travel ball requires weekends. Multiple weekends. Often consecutive ones. The parent working two jobs, the single parent without backup childcare, the family caring for an aging relative — they are not absent because they don’t care. They are absent because the system was not designed with their reality in mind.

Then comes health. The child who needs more recovery time. The child whose mental health is not served by high-stakes competition at age nine. The child with a learning difference or a sensory sensitivity who does not thrive in a screaming gym. The female athlete with a developing and fluctuating body. The system’s response to these children is rarely accommodation. It is attrition.

And then comes the cruelest barrier: the culture of commitment itself. Families who cannot give everything are made to feel that anything less is a choice against their child. That hesitation means you don’t want it enough. That questioning the cost means you don’t believe in your kid.

• “You need to specialize now or fall behind.”
• “Has your child considered a personal speed and agility coach?”
• “A nutritionist could make a real difference at this level.”
• “The kids who make it are the ones whose families are all in.”

These messages reach families of young kids, some as young as five and six years old. Children who, developmentally, should be trying new things, failing safely, and learning that they are more than any single sport.

SECTION 2

THE SPRING CONVERSION NOBODY IS HAVING

What Happens Every April

Every spring, recreational leagues transition to club tryout season. Parents receive invitations to competitive travel programs. The pressure crystallizes into a decision point that many families are not equipped to navigate clearly.

I have this conversation every year — in parking lots, at the sidelines, over text, at school pickups. Parents juggling what is best for their child, what is at risk if they say no, where their child’s friends are going, and what it means for their family if they follow.

The questions they are asking tell the whole story:

• Will my child fall behind developmentally if we don’t commit to this?
• Their best friend is trying out — what happens to that friendship if we don’t?
• They made the C team. Is that good? Should we be disappointed?
• What are we actually committing to — every weekend? All summer?
• What do we have to say no to in order to say yes to this?

That last question is the one I always ask back. And it is almost always the one nobody has asked them.

The Real Accounting

The financial cost of youth travel sports is real and well-documented. According to the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2025 report, the average U.S. sports family spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024 — a 46% increase since 2019 — with total annual family spending across all activities reaching nearly $1,500. For families in competitive travel and club markets, that figure climbs to $3,000–$10,000 per child per year when tournament fees, travel, hotels, equipment, and private coaching are included. Across multiple children and multiple years, the number becomes quietly staggering.

But the accounting that matters most is not financial. It is experiential.

What does your whole family have to say no to in order to say yes to sports? The summer vacation is already planned. The week with Grandma. The camping trip to the lake. The birthday parties on the weekends. The holiday with your extended family. Name them. Then decide.

When parents sit with that question honestly, something shifts. The decision stops being about their child’s athletic future and becomes what it actually is: a whole-family resource allocation with real tradeoffs and no guaranteed return.

The travel sports system does not present it that way. It presents it as: your child has potential. Don’t be the family that holds them back.

SECTION 3

WHAT MY CHILDREN TAUGHT ME ABOUT THIRTEEN SPORTS

My daughters have played soccer, gymnastics, swimming, basketball, flag football, volleyball, mountain biking, dance, hockey, softball, ATVing, parkour, and cheerleading. They start golf this spring. They are eight and nine years old.

I made this choice deliberately. Not because I couldn’t commit, but because I know firsthand what happens when a system tells a child they have to be one thing. I was that child. I know what the closed door feels like. And I know what opens when you find a different one.

Each sport gave my girls something different — not just a skill, but a way of thinking. Gymnastics gave them spatial awareness and the ability to read their own body’s signals. Swimming gave them the experience of being alone with effort, no teammate to carry them. Flag football gave them joy in a space that kept telling them they didn’t belong. Soccer gave them an activity to join in during recess.

They do not identify as “a soccer player” or “a gymnast.” They identify as kids who are active, curious, and open to what’s next. I know from my own life that identity will serve them longer than any single sport ever could.

The research is clear: early specialization in youth sports is associated with higher rates of burnout, overuse injury, and dropout by adolescence. A landmark study by Jayanthi et al. published in Sports Health (2013) found that the degree of sports specialization is directly correlated with increased risk of serious overuse injury in young athletes — and that multi-sport participation is associated with longer athletic careers, better overall development, and — critically — more joy.

The system does not sell this message. Multi-sport participation does not generate year-round registration fees, private coaching revenue, or tournament income. Specialization does.

I am not arguing that no child should specialize. I am arguing that the pressure to specialize at a young age is not coming from child development science. It is coming from a business model.

SECTION 4

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONVERSATION

What Informed Decision-Making Looks Like

When a child receives a club invitation, most families are handed a form and a deadline. What they are rarely handed is honest information.

Every Kid Sports believes families deserve a different kind of conversation before that decision is made; one that centers the whole child and the whole family, not just the athletic opportunity. Here is what that conversation can look like.

First: Name the Tradeoffs Concretely
Before the form gets signed, name what saying yes displaces. Not abstractly, be concrete. The specific trip. The specific week. The specific birthday party. The specific hobby your child mentioned wanting to try. When tradeoffs are made concrete, families make better decisions.

Second: Ask What the Child Actually Wants — and Why
Children are often responding to social cues, not genuine desire. “I want to play travel soccer” may mean: my best friend is going and I’m scared of being left behind. It may mean: I felt proud when I made the team and I want to feel that again. It may mean: I don’t know, it just seems like what everyone does.

