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When Aly was a little kid, “sports” consisted of playing on a playground or maybe standing in a hockey goal in the driveway while her big brother shot pucks at her face.

The latter might have served as “organic training,” she told me. Aly became a multi-sport athlete — running, swimming, and, ultimately, playing Division I college lacrosse in the early 2000s. But her early sports experience “was all play-based,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t always fun (I, for one, would prefer hockey pucks stay out of my face), but it definitely wasn’t serious.

Today, Aly, who asked that I use only her first name to protect her family’s privacy, has three kids who are starting to play sports themselves. What they’re experiencing is a world away from the casual driveway games of her youth, she told me.

Over the last few decades, youth sports in America have become big business. Free park- and community-based teams have increasingly been replaced by private pay-to-play options, which can be expensive. A survey by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative found that the average family spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46 percent since 2019. Some families spent nearly $25,000.

The stakes have changed, too, with more families viewing sports as a child’s ticket to college and a comfortable life, rather than just a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. And as pay-to-play programs crowd out other options, families can find themselves priced out — or sucked in — even if they’d prefer a more relaxed approach.

The result is bad for kids, both those excluded by the expense of the pay-to-play system and those whose families succumb to its pressures, putting them at risk of depression, anxiety, and overuse injuries. It’s bad for parents, whose lives increasingly revolve around shuttling kids to sporting events. And it’s bad for all of us if youth sports becomes a culture-war obsession and a decidedly imperfect substitute for a working safety net.

“Sports are not that important,” said Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports—and Why It Matters. “The idea that athletics should be the organizing principle of family life is........

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