South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Inflation slams youth sports
Organizers look for ways to keep kids’ participation going while families try to cut costs
Sticker shock in youth sports is nothing new, but the onslaught of double-digit inflation across America this year has added a costly wrinkle on the path to the ballparks, swimming pools and dance studios across America.
It has forced some families to scale back the number of seasons, leagues or sports that their kids can play in during any given year, while motivating league organizers to become more creative in coming up with ways to keep prices down and participation up.
Recent studies, conducted before inflation began affecting daily life across America, showed families spent around $700 a year on kids’ sports, with travel and equipment accounting for the biggest portion of the expense.
Everyone, from football coaches to swimmeet coordinators, is struggling to find less expensive ways of keeping families coming through the doors. Costs of uniforms and equipment, along with facility rental, are shooting up — all products of the deluge of supply-chain issues, hard-to-find staff, lack of coaches and rising gas and travel costs that were exacerbated, or sometimes caused, by the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted seasons and sometimes canceled them altogether. The annual inflation rate for the 12 months ending in September was 8.2%.
Rachel Kennedy, who lives in Monroe, Ohio, and describes her family as “on the lower end of middle class,” opted son Liam out of summer and fall baseball, not so much because of the fees to join the leagues but because “those don’t include all the equipment you need.”
“And gas prices have gotten to the point where we don’t have the bandwidth to drive one or two hours away” for the full slate of weekend games and tournaments that dot the typical youth baseball schedule each season. The Kennedys rarely stayed the night in hotels for multi-day tournaments.
A study published by the Aspen Institute that was conducted before COVID-19 said on average across all sports, parents already spent more each year on travel ($196 per child, per sport) than any other facet of the sport: equipment, lessons, registration, etc. A number of reports say hotel prices in some cities are around 30% higher than last year, and about the same amount higher than in 2019, before the start of the pandemic.
At the venues, it costs more to hire umpires to call the games, groundskeepers to keep fields ready, janitors to clean indoor venues and coaches to run practices. Even sports that are traditionally on the less-expensive end of the spectrum are running into issues.
“You talk to people and you say, ‘What do you mean you get $28 an hour to be a lifeguard?’” said Steve Roush, a former leader in the Olympic world who now serves as executive director of Southern California Swimming, which sanctions meets across one of America’s most expensive regions. “The going rate has just gone through the roof, and that’s if you can find somebody at all. And that accounts for part of the big gap” in prices for swimming meets today versus three years ago.
At stake is the future of a youth-sports industry that generated around $20 billion, according to one estimate, before COVID-19 sharply curtailed spending in 2020.