Every time someone writes about why lacrosse isn’t growing the way it should, the conversation goes the same place. Cost. Travel teams, club fees, gear, tournaments. Back in 2019, Aspen’s Project Play pegged lacrosse at $1,289 a year per kid, one of the pricier sports a kid can play.¹ In 2024 dollars, the same window Aspen’s spending survey covers, that’s more than $1,580, and higher still today, which tracks with Aspen’s finding that family sports spending overall is up 46 percent since 2019, nearly twice the pace of general inflation.2 Somebody cites a number like that, then says the sport is pricing families out, not just working class families, but underserved communities too, and plenty of families who could afford it and just don’t want to spend that kind of money on a kids’ sport, and that’s usually where it stops.
There’s data on why kids quit sports generally, not lacrosse specifically, that backs up exactly what I’m describing. Ohio State University surveyed nearly 4,000 adults about why they walked away from sports as kids, and the findings were published in Aspen’s own State of Play 2024 report.3 Cost, “could not afford sports,” came in at 16 percent, tied for fourth. The two reasons that actually topped the list: “didn’t have fun” at 45 percent, and “felt like they were not a good player” at 31 percent. Add those together and you get 76 percent of every kid who ever quit a sport, any sport. And those two reasons aren’t independent of each other. Research on youth sport dropout backs this up directly: a kid’s sense that they’re actually improving is tied to whether the sport stays fun, and when that sense of competence is low, both motivation and enjoyment drop together, and dropout follows.4 Fix a kid’s ability to improve, and you’re pulling on both of the two biggest reasons kids quit at once. That’s true across sports generally. In a sport with no right field, where a struggling kid has nowhere to hide while they catch up, I’d bet it’s even more true.
It is true. I’m not going to sit here and tell you lacrosse is cheap, because it isn’t. But I think that explanation is doing a lot of work to avoid a harder question, which is: of the kids who do sign up, who do get the stick in their hands, why do so many of them quit? Because they are quitting. Of the 16 youth sports Aspen’s own State of Play research tracks, lacrosse had the single steepest one-year decline among kids ages 6 to 12, worse than wrestling, worse than tennis, sitting in a tier of its own below every other sport on the list. I’ll get into those numbers below, but the short version is this: cost explains why fewer kids show up on day one. It doesn’t explain why the ones who do show up are leaving faster than any other sport in the country, and mostly during the exact years they’re supposed to be learning the game.
Because that’s a different problem than cost. And I’d argue it’s the bigger one.
Getting in the door isn’t the same as staying
Cost decides who tries lacrosse. It has nothing to do with who sticks with it. I’ve coached youth lacrosse from rec level K through eighth grade, boys and girls. I have watched a lot of eight and nine year olds walk onto a field for the first practice of their life. Most of them are excited. Within a few weeks, some of them are not.
It’s not because their parents ran out of money halfway through the season. It’s because the stick didn’t do what they wanted it to do, over and over, and nobody explained to them why, and eventually “I’m bad at this” turned into “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And it’s not only the kids who quit in week four. Some of them stick around a full season, even two, and just never quite catch up. They’re still fumbling the same catches in third grade that they were fumbling in first, while others on the team pulled ahead, and eventually they drift off too, just on a longer timeline. Same problem, slower fuse.
Compare that to soccer and baseball. In soccer, a beginner can kick the ball and it goes somewhere close to where they aimed, even on a bad kick, and they can chase the game around the field without ever needing a skill they haven’t built yet. Baseball has its own version of the same mercy. Every parent who ever coached Little League knows the trick. You put your least experienced kid in right field, because at that age almost nothing gets hit out there. The kid gets to wear the uniform, stand on a real field, be part of the team, and nobody’s fun gets ruined while they figure the game out at their own pace. Both sports have a place to hide a beginner and still let them belong.
Lacrosse doesn’t have a right field. There’s no spot on the field where a kid who can’t cradle yet can just stand around and still feel like a lacrosse player. The stick is in their hands every single play, and if they can’t control it, everyone on the field knows it, including them. Cradling, catching, scooping ground balls, throwing with any accuracy, none of that comes from instinct. It comes from reinforcing proper technique and repetition, and a lot of it, before a kid gets even a small taste of competence. That gap between signing up and feeling like you’re any good at it, and the gap that never fully closes for some kids even after a couple of seasons, are where lacrosse loses kids, and it loses them regardless of their parents’ income level.
