Money Is Ruining Youth Sports - The Atlantic

My 14-year-old son competes in a serious, multistate hockey league. During his five-month, 60-game season, he travels up and down the East Coast on weekends, and I occasionally miss votes in the Senate to watch him. Rider isn’t likely to play in the National Hockey League, nor is he interested in devoting his entire childhood to chasing a pro career as a goalie. He still plays other sports—flag football, basketball, and golf. That sounds about right for an eighth grader.<br>But for the owners of the Atlantic Hockey Federation—the youth-hockey association that pulls together elite teams from Connecticut and many other states, as far west as Arizona—kids’ sports is a cutthroat business, a way to make a handful of people very rich. Black Bear Sports Group owns the AHF, several other youth hockey leagues, and many of the rinks where the teams practice and play. Methodically and quietly, Black Bear—backed by the private-equity firm Blackstreet Capital Holdings—is tightening its stranglehold over the youth-hockey infrastructure along the Eastern Seaboard. Whereas Rider sees hockey as character-building fun, Black Bear’s objective is far simpler: to make a grotesque amount of money.<br>I first came face-to-face with this reality when I noticed a parent from our team sheepishly recording his son from a dark corner of the rink during one of our league games. Because our team travels so much, both parents—or other relatives—can’t always attend. Streaming games for grandparents or recording a child’s shifts on the ice seems like a natural way to share in these moments. I approached the parent and asked why he wasn’t standing in a better spot.<br>Read: How private equity is changing housing<br>“Wish I could,” he said. “I heard we could be docked points in the standings if parents are caught filming their kids.”<br>I was stunned. When my father recently uploaded all of our old home movies to the cloud, the first videos I pulled up were of my grade-school basketball games and tennis matches. What I learned next shocked me further. Black Bear had installed cameras in each rink that feed video footage into a subscription service—Black Bear TV—that charges parents as much as $37 a month. Subscribers can watch games remotely and must pay for the “premium” tier to share highlights, such as their daughter’s game-winning goal, with relatives. Of course, Black Bear could have allowed parents to livestream games to family members and still made money off the low-cost, AI-operated camera system. But that, apparently, wasn’t enough for the executives, so the company banned parents from streaming games for grandparents or the mother or father who didn’t drive two hours to the rink.<br>Investor money has warped youth sports in another way: It has individualized and professionalized the experience. Black Bear creates a youth-hockey experience that feels like the NHL—the youth league’s website keeps meticulously updated standings and individual statistical leaders’ pages. The kids on our team always know exactly where they rank in the race for the points, goals, and assists titles (and, if I’m honest, I also spend too much time on those pages). The winners of the league receive heavy embossed rings and championship hats, just as the Stanley Cup winners do.<br>The result is that youth-league hockey ends up being about the players, not about the team. Rider never plays with the same kids from one season to the next. Each year, players are reshuffled so that the best kids land on the most elite teams. If parents feel their child was unfairly cut, they move to another program—sometimes far from home—just to secure the best placement. This high-pressure environment, driven by parents and profit-hungry owners alike, has produced a youth-sports culture in which profit and individual achievement matter more than teamwork or character building.<br>This was not always the case. For most of the past century, youth sports were managed primarily by local park departments, parent-led leagues, and nonprofit groups such as Pop Warner and the Catholic Youth Organization. Parents’ dues went to support their work, not to maximize outside investors’ returns. The extent of commercialization was limited to a handful of local businesses donating a few hundred dollars to sponsor teams (my very first Little League team was sponsored by Dillon-Baxter Funeral Home, and our main rival was the team sponsored by Dillon-Baxter’s main rival, D’Esopo Funeral Chapel). Youth sports were mostly treated as a public good.<br>This was the better approach—and it served many valuable purposes. Few rituals are more formative and unifying than youth and high-school sports. For children, they build teamwork, resilience, and work ethic. For parents, they provide bonding moments—long car rides, talks after tough games, camaraderie with fellow parents. For communities, youth sports offer collective pride, bringing together adults across political, racial, and...