In the last decade, the cost of youth sports has skyrocketed. Cheaper, more local rec leagues have lost out premium travel leagues funded by private equity. The Covid-19 pandemic made things worse. As a result, some families are now paying thousands of dollars to keep their kid in a sport that they love.

Caitlin Moscatello wrote about the phenomenon last month for New York magazine. She says the shift started during the pandemic when park and rec budgets were slashed and the premium leagues became the only game in town. Private money saw the opportunity and seized it. Now, participating in youth sports means you’re caught in a pay-to-play model. 

In return, elementary-aged children are being railroaded into a professionalized environment before they’re ready. More children are suffering from overuse injuries and are getting locked into a sport before they even have time to decide if they love it. 

Moscatello joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what happened to youth sports, the impact on children, and whether it’s possible to reverse this trend. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Private money in youth sports doesn’t seem to make a ton of sense. Who’s going to make money off of an 8-year-old playing soccer? And yet what you found is there’s a lot going on here. Give me a broad sense of what’s been happening.

It was a little over a decade ago that you really started to see this influx of big money coming into the youth sports sector. And what you see right before and then certainly after Covid is investors using what’s called a roll-up strategy — where they own, or have a financial stake in, different touch points that families would have in the sport that their child’s playing.

For instance, they might have a stake in the league itself, but also the apparel company where families are required to buy the uniforms, and the software or the app that families need to go on to look at the team’s schedule, and in some cases look at updated stats and standings. There can be a hotel partner, so even though there’s a less expensive hotel down the street, they’re required to stay at this specific hotel. 

There’s also money to be made on what’s being called the media side of all this. Parents described to me not being able to record video at their child’s game, but then being sold a package of photos and videos, which, again, is just another financial touchpoint.

How much are parents spending on sports?

But ultimately, in their quest to do something good for their kids, the way that the sports ecosystem has changed and is continuing to change can potentially set them up for long-term harm.

The average spend is a little over $1,000 a year, but many of the families that I spoke with, especially in this travel private club sector, can spend anywhere from $3,000 a season. It can be $5,000 or $10,000 a season depending on the sport, where you are, the level of play. I spoke with numerous families who were spending $25,000 a year. 

There was one mother that I spoke with. She’s a single mom. She was pet-sitting on the side in addition to her full-time job to help offset the cost of her son’s $25,000-a-year hockey program. I also came across a lot of GoFundMes for families who are trying to get their 6-year-old or their 7-year-old or their 8-year-old who made the travel fill-in-the-blank soccer, baseball team. And they’re fundraising to try to make that happen.

And for your $25,000 or more a year, what are you getting?

It’s a loaded question. Part of what’s drawing families to this in some areas is that they really feel like they have no other choice. Rec programs are sparse. They also don’t extend as long as they used to. 

I’m an elder millennial, I guess I would say, and back in the ’90s, it was still very much that you could play a rec sport through eighth grade and then if you chose to, go on and play in high school. What’s happening is that rec programs now are ending much earlier. In some places it can be difficult to find a rec program after maybe third or fourth grade. And these programs are also getting diluted because the private leagues are incentivized to attract families earlier and earlier.

Now you start to see travel teams and even tryouts for kindergartners, first-graders, second-graders. And what I was hearing from parents over and over again was that there was this fear of missing out: “This isn’t something I would necessarily choose for my kid, but if we don’t get in on the ground floor, the elevator’s going to go up without us and we’re never going to catch up and my kid won’t be able to play and everyone around me seems to be doing this now, so we’re going to do it too.”

What this does to the rec programs is that it dilutes them really early in a couple of ways. One, it just brings the level of play down when kids start leaving in the first and second grade, by third grade. Also, there just aren’t as many kids.   

And then the other factor is that kids and parents both notice that these other leagues exist. And so another thing that I kept hearing was, “Well, the rec programs sort of felt second-rate and we’re looking across the field.” There was this one father, he’s a lacrosse coach and he has two children who now play travel lacrosse. And he’s like, “It’s kind of hard when you look across the field and you see the kids with their shiny helmets and their fancy uniforms and their professional coach.”

What did you find all of this money in youth sports is doing to the youths playing the sports?

The benefits of sports have been really well established. Kids who play sports have everything from higher levels of academic achievement to higher self-esteem, better long-term health outcomes. 

