Youth sports is now a $40 billion industry in the United States, an estimate from investment bank Baird that Newsweek reported on this year. Participation is climbing again after years of decline, and families are spending more on travel teams, private coaching, and specialized facilities than the industry has seen since before the pandemic.
But every story about that $40 billion number is measuring the wrong moment. It counts what families spend on a kid this season. It does not count what that kid gives back to the sport right now simply by staying on the roster, or what they become to the sport over time, especially twenty years from now, and that second number is worth far more than the first.
Here is the thing the industry understates, or lets fly under the radar: retention. Most rec leagues and club programs already track signups by season, often broken out by boys and girls and by age group. What they are not tracking, or acting on, is whether the same kids stay multiple seasons, how much of that time they spent enjoying the game versus gritting through it, and what a kid who stays becomes worth to the sport later on. The enrollment data already exists. The link between that data, enjoyment, and long-term value does not.
Research has consistently identified fun as a critical factor in youth sports participation and retention. Visek et al. (2015) noted that children cite fun as the primary reason for participating in organized sports and the absence of fun as the leading reason for dropping out.
Enrollment tells you how many kids showed up this year. Retention tells you how many are still around in five years, and whether they leave loving the game or relieved to be done with it. Right now, the industry is optimizing for the wrong one.
Why retention is the real growth engine
Think about what a kid who plays a sport for eight or nine years, and genuinely enjoys most of them, actually becomes: a future fan who watches from the stands and buys a ticket to watch it live, a future parent who signs their own kid up without needing convincing, a future coach or volunteer who keeps the whole system running, and quietly, a recruiter who talks their friends into trying it too. A kid who quits after two frustrating seasons usually becomes none of that — no fandom, no future purchases, no next generation introduced to the game. And a retained, happy player isn’t worth one unit of that future value; they’re worth a branching, multiplying set of it, because affinity spreads sideways to friends and forward to the next generation. That long-term value isn’t in tension with the kid’s own experience, either — a sport’s entire economy, from broadcast deals to the equipment aisle at a sporting goods store, is simply the downstream byproduct of enough kids having a good enough time early on to stick around.
This is not only a long-term story
It would be a mistake to read this as purely a bet on the future, because retention pays off right now too. A kid who sticks with a sport instead of quitting after one frustrating season is a roster spot filled next year instead of empty. They are a stronger travel team, a fuller rec league, a more competitive tryout pool, and a program that does not have to keep re-recruiting beginners to replace the ones who left. Leagues need bodies on the field this season, not just future fans, and every player who stays is immediate value to the health of the sport, even before they become the long-term fan or buyer, they are on track to be.
If the industry wants to act on this, leagues need to start tracking a different number. Instead of celebrating top-line seasonal signups, program directors should track cohort retention rate — what percentage of last year’s roster, say 2024’s U8 team, is still playing in 2026. You cannot fix player experience if the only thing you’re measuring is who arrives, not who stays.
Why this shows up first in lacrosse, but belongs to every sport
I have spent my career around lacrosse, played it through college (Division 1), and now build products for it, so that is the lens I see this problem through most clearly. Lacrosse has a specific version of this issue. Cradling and catching with a stick take real time to learn, and the early frustration curve is steep enough that plenty of kids quit before the fun part ever kicks in. Anyone who has coached a first-year player knows the moment: a kid who came in excited, spent a season dropping the ball and feeling behind everyone else, and never came back.
That is not a lacrosse-specific failure. It is a universal one. Every sport has some version of the same early frustration cliff, whether it is a beginner getting overpowered in pickleball rallies before they understand positioning, a kid who cannot make consistent contact in baseball and starts dreading batting practice, or a young golfer who spends a summer topping the ball and decides the game is not for them. The sport changes. The mechanism does not.
This is the piece I would like the youth sports industry to start paying attention to. Not just how many kids are enrolling this year, but how many of them are actually enjoying the early, hardest part of learning the sport, because that enjoyment is the single biggest predictor of whether they stay, and a kid who stays is worth more to a sport immediately, and worth even more to it over time.
But that enjoyment matters to the kid long before it matters to the sport’s balance sheet, and it matters to every kid, not just the ones with a college roster spot in their future. A kid who sticks with a sport builds real confidence, the kind that comes from getting better at something hard over time. They learn to lose without falling apart, to show up for a team on days they do not feel like it, and to make friendships that often outlast the season itself. None of that depends on natural talent. The most gifted player on the field and the kid who will always be, at best, a solid role player are chasing the same ground ball and standing in the same huddle, and both walk away with the same core benefits if they stay long enough to enjoy the process. That is exactly why enjoyment, not talent, is the variable worth protecting for every kid who picks up a stick, a ball, or a racquet.
It is also, not coincidentally, the exact problem I started trying to solve in lacrosse with a small, patent-pending grip product designed to make those first frustrating months of stick work easier to get through. The idea was never just about helping a kid catch more passes this season. It was about keeping that kid in the game long enough to fall in love with it, because that is where the real value of a sport, and the real benefit to the kid, gets built.
The $40 billion figure is a fine headline. But the number that actually determines both how healthy a sport is this season and what it is worth in twenty years is much simpler, and much harder to measure: how many of today’s kids are still playing, or still watching, in year eight. Every sport, not just lacrosse, should be asking that question a lot more seriously than it currently does.
