At the end of every i9 Sports game, parents line up on both sides of the field and form a tunnel. Every kid runs through it, the most talented and the least, the one who scored three times and the one who spent most of practice looking at the sky. The parents cheer for all of them. It is a small thing. It is also, I think, a picture of what youth sports is supposed to be doing.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what keeps kids in sports and what loses them. The data is not encouraging. Nearly 70% of American kids quit organized sports by age 13, and the most common reason they give is that it stopped being fun. The industry has worked hard on the right problems: cost, early specialization, coaching quality, the pressure parents bring to the sidelines. All of it matters, but it’s not the whole story.

Youth sports has a new competitor, and it is not another league, another sport or a scheduling conflict. It is devices engineered to be more immediately rewarding than almost anything a child might do instead. Kids aren’t lazy, and parents aren’t failing to try; the companies behind these screens........

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