Overview:
As youth sports become a multibillion-dollar industry, Colorado families face rising costs, burnout and shrinking access.
This story is a capstone project by CU Boulder’s News Corps student Wyatt Duesenberg.
Tracey Crawford’s 14-year-old son loves hockey. So does her 12-year-old daughter. Both started playing when they were 5, and both now play for the Littleton Hawks, a private club program. Crawford, a Littleton mental health therapist, has watched her children grow through the sport. She has also watched the bills grow with them.
“My son’s season club fees were $4,200,” Crawford said. “We set over about $12,000 for the team travel fees. Team travel fees include flights, hotel, the coaches’ travel, the per diem for the kids, dinners, those types of things.”
That did not include equipment.
“I would say just for my AA player, we probably paid upwards of $25,000 for this kid to enjoy the fall season,” she said.
Her daughter’s season was less expensive but still costly. Crawford said her club fees were $2,800 and travel fees were about $1,800, not including flights, hotels or food for the parent traveling with the team. With multiple tournament weekends, Crawford estimated her daughter’s hockey costs reached $6,000 to $7,000 for the season.
“What I’ve noticed is that the older you get, the more expensive it gets,” Crawford said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the club fees, the travel fees or the equipment cost.”
Crawford is not expecting her children to become professional athletes. She is not counting on a Division I scholarship. She keeps paying because her kids love the game.
But her family’s experience reflects a larger shift in youth sports. Across the country, the cost of playing has climbed as private clubs, travel teams, specialized training programs and corporate-backed facilities reshape what used to be a more accessible part of childhood.
The result is a system often described as “pay-to-play,” where families with money can buy access to better coaching, competition and exposure, while others are left out before they ever step onto the field, rink or court.
“Pay-to-play, essentially, the simplest way to think about it, is that a private company manages the logistics of organized youth sports, and they charge people significant amounts of money to have their kids participate in those youth leagues,” said Ever Figueroa, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies how sports media and communication convey ideas about race, gender and class.
Families in the United States now spend between $30 billion and $40 billion annually on their children’s sports activities, according to the Aspen Institute. That is more than the annual revenue of any professional sports league. Forbes estimated the NFL, the country’s most profitable league, generated $21.2 billion during the 2024 season.
That money has drawn the attention of private investors. In recent years, private equity firms and sports executives have bought youth leagues, training facilities, tournaments, camps and rink networks.
The business model is built on a promise: pay more, train more, travel more and maybe your child will move up. Figueroa said that promise can distort what youth sports are supposed to provide.
“It’s essentially done to sell the illusion that if you give us the most amount of money that you can give us, your kid will become a professional athlete,” Figueroa said. “I think some people are being taken advantage of. As with all things that are usually for profit.”
Parents are not the only ones feeling the pressure. Athletic directors and coaches say rising costs are changing who gets to play and how long kids stay in sports.
Brendan Netherton, athletic director at George Washington High School in Denver, has worked in education and athletics for nearly two decades. He said the biggest concerns he sees are access and specialization.
“If you don’t have the money anymore, you’re not going to be on that ice. You’re not going to be on that court. You’re not going to be on that field,” Netherton said. “If you don’t pay your fees and your travel fees and all that, you’re not going to be able to do those things.”
School-based sports, he said, are meant to serve a different purpose.
“Here at George Washington High School, we’re educationally based,” Netherton said. “We’re not really concerned about a financial gain. We’re just trying to develop a human.”
The Colorado High School Activities Association, which governs high school sports and activities in the state, makes a similar distinction. Unlike private clubs, school-based sports are tied to a student’s school community and are intended to emphasize participation, development, academics and character, not just competition or recruitment.
But club sports often begin long before high school, and by the time athletes arrive, Netherton said some have already specialized in one sport for years.
“I’ve also seen just the specialization of sporting,” he said. “Kids are less and less active in other sports. Even at our level, they just play baseball or they just play basketball. We used to have a lot of multi-sport athletes, and now that’s kind of going down.”
That specialization can come with physical and emotional consequences. The American Academy of Pediatrics has warned that early specialization, year-round training and overtraining can increase the risk of overuse injuries and burnout. According to the Aspen Institute, the average child quits playing sports by age 11. The AAP reported that about 70% of youth athletes stop participating by age 13.
Netherton has seen that burnout firsthand.
“I’ve had kids walk the hallway here that are some top soccer players in the country,” he said. “They don’t play soccer anymore. They’re just like, ‘Hey, I’m just kind of done.’ And so it’s sad.”
Ashley Charboneau-DiPaolo, a former coach at a Catholic elementary school, saw pay-to-play sports ramp up while coaching between 2008 and 2012. At the time, she said, private teams often recruited the strongest athletes. Now, she worries some programs accept any family willing to pay.
“In the past, it seemed like the kids really had to be good at their sport,” Charboneau-DiPaolo said, “and now they just want to charge an arm and a leg for anyone to join.”
The rising cost also deepens inequality. According to Aspen Institute research, parents in the wealthiest households spend roughly four times as much on their child’s sports as families in the lowest-income households. Families earning $150,000 or more spend far more on travel than families earning under $50,000.
Participation trends reflect those barriers. In 2013, 45% of Black youth ages 6 to 17 played sports regularly, higher than their white peers. By 2023, participation had fallen to 35% for Black youth and 37% for Hispanic youth, compared with 41% for white youth.
“If you have a system that privileges people with money, it is by design created to exclude people who do not have money,” Figueroa said. “I’ve seen parents quickly realize, like, this isn’t worth the money, and I’ve also seen or heard stories of parents spending way too much money chasing a dream that really isn’t real.”
The consequences may extend beyond childhood. Figueroa said sports have long been sold as one of America’s great meritocracies, a place where talent can rise regardless of background. Pay-to-play challenges that mythology.
“The mythology of sport in America is that it’s supposed to be this place of merit, where only the best rise up to the top, that everybody has equal chances, equal opportunities,” Figueroa said. “We are producing fewer good players because fewer kids can play sports at a meaningful level.”
Still, families like Crawford’s remain caught between the system’s problems and their children’s joy.
“It’s been stressful,” Crawford said. “Especially when your player continues to want to play again and they’re actually moving up in different levels of hockey and competition, so it’s really hard to say no to your player.”
She knows the costs are high. She knows the dream of professional sports is unlikely. But she also knows what hockey gives her children right now.
“Right now my kids find a lot of pleasure in playing the sport,” Crawford said. “As long as my kids keep saying yes, I’m going to try to keep doing this. Also, I enjoy the game. I enjoy watching them play. And as long as they want to play a sport and I can afford it, I’d love to offer it. And maybe when I can’t, then they’ll have to get a job.”