Why youth sports is such a potent political target

Washington Post

2 days ago

A friend of mine has a daughter in high school and one in middle school, both much older than my own kids. So I was taken aback when he explained how competitive school sports had become. Students didn't have much choice but to join external programs and get additional coaching, he said, to be able to play on their high school teams. And this is in Silicon Valley, not exactly a place generally known for its focus on athletics.
What Silicon Valley does have, of course, is a lot of money — and that makes a difference. Ohio State University researchers this year reported finding that success in ascending the competitive ladder of youth athletics is correlated with nonathletic factors.
'Success depends a lot on the advantages young people have when they grow up,' sociology professor Chris Knoester explained when the research came out. Wealthier parents, he added, 'can find the best coaches, help choose the sports that offer the best opportunities for their children, they can figure out the hidden rules and strategies that aren't available to everyone.' This raises the floor for everyone else even as the number of slots remains constant.
Over time, Knoester explained in an email to me, the rate of participation in youth sports has increased, mostly thanks to increased participation from young women and girls. Here, too, nonathletic factors play a role. White, wealthy girls are more likely to progress through the ranks of youth sports, often driven by what a 2024 study from the Ohio State team tactfully referred to as 'intensive parenting.'
This mix of cost, personal investment and escalating competitiveness is anecdotally obvious. Parents of my kids' elementary-school-aged peers have elected to have their kids start kindergarten later so that they'd consistently be older then their classmates until high school — and therefore bigger and more athletically adept. Surgeries once reserved for elite athletes are now performed on high school kids.
The trend is also backed by data. The Aspen Institute's Project Play has surveyed parents and found that the cost of paying for their kids' primary sport has risen faster than the rate of inflation since 2019. Add in additional sports and parents reported paying an average of about $1,000 last year. That's just the average; some parents reported paying more than $20,000 for both primary and other sports.
The group's 2023 report found that 'half of survey respondents who played youth sports or who have children who have played said they have struggled to afford the costs to participate.'
Project Play data released last week illustrated what parents hope to get out of their investments. High school sports can facilitate college admissions (as several well-known Southern California parents can attest) or — as about a fifth of parents foresaw in the new survey — lead to college athletic careers. One in 9 parents is more ambitious, anticipating that their young athletes might end up playing professionally or in the Olympics.
Needless to say, 1 in 9 young athletes does not end up playing professionally. If you make your high school girls' basketball team, for example, you have about a 1 in 71 chance of playing Division I college basketball.
There are of course plenty of reasons for parents to encourage participation in sports besides dreams of World Series home runs or gold medals. There are myriad positive effects from participation in youth sports, including increases to self-confidence and the life lessons that accompany winning and losing.
But let's step back now and consider all of this in the context of politics. We have a group of parents who've often invested heavily in their kids' athletic success and who often have outsize expectations for where that success might lead. Other parents simply want their kids to experience fair competition. And here comes Donald Trump Jr. — one of the earliest and loudest voices on the issue — warning that trans students were coming to relegate their daughters to second-place finishes.
It's important to recognize that this concern is both exaggerated and selective.
The most famous voice against having trans athletes participate in girls' or women's sports is Riley Gaines, who has built a career in conservative punditry on having competed against trans swimmer Lia Thomas in 2022. What's often left unmentioned is that Gaines and Tomas tied — for fifth. Even in the track meet in California last weekend that earned a social-media mention from President Donald Trump, trans athlete AB Hernandez won the triple jump — but tied for first in the high jump and came in second in the long jump. Trans athletes are not necessarily going to dominate simply because they are trans.
More important, there have been scores of other sporting contests this year in which no trans athletes participated. The NCAA estimated last year that there were no more than a dozen trans athletes playing college sports, out of half a million in total. Instead, hundreds of thousands of youth athletes lost to competitors who were faster or stronger by virtue of their own biological advantages — or because their parents could afford better coaches.
Analysis of (preliminary) 2024 American National Election Studies data suggests that parents of kids who still live at home are more supportive of the idea that there should be a ban on transgender girls participating in K-12 sports.
There are other splits, too: Republicans are far more supportive of the idea than Democrats and older people without kids are more supportive than younger ones. But the divide among Democrats is a central reason that the issue has been a centerpiece of federal (and even lower-level) elections. In addition to playing to transphobia, the issue stokes concern among parents about the youth-sports playing field being tilted away from their kids.
What's elided in this debate is that youth sports is inherently unfair anyway. Some kids are bigger or faster or stronger or have better reaction times. Some kids have parents who can afford coaches or afford to move to districts where their kids can get more playing time. Some kids are handed the best shoes or swimsuits or balls or bats. The unfairness is, in many ways, inextricable. But only one perceived unfairness — no matter how uncommon or exaggerated it is — is seen as a way to get more votes.
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