I have been railing about the how youth sports are out of control for the last year. In the U.S. in 2019 youth sports with $19 billion in revenue was bigger than the NFL’s 15 billion in revenue.
As a sports official and a parent I have seen first hand how youth sports continues to get bigger and bigger and more demanding of the participants at an even younger age. What is expected of the participants is beyond reason and is detrimental to family life.
My granddaughter recently quit her ten-year-old girls softball team because of the unreasonable demands. Just last weekend her former coach scheduled her former team to a 10AM practice on a day the team was playing three games in the evening with the last game starting at 11:30 PM. Think about the unreasonableness of ten-year-old-girls practicing and playing three softball games in one day in Michigan on the second Saturday in March. How the parents can support such scheduling is beyond my comprehension.
Last week The Guardian had a great article about youth hockey and the Greater Toronto Hockey League. It really hits home on the abuses of youth sports. The article is focused on hockey, but a similar article could be written about any sport in most areas of our country. Here are excerpts from the article.
Walking into a Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL) arena, you’ll see fans, parents, and kids ready to take to the ice. At some rinks, where the city’s elite players compete in the world’s largest amateur hockey organization, you’ll also see corporate sponsors, agents, personal trainers, scouts and media.
As the NHL puts it, the GTHL is “Where NHL dreams begin”. Parents quit jobs, sell homes, move their families and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure their children can play in the GTHL. For some of them it’s worth it: stars like Connor McDavid, Mitch Marner and John Tavares honed their skills in the GTHL before embarking on careers in the NHL that have made them multimillionaires.
The GTHL, whose players range in age from nine to 18, is the definition of high-performance youth hockey, but it is also an example of how kids’ joy can be exploited for profit. Making money from youth sports is neither new nor illegal, of course. But in the GTHL, the thirst for profit is particularly egregious….While children chase their NHL dreams, their on-ice performance also produces money and prestige for parents, coaches, teams, media and equipment manufacturers.
And there’s no doubt the GTHL, which has more than 30,000 players, generates money. Beneficiaries include the equipment manufacturing industry pedaling $250 sticks and $1,000 skates (all figures in this story are in Canadian dollars); coaches, who can earn six-figure salaries; sport schools that charge upwards of $40,000 per season for tuition and lessons; and scouting agencies that charge fans on the lookout for the next hockey prodigy upwards of $200 a year for reports and rankings.
In the GTHL, corporate sponsors such as Gatorade, Scotiabank, PlayStation, and Canadian Tire tie their brands to the performance of kids as young as nine. The GTHL’s own information on such partnerships states the league “offers a phenomenal marketing area to corporations seeking new avenues of exposure”.
In 2023, this included the GTHL’s Top Prospect Game for 15-year-old players, an event “fuelled by Gatorade”, which was played in front of a sold-out crowd, paying $17 a ticket. For those who couldn’t attend, an online stream of the game was available for $9.99.
Until recently, GTHL clubs charged parents between $5 and $7 to enter arenas to watch their own children play. That practice, however, has since been changed. But that doesn’t mean parents get to watch their kids for free. They must pay a fee of up to $895 for a a Player Registration Fee (PRF). Any player who doesn’t pay the fee, cannot play. (There is some relief for lower income families but few qualify.) The PRF is far from the only cost: each organization, age level and team will then have additional fees, sometimes in excess of $10,000. The charges never seem to stop. It’s little surprise then that the GTHL had revenue in 2022 of $8.8m, with reserve assets totaling an accumulated $5.1m from previous seasons, including more than $4m in cash.
GTHL coaches also stand to gain. “Coaches get paid … it’s in the budget and it’s up front,” “They put it in the budget as ‘coach’s fee’. The average is creeping up. It’s $20,000 to $25,000, but there are some coaches making $120,000 to $150,000. But the sources of some coaches’ incomes are a little more dubious. At the upper echelon of that pay scale …..payments are often made off the books by investors or sponsors hoping to gain control of organizations or buy a position for their child on a team.
GTHL clubs are also a contentious source of revenue throughout the ever-professionalizing league. In the eyes of the provincial and federal government, clubs and the league itself are considered non-share capital corporations, which is any corporation considered “an independent legal entity whose goals do not include gain or profit for its members, although in some cases members can benefit”…..
“Teams in the GTHL are non-profit but owned by private individuals … while they may be non-profit for the purposes of bookkeeping, huge money is involved…. One parent was asked for $1m to control just a quarter of a AAA team…. people are “buying and selling organizations for millions of dollars and turning the game we love into profits”.
All this goes against the background of a sport whose harms are well documented. As Hockey Alberta committee member and scholar Lauren Dormer wrote, hockey, including at the youth level, is “a violent sport that is known to result in troubling physical, psychological, and emotional outcomes”.
Researchers have found clear connections between youth hockey and brain injuries and other bodily harm. Similarly, cases of hazing and physical and sexual abuse in junior and youth hockey are currently at the forefront of discussion in Canada…. the risks for harm to youth in Canadian minor hockey cannot be understated. These are working conditions. Moreover, as a 2022 White Paper presented at the Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour states, the opposing view that athletes are reaching for their dreams, benefitting socially and physically, and that sport is inherently “good”, has the ability to conceal this pervasive harm in minor hockey.
“So pervasive is a belief in the essential ‘goodness’ of sport that there is a deep-seated reluctance to consider any negative aspects of sport, despite long standing scientific research and growing media, academic and public attention paid to the work, exploitation and abuse (neglect, physical, psychological and sexual) of children in sport,” the paper states.
Indeed, one parent, who claimed the elite hockey world is “worse than the mafia”, told Rachel Giese in a 2015 article for Toronto Life that “one of her sons had a coach she says was physically and emotionally abusive: he would train the team for 90 minutes without a water break, until they were nearly delirious with fatigue and dehydration.”
Not only does this statement invoke violations of occupational health and safety regulations, but the restriction on breaks, water and the physical implications are similar to conditions children across the globe face in sweatshops.
The GTHL disputes the claim that youth are being exploited for financial gain.
….“Big money does rule minor hockey, and one of the most blatant examples of that is the Greater Toronto Hockey League…..this big money is being generated by children….it’s this departure from play, and fun, to the centering of money as object, that transforms children into laborers. [O]nce youth sport becomes more than play, it is an activity with an enormous capacity to generate benefits for stakeholders far beyond what is necessary to simply benefit the child participating, this doesn’t make youth sport bad or wrong, but it does warrant closer examination of who primarily benefits from the ways in which youth sport is organized and administered, because children in such a system can easily transition from players to laborers.”
The GTHL is filled with elite hockey players, but few will go on to the big stage. The GTHL itself says that the likelihood of an NHL career for minor hockey players is roughly 0.05%. With those odds, some of the league’s players are participating under a false pretense, with adults the primary beneficiaries of their travails. In the transition away from enjoyment, health, and wellness towards profit and status, it’s clear that the arenas of elite minor hockey benefit those outside the glass – coaches, agents, scouts, parents, and media – far more than the children participating on the ice.
Feel free to share my blog or to sign up to receive it directly in your email. See the sign-up at the bottom of the blog below the video.
Quote of the Day: “We got our MOJO back.” MSU coach Tom Izzo following his teams win today in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
Orchid of the Day: Michigan State Spartans for their win today in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
Onion of the Day: Number 1 seed Purdue for losing the number 16 seed Farleigh Dickinson University. It is only the second time in the history of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament that a number 16 seed has beaten an number 1 seed.
Question of the Day: Will any B1G men’s basketball teams advance to the Sweet 16
Video of the Day: Tom Izzo breaking the clip board today during a timeout.