But ultimately, in their quest to do something good for their kids, the way that the sports ecosystem has changed and is continuing to change can potentially set them up for long-term harm. It can be psychological. So they’re seeing stress and anxiety, burnout, but also physical [harm]. 

There’s a surge of overuse injuries now in young athletes, especially because the private programs are incentivized again to get kids playing as much as possible. And so what’s happening now is that you have young children playing in this hyper-competitive year-round environment. 

Medical advice has said that kids should play all different sports, use different muscles, learn different skills. And that’s what’s appropriate for young developing bodies, not playing one sport 10 to 12 months a year, tournaments on the weekends, six games, practices three or four times a week where then you see these overuse injuries, because kids are just doing that same motion over and over again. 

Is there any movement among parents to stop this, to say, “This has gone too far, let’s not do it anymore.”

This is a collective action problem. If more parents stayed in the rec programs, then we would have a more robust rec system: more kids play, it’s more accessible, it’s more affordable. It’s also local and fun.

I don’t want to be so naive and think, “Oh, things could go back to the way they were in the ’90s.” I think you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube entirely. But the good news is that we do have a model for a pathway forward.

Minnesota Ice Hockey is a nonprofit youth sports program, the core of which is 250 public rinks. The cost to play is about $200 to $400. Coaches are volunteers, but they are trained through USA Hockey. And these kids play more in that rec model where they play with other kids from their community. 

This is showing real results. You look at this program and there’s 60,000 kids who play Minnesota ice hockey and Minnesota produces more D1 men’s and women’s ice hockey players than any other state in the country.

And really what this comes down to is it’s accessible to everyone. And so it’s more of a meritocracy, right? Everyone gets to play, and everyone gets to have fun. And then the kids who really do eventually show a high level of ability, they still get to play at that really competitive level because it’s not diluted. That has shown that it can produce really amazing hockey players while giving all these kids a good experience.

Republicans have been turning transgender athletes into a wedge issue since Idaho passed the first state ban in 2020. This year, it’s already playing a major role in midterm ads, with Democrats in competitive races almost always on the defensive. At this point, the fight doesn’t even need a trans athlete: The WNBA spent the summer at the center of a culture war over a hypothetical conflict, after two ex-NBA players declared themselves eligible for the women’s draft as a stunt. There have been no known trans women on any team, and the league confirmed it had “no immediate eligibility matters” on its hands. 

It became such a political priority in part because it polls well: Surveys show most Americans, including many otherwise Democratic-leaning voters, favor barring trans women from sports leagues. This November, though, marks the first time voters will confront the issue directly at the ballot box themselves.

Most notably, in Washington state, the public will decide whether to go further than any red-state legislature has even managed. A ballot initiative, I-638, would require every girl who wants to play school sports to first prove their sex assigned at birth, via an inspection of their reproductive anatomy or a test of their sex chromosomes or hormone levels. Competing campaigns in the state are mobilizing voters for and against the measure, which will deliver the clearest test yet of how liberal and moderate voters feel about this issue.

Twenty-seven other states have already imposed measures to restrict trans athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports in recent years, and the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer that such bans are constitutional. Yet nearly all of those bans passed through Republican-controlled legislatures, mostly in states Donald Trump won three times, and none went directly before voters. That changes this fall, not only in Washington but also with Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska voters weighing in.

The blue-state ballot battle comes at a time when the Democratic Party is still struggling to figure out how it wants to talk about transgender athletes. Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on the specific questions that have dominated the political debate — namely whether trans women and girls should play on sports teams matching their gender identity, and whether minors should have access to gender-related medical treatment — most Democrats have been reluctant to adopt clear positions, while some swing-state candidates have actively distanced themselves from the party.

But the Washington state referendum is forcing its opponents, and allied Democratic politicians, to tackle the issue head-on. And they think they may have found a way to win — by convincing even voters who agree with the ban’s goals that enforcing it will create more problems than it solves. 

