This is a reference page. Each section covers one stakeholder group in a few sentences, and every number links to its source. Five of the problems get their own deeper page, linked from the matching section. Where we give our own view instead of a sourced fact, we say so.
- Parents
- Leagues & youth organizations
- High school athletics
- Coaches
- Cities, local government & parks and rec
- Referees & officials
- Venues & facilities
- Tournaments & the travel-ball circuit
- Cross-cutting systemic issues
- The athletes themselves
- Travel and club team organizations as businesses
- Brands & sponsors
- Healthcare & sports medicine providers
- Equity & access subgroups
- State & national governing bodies
- Recruiting & exposure services
Parents
Families carry most of the cost and most of the guesswork. The Aspen Institute's parent survey puts average spending on a child's primary sport at $1,016, up 46% since 2019 (source). Finding what's available locally means piecing together fragmented, low-quality websites (or none at all), and comparing cost, competitiveness, or coach quality before committing is close to impossible.
Read: The Discovery and Data Gap →Leagues & youth organizations
Many leagues know they need sponsors to cover field rental, insurance, and equipment, but have no one with the sales skill or bandwidth to pitch and structure deals. Volunteer boards are good at running a league and rarely have a sales function. NRPA also lists difficulty recruiting enough volunteer coaches among the long-term challenges agencies report (NRPA, 2020).
Read: The Sponsorship Sales Gap →High school athletics
Demand is not the problem: NFHS counted a record 8,266,244 participants in 2024-25. Capacity is. NFHS estimates at least 50,000 officials left in 2020-21, which led to hundreds of contests being postponed, rescheduled, or canceled (NFHS), and a 2015-2018 census found that 34% of 20,272 secondary schools had no access to an athletic trainer.
Read: The Referee Shortage →Coaches
Youth sports relies on volunteer coaches, and 81% of coaches said their community needs more coaches. Training is thin: SFIA data shows that fewer than one-third of youth coaches in 2022 had been trained in the previous year in areas such as concussion management, general safety, and motivational techniques. Parents in Aspen's 2019 survey also named coaches as the biggest source of pressure on their children.
Cities, local government & parks and rec
Public agencies are a major youth sports provider and a squeezed one. 92% of agencies charge registration fees, 65% offer reduced fees for lower-income residents, and agencies list insufficient sports fields and courts, difficulty recruiting volunteer coaches, and competition with better-funded private organizations as challenges. City rec leagues also get coded as “the non-competitive option,” which suppresses sign-ups even when the program would be a good fit for most families.
Read: The City Rec-League Perception Problem →Referees & officials
Officials are aging (average 56.68 years in NASO's 2023 survey, up from 53.29 in 2017), overbooked (79.06% took on more assignments because of the shortage), and exposed to abuse: more than half have feared for their safety and nearly 12% have been physically assaulted. Registrations have recovered in many states, but the conditions that drive officials out have not changed.
Read: The Referee Shortage →Venues & facilities
NRPA's agencies list insufficient sports fields and courts among their long-term challenges. Aspen's Washington, D.C. report found too few quality fields and gyms to meet demand, with providers frustrated by permitting and maintenance (one provider reported spending $22,000 a year on four football games at high school fields). Clubs that lease facilities they don't own carry that pressure straight into their budgets.
Read: Enrollment and Reputation Risk →Tournaments & the travel-ball circuit
The circuit is expensive and it sorts kids early. Aspen's State of Play 2025 names expensive club programs among the pressures on youth sports. A researcher with Utah State University's Families in Sport Lab, which ran Aspen's parent survey, has called it “a serious problem if at 8, 9, or 10 years old, kids are deciding or being told ‘this sport isn't for you’” (Project Play, 2019).
Cross-cutting systemic issues
Costs are up 46% since 2019, while 58% of U.S. youth play sports against a federal Healthy People 2030 target of 63%; only 15 states (including D.C.) have hit it. The system is also fragmented: US Youth Soccer alone reports more than 10,000 clubs and leagues, and no shared standard exists for listing, pricing, or screening programs. Much of it runs on volunteers.
The athletes themselves
The average child quits a sport by age 11, most often because it stopped being fun (36% of the time, per parents). Cost pushes some out first: youth from low-income homes quit because of cost at six times the rate of high-income youth. Pressure matters too, and parents named coaches as its biggest source.
