Taking Back the Game
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Episode Summary
Linda Flanagan returns to Be Valiant — the first guest to come back twice — for a wide-ranging conversation with Todd Merkow about what is still working in youth sports, what is broken, and why parents need to understand the business hierarchy they are navigating before they can protect what matters most. Linda is a former athlete, youth and high school coach, sports parent, journalist, and author of Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports and Why It Matters. This episode picks up where Episode 8 left off and goes further.
Todd opens by flipping the script. Instead of closing with the usual reminder — that parents are allowed to make bold, informed decisions for their child — he opens with it. On purpose. Because this conversation is about why that permission matters in the first place. Both Todd and Linda are former sports parents who have lived youth sports from the inside, emotionally, financially, personally, and both have tried to turn those lived experiences into impact. Linda through journalism and research. Todd through unpacking what his own kids experienced and what he has seen in families around him. The goal is not negativity. The goal is clarity.
The episode starts in a place that is easy to overlook: what is still working. Linda names school sports as a bright light — particularly high school sports, where the fun tends to live, where it is community-based, where even athletes who go on to play in college look back and say the high school experience was the most meaningful. She points to Tuscarora High School in Virginia as a model, where the athletic director has built unified programs, adapted programs, intramurals, and club options with a deliberate philosophy: get more kids playing, not just more kids winning. She names the Cambridge Soccer Club in Massachusetts — a nonprofit run by Jason Targoff, serving 2,000 kids in a city of 100,000, all local, no travel, trained coaches, affordable — as the best version of what youth sports can be. She mentions a pickup sports app created by Lakshmi Jayanti that allows kids to connect locally and just go play at the park, without organized structure, as an encouraging sign that free play is not entirely dead.
The research is clear: the more parents spend, the less kids enjoy it, the more pressure they feel. That is the crux of the tension — and introducing more money seems unlikely to lower the stakes.
The conversation turns to the numbers. Boys' sports participation has dropped from roughly 50% to 42% over the ten years from 2013 to 2023 — not kids quitting, Linda clarifies, but kids not joining in the first place. And then the number that defines the crisis: 70% of kids quit sports by age 13. They are getting in at six or seven and leaving in large numbers by the time they hit middle school. The reason they give, consistently, is that it stopped being fun. Linda is direct: if 70% of kids are quitting by 13, something is not right. And introducing more money into the system is unlikely to fix it. The more parents spend, research from Travis Dorsch at Utah State's Families in Sport Lab shows, the less kids enjoy it and the more pressure they feel. That is the crux of the tension.
The early specialization section is one of the most nuanced in the episode. Linda acknowledges something she has had to modify her own advice about: in a perfect world, where peers were not a factor and you were looking purely at athlete development, specialization at 17 or later is better. The top soccer players in Germany, for example, often did not specialize until 21. But the world is not perfect. If all the kids your child will compete against for a high school roster spot have been playing club since fourth grade, your multi-sport child may not make the team as a freshman — even if they are athletic. Linda has heard those stories. Todd has lived one: his youngest daughter tried club softball in middle school, faced pitchers who had been spinning the ball for years, couldn't touch it with a bat, and never went back. The point is not that early specialization is good. The point is that the baseline has shifted so far that parents who want their child to play high school sports — not college, just high school — are being forced into decisions that were never supposed to be necessary at that age.
The business hierarchy section is the centerpiece of the episode. Todd lays it out in six levels. Level one: the kids — the product. Level two: the parents — the customer. Level three: coaches and trainers — the operators. Level four: clubs, leagues, and facilities — the businesses, with fixed costs that require constant acquisition and retention. Level five: tournaments, showcases, media, and streaming — the amplifiers, where performance becomes content, kids are evaluated and displayed, and comparison goes through the roof. Level six: investors and private equity — the accelerators, who do not create the pressure but multiply whatever is already there. The youth sports market is $40 billion today and projected to exceed $50 billion by 2030. Linda's response is direct: people are trying to sell you something. That is not inherently evil — she is a capitalist, she says, and so is Todd — but parents need to be dispassionate enough to recognize it. She cites a former Disney Wide World of Sports executive who was completely transparent at a conference: they needed heads and beds, they were losing teenage revenue, and sports was the strategy. She cites a New York Life Wealth Watch survey in which 82% of parents reported believing their child was good enough to play college sports, and 75% believed their child was good enough to play professionally. That is what blinders look like. Parents are an easy target, Linda says, because they love their kids and they have enormous hopes for them, and that emotion is exactly what the business model is designed to provoke and sustain.
You have to recognize that people are trying to sell you something. Despite the positive talk, there is a profit motive driving a lot of what's happening in youth sports. Parents are a kind of easy target, because we love our kids and we have so many hopes for them.
