You’re Doing It (Youth Sports) Wrong
Okay, "we're all" doing it wrong.
I’d like to explore the problems in youth sports using economics as the lens through which to explain how and why there is a problem.
So as to not beg the question, I should first state my argument for why I think there is a problem to begin with. Nevertheless, I believe most people at some level would agree with my contention without having to make a supporting argument.
Contention
Youth sports are valued by millions of participants and fans. They can and do provide a lot of happiness in the broadest since of the word—an economist might say they provide utility. However, like in all things the law of diminishing returns is ever present and benefits do not always exceed costs. Generally these negative excesses are held in check by a well-functioning market. But not all markets are well-functioning enough, and certain conditions can create suboptimal outcomes—market failure—where we could at least theoretically be better off than we actually are. I believe this is the case with youth sports.
Argument in Support
How do I know we’ve gone astray? For one people largely agree with this hypothesis saying in as many words that “there’s gotta be a better way!” and “why can’t kids just play sports for fun” and “back in my day, we just got together and played ball making up our own rules and settling disputes ourselves”.
Perhaps the way it is is the way people actually prefer it despite what they say—the economist’s principle of revealed preference. Sure, maybe. But there is a more fundamental reason to believe the resources we are putting into youth sports exceed the output they produce. Very interestingly this will have me somewhat arguing against a position I took long ago.
Competitive excellence, improving how good the best of the best are, in youth sports is a zero-sum game. The cost of marginal improvement are higher and higher as the level of quality gets better and better (law of diminishing marginal product). Yet the marginal benefit from improved quality is less and less as the level of quality gets better and better (law of diminishing returns). Therefore, at some point cost exceed benefits. And we have every reason to believe that point has well been reached by the nature of the market itself—a zero-sum game.
It is zero sum in that my kid getting better and becoming champion over your kid still leaves us with a champion and a runner up. Maybe, maybe my kid “wanted it more” meaning in this case it was worth more to them such that the additional resources used to bring about a different outcome actually brought about a net gain. That is highly unlikely at least in the aggregate and at the extreme where we find youth sports today.
Before you object that this doesn’t sound like the side of the argument I would usually take, I know; it is not. As you can see from this post from long ago, I dared to challenge Steven Landsburg on this very point. I stand by that post as a pushback against Landsburg then and myself today. However, I have to admit I have softened from that position while maintaining that there is something to quality qua quality and that wasteful competition maybe be a necessary byproduct in pursuit of a bigger goal.
Yet in youth sports I only see through the framework Landsburg provides. It is wasteful competition with deleterious side effects that include ostracization, misplaced priorities, and ironically less quality.
Discussion
There are many dimensions along which youth sports could and should contend. These include general enjoyment, exploring new domains, improved physical health, learning teamwork, overcoming adversity, and many others including improved ability and accomplishment in the given sport. While all have their place and different people would like to choose different combinations (minimizing some while maximizing others), we are stuck in a system that allows the last one, improved ability and accomplishment in the give sport, as the overwhelmingly dominating single goal.
Asymmetric information and principal-agent problems along with diffused cost and concentrated benefits have created an arms race environment. Here is what I mean by that. Coaches want kids to specialize even though the research is clearly against it and they greatly encourage over use of expensive competitive leagues. Parents fall for the specialization trap either because they truly believe it as it is intuitive or because of group think.
It can be fine IF the kid simply enjoys it, but it is not the road to long-term success. It might be a necessary road to playing time on school teams IF the coach makes good on the implied threat (no join then no playing time), but that is unlikely if the kid really has the talent to begin with.
The coach has asymmetric information—he knows how good he actually thinks each kid is and how good they could be along with his preferences for who and how much each will likely play. Consider a school-league coach. When it comes to recommending how dedicated a kid should be including off-season competitive camps and leagues and all other extra-extra curricular activity, he has every reason to encourage an excessive level. His cost is basically limited to the risk a player sustains an injury that affects his team. For all but the absolute start players this is a non factor for him.
He also does not incur the cost of participation. The kid’s family does. In fact he often is on the selling side of the competitive off-season league or practice sessions.
