Kids’ Sports a $15 Billion Industry

School and town youth sports leagues are being replaced by privatized, professionalized club teams. We ask what it means when youth sports go pro.

Quite a long time ago, American children went out for Little League and school sports and, sometimes, a main residence legend went ahead to school sports wonderfulness, perhaps the masters. Nowadays, another model has generally moved in. Private club sports – with families paying huge cash and children voyaging all finished – are immense. Kids as youthful as five and six getting positioned and transported around the nation. A great deal of dreams and personalities, ability and dollars assuming control. Up next On Point: when children's games go, sort of, expert. - Tom Ashbrook.

Guests

Sean Gregory, Senior Writer covering sports for TIME Magazine. (@seanmgregory)

Jon Frankel, Correspondent for HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.”

Angie Coe, Mother of 13-year old twins, Ely and Jasmine who was featured in Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel’s” episode “Youth Sports, Inc."

Bob Bigelow, Former NBA-player for the Boston Celtics, Kansas City Kings, and San Diego Clippers who now advocates for reforming youth sports. Author of "Youth Sports: Still Failing Our Kids - How to Really Fix It."

TIME: How Kids' Sports Became a $15 Billion Industry — 

"The country over, children of all ability levels, in essentially every group activity, are getting cleared up by a young games economy that undeniably looks like the experts at progressively early ages. Neighborhood Little Leagues, town soccer affiliations and church b-ball squads that fortified children in a group - and didn't cost as much as a lease registration have to a great extent lost their gloss. Youth baseball support, for instance, is down 20% from its turn-of-the-century crest. These neighborhood associations have been prodded aside by private club groups, an inexactly represented star grouping that incorporates everything from advancement foundations partnered with proficient games establishments to territorial squads keep running by working two jobs mentors with little involvement." 

The Miami Herald: Does Your Kid Play Sports? 

Odds Are, You're Shelling Out Big Bucks To Travel — "HBO's "Genuine Sports" as of late took a profound jump into a blasting business — youth sports tourism. It finds that travel groups have powered what it calls "an exceptional games tourism blast" over the previous decade. In 2016, Real Sports reports that families spent more than $10 billion out and about." 

Changing The Game Project: The Adultification of Youth Sports — 

"Youth sports has turned out to be less an apparatus to teach kids about game and life, and all the more frequently a place where guardians go to be engaged by their children. They pay great cash, include a lot of confusion to their lives, and invest their profitable energy going far and wide watching their children play sports. At the point when the item they see on the field does not satisfy their apparent thought of the estimation of their speculation, they get annoyed with the children, the mentors, and at the schools and clubs. They need their cash worth. They need to be engaged. Yet, at what cost?"

This program airs on August 31, 2017.