The numbers back this up, and it’s not close
Look at what actually sits at the top of youth participation for kids fifth grade and under. SFIA tracks this every year, and for ages 6 to 12 the list has been stable for a long time: basketball, baseball, outdoor soccer, flag football, and track and field.5 Lacrosse isn’t in that group. It shows up strong in a different stat, the share of kids who play it in organized programs versus pickup, where lacrosse ties baseball and soccer at 56 percent, trailing only softball and gymnastics.6 In other words, almost nobody plays lacrosse casually. You’re in a structured program from day one or you’re not playing at all.
Here’s the number that actually settles the argument. Aspen’s Project Play tracks core participation by sport every year, and the most recent numbers show one-year change from 2022 to 2023 for kids ages 6 to 12. Lacrosse’s decline was the steepest of the 16 sports on that table, down 18.1 percent in a single year.7 That’s not a photo finish either. Wrestling was the next worst at -14.6 percent, tennis right behind it at -14.3 percent, and after that the drop-off levels out fast, cheerleading and ice hockey both sit at -6.4 percent. Lacrosse isn’t just the worst on this list, it’s sitting alone in its own tier below everyone else.
Now look at the same table for kids 13 to 17, and the story changes completely. Lacrosse’s decline there is only -4.1 percent, roughly in the middle of the pack, nowhere close to the outlier it is at the younger ages.8 That gap tells you something. Whatever is driving kids away from lacrosse is heavily front-loaded into exactly the years I’m describing here, the years a kid is supposed to be learning how to play with the lacrosse stick for the first time. By the time a kid’s made it to 13 or 14, they’ve usually already survived that gauntlet, and the sport holds onto them at a rate that looks like everybody else’s.
Aspen also publishes a churn rate chart, tracking what share of kids ages 6 to 17 stopped playing a sport in 2023 against how many came in as newcomers or returners.9 Lacrosse’s churn was -51.6 percent, with newcomers and returners at 57.7 percent, for a net of positive 6.1 percent. On its face that looks healthy, lacrosse is actually gaining players, and its net is better than basketball’s or outdoor soccer’s. But I don’t think that net number tells the real story. It blends 6-year-old newcomers in with 16-year-old veterans who’ve already survived the hardest years, and we already know from the table above that those two groups are having completely different experiences. My guess is that blended number is hiding a genuinely ugly attrition rate among true newcomers behind a much larger, much more loyal population of long-tenured players. It’s a version of the same bias that makes average returns for active fund managers look better than what most investors actually experience. I think it’s worth its own full breakdown, so I’m giving it one in a separate piece.
Go back to that top five list from a minute ago, basketball, baseball, outdoor soccer, flag football, and track and field, and the pattern jumps off the page. Track and field asks a kid to run, jump, and throw, things they already know how to do before they ever join a team. Soccer asks them to kick a ball, another motion that needs no tool-handling skill at all. Basketball puts the ball directly in their hands, and dribbling takes some coordination but they can shoot, pass, and rebound usefully in their very first practice. Flag football strips out contact and mostly asks kids to run and catch, both natural motions. And baseball, even though hitting is genuinely hard, gives you right field, a legitimate place to stand, wear the uniform, and belong to the team while you grow into the harder skills at your own pace.
Every single one of the top five either uses a motion a kid already owns, or it builds in a low-demand role where a beginner can survive the learning curve without embarrassing themselves in front of their own teammates. Lacrosse is the outlier. It’s the one sport on any of these lists where a kid has to master an actual foreign tool, a stick with a mesh pocket on the end, before they can do anything the game asks of them, and there’s no equivalent of right field to hide in while they get there. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not a coaching failure either. It’s a structural difference between lacrosse and the sports that dominate the participation numbers at this age, and I think it explains a real chunk of the gap that cost alone never fully accounts for.
The industry keeps answering the easy question
I get why cost is the go-to explanation. It’s sympathetic, it’s got real data behind it, and it doesn’t implicate anyone specific. Nobody in the lacrosse business wants to stand up and say the sport itself has a rough first-touch experience, or that the equipment and the coaching in those first couple of seasons aren’t doing enough to shorten that gap between picking up a stick and feeling like a lacrosse player.
But that’s the more honest conversation, and it’s the one that actually points to something we can fix. You can’t unilaterally lower the cost of travel lacrosse. What you can do is shrink the amount of time and frustration it takes a kid to feel some baseline competence with a stick in their hands. That’s a coaching problem, it’s a teaching-progression problem, and yes, it’s a product problem too. I didn’t get into hand grips because I thought lacrosse sticks were too expensive. I got into it because I watched kid after kid lose their grip, lose their confidence, and lose interest, some in the first few practices and some over a slower stretch of a season or two, all during the exact window when the sport is supposed to be hooking them for life.