What’s different about the Washington sports ban

The measure in Washington state is more far-reaching than other state bans in one key way, as it would require verification from every student seeking to join a girls’ sports team, not just those whose eligibility has been challenged. According to the text for I-638, athletes would need to document their sex assigned at birth based “only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

Opponents, organizing under the banner of No Hate in WA State, are seeking to defeat the measure by framing it as the most extreme proposal of its kind. On paper, they face an uphill battle: 73 percent of Americans told Pew last year they were uncomfortable with transgender athletes playing on teams that don’t match their assigned birth sex. Opponents are also being massively outspent by Let’s Go Washington, the PAC campaigning for the measure, which is bankrolled by the conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood.

But No Hate in WA State hopes the ballot text will help them show that the proposed ban on transgender athletes would be a nightmare to implement. Even if Let’s Go Washington didn’t intend the outcome, they argue, no defensible reading of I-638 could avoid the conclusion that thousands of children will face either invasive new genital exams or the loss of a spot on a girls’ team altogether because their families can’t afford the genetic or testosterone testing the initiative offers as alternatives.

“Brian Heywood’s Initiative Wants To Inspect Your Daughter’s Body” reads a typical post from the No Hate in WA State campaign account, warning the initiative would yield “medically unnecessary” and “potentially traumatizing” genital or pelvic exams.

Let’s Go Washington disputes this, saying documentation of a genital exam from any routine past checkup, including the physical performed at birth, would suffice. But more than 150,000 school-age girls in Washington lack a regular family doctor with the medical records the campaign says would already be on file, and many schools conduct sports physicals publicly in group settings, where examining a student’s reproductive anatomy would be unthinkable.

Let’s Go Washington could not connect me with an attorney willing to defend its interpretation of the legislative text on the record, though campaign spokespeople Darren Littell and Hallie Herzberg said they consulted lawyers while crafting the ballot language. “I agree with you that it should have been explicit to say, ‘Here’s all the ways in the universe that you could verify a child’s sex’ and we didn’t do that, and that’s where we are now,” Herzberg told me.

Critics of the initiative warn the campaign will stir up more anti-trans sentiment and put vulnerable students in danger. The lead supporters say I-638 is necessary to protect the “integrity and fairness” of girls’ sports, and has nothing to do with targeting trans children. “This is not being motivated because we don’t like trans kids,” Littell said. “I’ve got family members who are trans, and I still love them and care about them.”

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association is aware of about 10 transgender middle and high schoolers who play sports, out of more than 200,000 student-athletes statewide. Since 2007, the organization has allowed trans students to play on teams that align with their gender identity, with their handbook stating once a student-athlete is granted eligibility, they do not need to seek to renew eligibility every season or school year. 

“School sports is a place where kids can belong, a place of inclusion, where they can learn to work as a team and learn dedication,” Kelsey Gellner, a pediatric nurse based in Seattle, told me. “Tens of thousands of girls will be impacted by this to purposely exclude 10 children. That’s insane.”

Some opponents doubt the measure is really about protecting competition in female sports at all. Earlier this summer, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration, released a report attacking Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in federally funded schools and programs. The report argues for “unwinding our current regime” and blames the law for imposing a male model of competition on women, encouraging girls toward dominance and aggression, and pulling them away from femininity and motherhood.

“Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point,” Megan Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist, wrote in a recent op-ed lambasting the ballot measure in Washington. “Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict — and then eliminate.” 

Bringing adult restrictions down to children

The initiative’s proponents point to alternative means of verifying sex at birth, rather than genital exams. But hormone and genetic testing, the less invasive alternatives on offer, are very unusual for minors, and typically have only been required for certain elite adult athletes. 

Earlier this summer, for example, the Women’s Tennis Association announced it would require all players to undergo genetic sex testing in order to compete on the WTA Tour, a move that came on the heels of World Athletics requiring the same for participation in the female category for world ranking competitions. The goal would be to provide blood, saliva, or a cheek swab to test for any presence of the gene associated with the Y chromosome.

These tests are expensive, though, and require specialized training that public school staff virtually never have. 

“The language in the [Washington state] measure is quite alarming because it quite literally would codify sex testing for youth athletes into law,” Anna Posbergh, a professor at the University of Illinois Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism, told The Cut.

I-638 doesn’t specify how these tests would work in practice or who would pay for them. The ballot measure is also silent on intersex students, whose anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones may not point to the same answer. Littell says they would leave these questions “up to the doctors and patients, and at the end of the day this is common sense.” 

I asked the Washington State Medical Association what share of primary care and family medicine practices in the state could even run genetic or hormone testing in-house, and what referrals would look like for a rural practice.