These are all valid starting points. But they require a conversation, not an enrollment form. Some questions worth asking:

• What do you love most about this sport right now?
• Let’s talk about what this would actually mean for our weekends, our summers, our family?
• Is there something you’ve been wanting to try that we haven’t made space for yet?
• What if we gave that a shot this summer instead?

Third: Normalize Not Knowing
One of the most powerful things a parent can model is that hard decisions without guaranteed outcomes are a normal part of life — not a failure of commitment.

The travel team does not guarantee advancement. Opting out does not close doors permanently. What it does is preserve options: the option to try something new, to rest, to be a whole family for a season.

It’s okay not to know the right decision. That’s going to happen a lot in life. That’s why I’m here; to think through it with you, not to have the answer.

Teaching children to make informed decisions under uncertainty, and to revisit them as circumstances change, is itself a developmental win. It is, in fact, exactly what sport is supposed to teach them.

SECTION 5

Why Every Kid Sports Exists —
And Why It Shouldn’t Have To

The Mission

Every Kid Sports removes financial barriers to youth sports participation. We provide grants directly to families who cannot afford registration fees, ensuring that cost alone does not determine which children get to play.

We believe that access to sport is not a luxury. It is a developmental right. The physical, social, emotional, and cognitive benefits of youth sports participation are well-documented. A child’s access to those benefits should not be determined by their family’s income.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Every Kid Sports was built to catch the children the system drops. And the system drops a lot of them.

We should not have to exist.

Not because the work isn’t necessary — it is, desperately so. But because the fact that a nonprofit is required to ensure basic access to youth sports tells us something damning about the system itself. It tells us the system was not designed for all children. It was designed for the children of families who can pay, who have flexible schedules, who have two parents with a car, who can navigate the social and bureaucratic complexity of club enrollment.

Everyone else needs a workaround. We are the workaround.

We are fed up with having to exist. Not because we don’t believe in this work — we do, completely. But a system that excludes children by design and then requires charitable intervention to partially correct that exclusion is a broken system. We are naming it as such.

The answer is not more nonprofits. The answer is a youth sports ecosystem that asks different questions from the beginning: who is this for? What does access actually require? What does a healthy, developmentally appropriate youth sports experience look like — and what would it take to make that the default, not the exception?

What We Are Calling For

Every Kid Sports is calling on youth sports organizations, recreation departments, school districts, and policymakers to take the following seriously:

• Cost transparency before commitment: families deserve full accounting of what participation costs before they sign.
• Developmental honesty: organizations should communicate what is actually known, and not known, about specialization, advancement, and long-term athletic development.
• Multi-sport and recreational pathways that are treated as legitimate choices, not consolation prizes.
• Family-centered enrollment conversations, not just deadline-driven transactions.
• Structural access: sliding scale fees, flexible scheduling, and active outreach to underserved communities as baseline expectations, not afterthoughts.

CONCLUSION

THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING

The youth sports system in America has been optimized for revenue and elite pipeline development. It has not been optimized for family wellbeing, child development, or community health. Why?

The families who quietly walk away, who choose the local activity over the tournament weekend, the camping trip over the tryout, a new sport over the one the system says they must commit to now, are not failing their children. They are revolutionizing today’s youth sports system by making rational decisions in the face of an irrational system.

And the children who never get to the starting line because the cost was too high, the schedule too impossible, the culture too unwelcoming — they are not edge cases. They are the majority of children this system was never built for.

Every child deserves to know the joy of sport. Not the anxiety of it. Not the debt of it. Not the guilt of it. The joy.

That is why Every Kid Sports exists. That is why we are having this conversation publicly. And that is why we believe the most important thing we can do, alongside the grants, alongside the access work, is to name the problem clearly, so that the people who have the power to change the system understand: this is not a parent problem. This is a design problem.

And designs can be changed.

About Every Kid Sports

Every Kid Sports is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring every child has access to youth sports, regardless of financial circumstances. We provide direct grants to families, advocate for systemic change in youth sports access, and work to build a more equitable and developmentally healthy youth sports ecosystem.

Learn more or support our work at everykidsports.org.

Eleana Fanaika, Executive Director, Every Kid Sports
everykidsports.org

REFERENCES & SOURCES

Youth Sports Specialization & Injury Risk
Jayanthi, N., Pinkham, C., Dugas, L., Patrick, B., & LaBella, C. (2013). Sports Specialization in Young Athletes: Evidence-Based Recommendations. Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach, 5(3), 251–257. The study found that the degree of sports specialization is directly and positively correlated with risk of serious overuse injury in young athletes, and that multi-sport participation supports longer, healthier athletic development.

Youth Sports Cost & Access Gap
Aspen Institute Project Play. (2025). State of Play 2025: Trends and Developments in Youth Sports. Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute. Key findings: average family spending on primary youth sport reached $1,016 in 2024 (a 46% increase since 2019); participation gap between lowest- and highest-income households widened from 13.6 percentage points (2012) to 20.2 points (2024). Available at projectplay.org.

Every Kid Sports Organizational Data
Every Kid Sports internal program data (2026): $23M+ distributed, 180,000+ children supported, all 50 states, 75+ sports and activities. Registration cost data based on organizational grant history: $30/child (2010, Bend, OR) to $150/child three times annually (2026, national average). Source: everykidsports.org.