Follow the money and you see where the industry’s attention actually goes
BSN Sports acquired Lax.com outright back in April, folding one of the biggest lacrosse-specific retailers in the country into its Club Direct platform.10 Then this month, BSN signed on as the first national sponsorship partner in the history of The Sports Facilities Companies, giving them opt-in access to more than 140 managed venues around the country.11 Two big moves in one year, and both of them are primarily aimed at the same target: kids and families who are already in, already committed, already buying gear at scale, already playing club ball.
That’s a rational business decision. Club lacrosse is where the money is. But it’s also a tell. Nobody is building a national platform around the eight year old who’s about to quit in week four because they can’t cradle. That kid isn’t a club prospect yet. They aren’t anybody’s customer yet. And if the sport keeps losing them at that stage, they never become one, and neither BSN nor anyone else ever gets the chance to sell them a stick again.
Why this matters for fan loyalty, not just player counts
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. The kid who quits, whether it’s early on out of frustration or after a season or two of never catching up, doesn’t just fail to become a player. They usually don’t become a fan either. They don’t grow up watching the sport, buying the gear, bringing their own kids to a field one day. The sports that build generational, sticky fan bases do it by getting kids far enough into the experience that it becomes part of their identity, not just an activity their parents paid for one spring.
If lacrosse wants the kind of long-term following that other sports have built, cost is only half the fight. The other half is making sure the kids who do walk onto the field actually get to feel good at this before they decide whether they love it.
That’s the stretch that decides everything, whether it closes early or takes a couple of seasons to play out. And right now, I don’t think the sport is paying enough attention to it.
Sources
1 Aspen Institute Project Play and Utah State University Families in Sport Lab, 2019 national survey of youth-sports parents, cited in “Staying in the Game: Progress and Challenges in Youth Sports,” Project Play, https://projectplay.org/news/2019/9/4/staying-in-the-game-progress-and-challenges-in-youth-sports. The $1,580 inflation-adjusted figure is calculated from a 22.63% cumulative price increase between 2019 and 2024, per U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI data, cited in “$100 in 2019 is worth $122.63 in 2024,” officialdata.org, https://www.officialdata.org/2019-dollars-in-2024
2 Aspen Institute Project Play, in partnership with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University, National Youth Sports Parent Survey (fielded November-December 2024), cited in “Project Play survey: Family spending on youth sports rises 46% over five years,” Project Play, https://projectplay.org/news/2025/2/24/project-play-survey-family-spending-on-youth-sports-rises-46-over-five-years
3 Ohio State University, National Sports and Society Survey (2018-2019, nearly 4,000 U.S. adults), “Why Adults Say They Quit Sports as a Child,” cited in Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2024, “Participation Trends,” https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2024-participation-trends
4 Cassidy M Foley Davelaar, “Body Image and its Role in Physical Activity: A Systematic Review,” Cureus, February 16, 2021, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7971183/
5 Sports & Fitness Industry Association, 2026 Topline Participation Report, cited in “SFIA’s 2026 Topline Participation Report,” Youth Sports Business Report, https://youthsportsbusinessreport.com/?p=26929
6 NSGA 2026 Sports Participation Report (conducted by Ipsos), cited in “NSGA Study: Pickleball Participation Growth Slows as Other Sports Step Up,” SGB Media, https://sgbonline.com/nsga-study-pickleball-participation-growth-slows-as-other-sports-step-up/
7 Sports & Fitness Industry Association, “Core Participation in Select Sports, Ages 6-12” (2022-23 change), Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2024, “Participation Trends,” https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2024-participation-trends
8 Sports & Fitness Industry Association, “Core Participation in Select Sports, Ages 13-17” (2022-23 change), Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2024, “Participation Trends,” https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2024-participation-trends
9 Sports & Fitness Industry Association, “Churn Rate in Youth Sports,” ages 6-17, 2023 data, Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2024, “Participation Trends,” https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2024-participation-trends
10 “BSN SPORTS Announces Acquisitions of Sports Endeavors and Lax.com,” Varsity Brands, April 27, 2026, https://varsitybrands.com/newsroom/press-release/bsn-sports-announces-acquisitions-of-sports-endeavors-and-lax-com
11 “The Sports Facilities Companies Announces First National Sponsorship Deal with BSN SPORTS,” PR Newswire, September 10, 2026, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-sports-facilities-companies-announces-first-national-sponsorship-deal-with-bsn-sports-302875628.html