For the kid and his/her family1 the cost are partially obvious (e.g., fees) while partially uncertain (e.g., injuries), but they (the principals) are largely at the mercy of the coach (the agent). To put a numerical example together, the explicit cost (fees, travel, etc.) might add up to $2,000 per kid for an off-season league—it often exceeds this greatly. Yet the coach can advocate for this expenditure with vague threats/promises about playing time even if the benefit he expects to reap (his benefit not the player’s benefit) is a mere fraction of this expense.
It is a classic story of something that sounds good combined with positive emotions supporting it—social desirability bias plus motivated reasoning—interacting with a monopolistic industry. So there is a cultural demand element along with an ironically uncompetitive supply element. This creates a ratchet effect whereby it self perpetuates toward a higher and higher competitive extreme.
Gresham's Law (bad money drives out good) is at play here since parents' options for less competitively focused and more economically structured alternatives get crowded out. The highly competitive/expensive (bad money) product drives out the more laidback/cheaper (good money) possibilities.
This leads to many perverse effects including a great lesson in how myopic pursuit of one goal can lead to suboptimal (local maximum) outcomes. In English, trying to be the best in one sport by only doing that one sport is generally a losing strategy. Even though it can bring improvement, concentration in one sport is not how most athletic success is best achieved. Sorry all of you year-round, unisport people, you are doing yourselves or your kids a great disservice even if they truly want to sacrifice all other goals to try to be the competitive best. Note that this research applies to virtually all domains.
This gets me fired up because I hate to see economically wasteful conventional wisdom. But I’m not the only one. While I was contemplating this post, Matt Yglesias largely beat me to it. Two choice selections from his piece:
There’s a youth sports industry that benefits from affluent parents’ participation, and the parents themselves are stuck in a collective action problem where nobody wants to be the family that opts out. On some level, there’s just no alternative to some set of individuals accepting responsibility for making a decision that’s better for society and participating in community-based sports instead of expensive travel teams.
And
I think the more insidious aspect is that people are generally conformists. If you’re interested in soccer and your friends who are interested in soccer join the travel team, then you want to join the travel team. And soon it’s not just the top one or two players from each cohort on travel teams, it’s everyone who can afford to be.
This all might make sense if it were something like the government of East Germany trying to build an elite soccer team for reasons of national prestige. But these leagues are not part of some federal program to maximize the quality of American athletes. They are for-profit entities that are making money by charging families to play. So while entry into the leagues is somewhat selective and involves tryouts, the incentive is to avoid setting the bar too high. This is not a question of selecting the most talented 1 percent of young athletes and bringing them into elite programs, it’s about selecting an above-average kid whose parents are willing to pay.
How do we break free? I don't know.
I am very, very reluctant to assume we can formally or informally legislate our way out of this to improvement—say, by limiting time or money that can be spent. My biggest hope is that we need to let 99 more flowers bloom to compete with the single one we currently guarantee flourishes.
One way might be a lot more competition in school supply rather than one-size-fits-all models like the existing government-school domination. For those who want to (over?) emphasize sports, let those kids attend sports academies. For many others then the track doesn't have to be always trying to win state! etc. But there has to be a demand change, and that means culture.
Cultural change is tough, but it can be achieved. In fact I think it can work hand-in-hand with changes on the supply side. If we could create a well-regarded system to offer kids, let's call it, friendlier opportunities to play sports,2 we might start to see some improvement. Another, more difficult angle is to deemphasize sports—lower the social standing. This is tougher for sure as it is both anathema to many, many parent's point of view as well as having a potentially negative effect disproportionately on under-privileged individuals. so tread lightly.
One thought would be to simply create leagues and norms otherwise that encourage any or many of the qualities besides competitive improvement in youth sports. Yes, this would mean some kind of subsidy, but that doesn't have to be a government subsidy—private organizations can play a huge role here. Regardless, there is much room to cannibalize some of the government-used resources currently devoted youth sports as we know them.
While it is obvious the coach can be male or female, this isn’t important to the hypothetical. However, I think it is important to note that this affects boys and girls (increasingly). And the affect on girls may be more exploitative in that their prospects for future benefits from sports are lower and their risk of injury (I hypothesize from anecdote) higher.