“We don’t have that level of data, unfortunately,” Graham Short, a spokesperson for WSMA, told me. He added that his association does not yet have a formal position on the ballot measure, though their policymaking delegation convenes in September and may formulate a stance then. 

The Washington State Nurses Association has come out against the proposal. Gellner, who sits on its board, said it’s been disturbing to watch the idea of sports physicals shift from checking whether a student is healthy to play — i.e., checking their muscles, joints, blood pressure, and signs of asthma — to determining “whether the child themselves is a risk.”

The state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has not taken a formal position, asked Let’s Go Washington to stop invoking the national group in the state’s official voter pamphlet, where the campaign cites AAP guidelines on routine childhood checkups. (The campaign refused.) Dr. Erica Li, a Spokane-based pediatrician who has been Let’s Go Washington’s most vocal physician in support of the measure, insisted to me that the process outlined in I-638 just “does not pose any barriers to any female” looking to participate in school sports.

Yet other states have backed away from language like this. A 2021 Florida law signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis originally had language saying that students would have to undergo a genital exam or get hormone or genetic testing if there were ever disputes over a student’s eligibility. That language sparked major controversy and was ultimately stripped from the final bill. House Republicans in Ohio also passed a bill in 2022 that would have required any student athlete whose sex was disputed to prove their sex assigned at birth through those same three options. After backlash, lawmakers removed the language from the Senate version, and put in a birth certificate requirement instead. 

A time of Democratic hesitance

Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on sports specifically, the party has struggled to find agreement.

The Biden administration proposed a Title IX rule in 2023 that would have rejected blanket bans but allowed schools to restrict trans athletes’ participation in some cases, but the president never spoke about this nuanced rule publicly. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign didn’t raise trans rights either, even as Republicans made them a centerpiece of their attacks against her. 

Democratic strategists have urged candidates to address transgender-related attacks more directly this time, but that hasn’t translated to a policy consensus. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger spent millions on ads acknowledging concerns about fairness and safety in school sports, for example, although even Spanberger’s actual position on the subject remains vague. 

Nationally, as the New York Times recently reported, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts appears to be the only high-profile Democrat “eagerly campaigning as a supporter of transgender rights” this cycle.

In Washington state, some prominent Democrats have come out against I-638, including five Democratic members of Congress, such as Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The state’s top two legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, have also come out against it. Gov. Bob Ferguson and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, though, have not publicly joined them. 

Polling thus far is unclear. A September 2025 poll of Washingtonians found 69 percent statewide support for the school-sports initiative, although the survey used language highly favorable to the measure, describing it as protecting “integrity and fairness” and did not explicitly say it would bar transgender girls from girls’ teams. 

No Hate in WA State referred me to May polling conducted by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that tracks state ballot measures. Their survey rated I-638 a toss-up, finding voters sharply divided, with 43 percent strongly in favor, 21 percent strongly opposed, 17 percent fully undecided, and another 11 to 14 percent not firmly committed. BISC said they did not have more recent polling to share.

The measure, however it ultimately goes at the ballot box, will be a verdict on how the issue is playing out beyond red states, and directly with voters. For the handful of trans students the WIAA knows about, and for every other girl who wants to play sports, November will decide something more immediate. Voter pamphlets go out in October.

Olympic weightlifting is defined by only two moves: the snatch and the clean and jerk. But behind what seems like a simple contest to see who can lift the most is a sport built on technique, speed, strategy, and psychology.

We speak to Matthew Tung, a competitive weightlifter who represents Hong Kong internationally, to break down how the lifts work, the strategy behind athletes changing their declared weights mid-competition, and how a lifter can miss four of their six attempts and still bring home gold.

In this video, we explore what it really takes to compete in Olympic weightlifting and what the rest of us can learn from athletes who have pushed strength training to the extreme.

Read more about professional weightlifting:

• Weightlifting in Olympics: Everything you need to know
• A guide to competitive weightlifting
• Hong Kong’s first pro weightlifter in 12 years had to compete in tracksuit borrowed from footballer, learned to lift from YouTube
• This Northeastern grad taught himself weightlifting and is now competing internationally
• Unique aspects of competitive weightlifting: Performance, training, and physiology

This video is presented by Colgate. Colgate doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.