Travel and club team organizations as businesses
Thin margins, heavy reliance on facility leases they don't own, and real exposure to one bad season of enrollment. One bad coach or one parent dispute can sink enrollment fast in a tight-knit community, and clubs compete with every other club in the region for the same limited pool of “elite” 10-year-olds. Many have no one dedicated to marketing, enrollment, or retention.
Read: Enrollment and Reputation Risk →Brands & sponsors
The demand side is there: in a 2025 Priority Partnerships / YouGov Sport survey of youth sports parents, 84% held a positive view of youth sports sponsorship and 3% a negative one (self-reported). The supply side is hard to buy. There's no good way for a brand to find and compare programs in an area, and sponsorship is often pitched ad hoc, if at all.
Read: The Discovery and Data Gap →Healthcare & sports medicine providers
A 2015-2018 census of 20,272 U.S. secondary schools found that 66% had access to athletic trainer services and 34% had none. Only 37% of public schools had full-time services (defined as at least 30 hours a week), and 45% of private schools had none. The data is several years old, and we could not find a more recent national census.
Equity & access subgroups
Income is the clearest divide. Average yearly spending per child was $476 in low-income households and $1,099 in high-income households (Project Play's 2019 survey of 1,032 parents; low income means under $50,000). Aspen's 2025 parent survey found children in the wealthiest households play their primary sport more often than their peers across community, school, travel, and independent settings (State of Play 2025), and its Washington, D.C. report found that Black children and girls are underrepresented, and that youth in the highest-poverty wards have less access.
State & national governing bodies
No single body governs youth sports, and each has its own reach and its own rules. US Youth Soccer alone spans 54 member state associations and more than 10,000 clubs and leagues. Even basic data is uneven: NFHS's eight-year officials data comes from the 37 states that reported, not all 50.
Recruiting & exposure services
Exposure services sell families a path to college sports, and the NCAA's own numbers show how narrow it is: of more than eight million high school athletes, about 550,000 compete at NCAA schools. By sport, the high-school-to-NCAA rate is, for example, 3.6% in men's basketball, 4.0% in women's volleyball, and 8.8% in baseball, and the NCAA notes the figures leave out athletes who play only on club teams, so the true rate may be lower in some sports.
About this page
Zubie Five is a sponsorship brokerage in Tempe, Arizona, run by Adam Zubiate, who has about a decade in sports corporate partnerships, including work connected to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Arizona Hotshots, and the LA Clippers G League Team. We have a stake in some of these problems: we sell sponsorship brokerage, rec-league rebrand consulting, and club enrollment marketing. Where a page points to one of those services, it says so.
More notes on sponsorship, fundraising, and community partnerships are collected in Insights.
Sources
- NFHS, “Participation in High School Sports Hits Record High with Sizable Increase in 2024-25” (Sept. 9, 2025)
- NFHS, “High School Officiating Continues to Rebound, but the Work Is Not Done” (July 29, 2026)
- NFHS, “NASO Survey Indicates Concerns with Sportsmanship, Shortage of Officials” (reporting NASO’s 2023 national officiating survey, 35,813 respondents)
- Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play 2025
- Project Play, “Survey: Kids quit most sports by age 11” (Aug. 1, 2019; 1,032 parents)
- Project Play, “Survey: Low-income kids are 6 times more likely to quit sports due to costs” (Jan. 14, 2020)
- Project Play, State of Play 2022: Coaching Trends
- Project Play, State of Play 2023: Coaching Trends (citing SFIA data for 2022)
- Project Play, “Too few quality fields and gyms are available to meet demand” (Mar. 12, 2025; from the State of Play Washington, D.C. report)
- Aspen Institute Project Play, State of Play Washington, D.C. (March 2025)
- NCAA, “Probability of Competing Beyond High School” (2024-25 data)
- NRPA, “Parks and Recreation Is an Essential Youth Sports Provider: Study” (Nov. 12, 2020)
- Huggins et al., “Athletic Trainer Services in the Secondary School Setting: The Athletic Training Locations and Services Project,” Journal of Athletic Training 54(11), 2019 (data collected 2015–2018)
- US Youth Soccer, About
- Zubie Five, Sources & Methodology (Aspen Institute Project Play parent survey; Priority Partnerships / YouGov Sport, 2026)
Last reviewed October 2026. Where a figure comes from a survey, the sample and year are noted in the text or the citation. Statements marked “our read” are Zubie Five’s own view, not a sourced finding.