The episode closes on NIL. Linda's biggest worry looking forward is how name, image, and likeness payments will trickle down into high school sports. Right now about 1% of high school athletes have any NIL deals. About 20% of D1 athletes do. But it all trickles down. The concern is not just money — it is what NIL does to the culture of high school sports, to recruiting at the private school level, to the relationship between coaches and athletes, to the idea that high school sports are supposed to be about community. Todd agrees and goes further: he does not want government involved at the collegiate level, but at the high school level, local government officials need to step in and define what is and is not allowed. The school associations are not going to do it. Someone has to.
Taking back the game starts when parents return sports to their kids.
Rapid fire: one word for youth sports when it's working — transcendent. One thing kids get from sports that adults underestimate — friendship (and snacks). One adult behavior that does the most damage — criticizing. One red flag parents ignore too long — the screaming coach. One age range where the most damage happens — pre-adolescent, 12 to 13, girls especially. One question every parent should ask earlier — are you having fun? One thing Linda wishes someone had told her as a sports parent — it really doesn't matter. And the closing question: finish this sentence — taking back the game starts when parents... return sports to their kids.
Top 5 Takeaways
School sports are still a bright light — protect them. Linda names high school sports as the place where the fun tends to live. Even athletes who go on to play in college look back and say the high school experience was the most meaningful — because it was community-based, because it was with their families, because it was about something larger than a recruiting profile. The private club and travel team ecosystem has crowded out a lot of what made youth sports worth having in the first place. School sports, rec programs, and town leagues are where the community still lives. They are worth protecting, worth funding, and worth choosing — even when the private option seems shinier.
70% of kids quit by 13. That number is not an abstraction. It is a verdict. Kids are entering sports at six or seven, and by the time they hit middle school, nearly three out of four have walked away. The reason they give, consistently, is that it stopped being fun. If you are a parent in the early years of this journey, that number is the most important thing you can know. The decisions you make in those first few years — about pressure, about performance, about how you talk in the car on the way home — are the decisions that determine whether your child is still playing at 13. Not whether they make the travel team. Whether they are still playing at all.
Understand the business hierarchy before you navigate it. Todd's six-level framework is worth sitting with. Your child is the product. You are the customer. The coaches and trainers are the operators. The clubs, leagues, and facilities are the businesses with fixed costs that require constant acquisition and retention. The tournaments, showcases, and streaming platforms are the amplifiers that turn performance into content and comparison into a constant. And the investors and private equity firms are the accelerators who multiply whatever pressure already exists. None of this is inherently evil. But if you do not understand the structure you are inside of, you will make decisions based on emotion — and the system is specifically designed to provoke that emotion. Information is the only protection.
The more you spend, the less your child enjoys it. This is not a hunch. It is research from Travis Dorsch at Utah State's Families in Sport Lab. The more parents invest financially in their child's sports participation, the more pressure the child feels and the less they enjoy the experience. That finding is in direct conflict with a youth sports market that is $40 billion today and growing toward $50 billion by 2030. The system is designed to get you to spend more. The research says spending more makes it worse for your kid. Hold that tension consciously every time you are asked to add another camp, another showcase, another private trainer.
Early specialization is a trap — but the baseline has shifted. In a perfect world, athletes would play multiple sports through high school and specialize in their late teens or early twenties. The research on athlete development supports that. But the world is not perfect. If every other child competing for a high school roster spot has been playing club since fourth grade, a multi-sport child may not make the team as a freshman — even if they are athletic. Linda has had to modify her own advice on this. The point is not that early specialization is good. The point is that the baseline has shifted so far that parents who want their child to play high school sports — not college, just high school — are being forced into decisions that were never supposed to be necessary at that age. Know what you are choosing and why.
The screaming coach is a red flag. Do not ignore it. Linda's answer to the one red flag parents ignore too long is immediate and unambiguous: the screaming, critical coach. Get off that team as fast as you can. A coach who yells at children is not teaching toughness. They are teaching children that authority figures are to be feared, that mistakes are shameful, and that the way to motivate people is through humiliation. Those lessons do not stay on the field. They follow your child into every classroom, every workplace, every relationship where someone has power over them. The screaming coach is not a personality quirk. It is a disqualifying characteristic.
Return sports to your kids. Linda's answer to the closing question — taking back the game starts when parents what — is three words: return sports to their kids. Not reclaim them for parents. Not reform the system. Return them to the kids. The fun, the friendships, the freedom to struggle and fail and try again without an adult's anxiety layered on top of it. That is what was taken. That is what needs to come back. And it starts with parents making a conscious decision to step back, ask their child if they are having fun, and trust the answer.
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