It’s early on a Sunday morning and Jack Hughes, a forward for the U.S. hockey team, has just scored the overtime goal that secures the Olympic gold medal for the United States, the first since 1980. Earlier in the game, he took a stick to his mouth, knocking out his front teeth. Now he grins, a bloodied, jack o’ lantern smile, beaming with victory. We cheer like crazy.
I grew up watching sports, the Olympics a staple, my family marveling at the beauty of top-tier athletes soaked in grit and determination. From middle school on, I also played sports, captaining teams in high school and then playing soccer and lacrosse in college, even finding my way into international competition. Athletics educated me with an immediacy little else could replicate: an understanding of the strength and limits of my physical body, a commitment to feedback as a vehicle for progress, and early lessons in grace, fair play, and the relationships that make teams work.
I saw the efficacy of this education from the flip side when I went on to coach after college. Athletics uniquely allowed students to demonstrate mastery through the authentic assessment of a game, the lessons of failure—poor defensive play, inaccurate passing—immediately self-evident. And I saw first-hand the power of educating students across the different spaces of a boarding school: the field, the dorm, the classroom, each cross-fertilizing to shape a student’s development.
But for all that athletics gave me—and for all the meaningful work coaches and athletes continue to do at Milton Academy (MA) where I currently teach—I look at it through a different lens now. I have watched sports change in ways we have not fully confronted. Over the past two decades, youth sports have become more professionalized, more expensive, more specialized, and more entangled with college admissions.
In the process, it has begun to reshape school life itself: how we structure time, measure success, allocate resources, and define what students are here to learn. The question is not whether sports still matter; they do. The question is whether we are willing to examine what this new sports culture is costing our students and our schools.
The Rise of Pay-to-Play Sports
This shift did not happen all at once, and it did not happen only inside school walls. At its heart is the evolution of year-round, for-profit club sports—a “pay to play” corporate model—driven, generally speaking, by families trying to give their children meaningful experiences, keep them active and connected, and preserve the lessons sports can teach, even as college admissions and scholarship hopes have turned participation into something that can feel like a long-term investment strategy.
According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play 2019 report, “State of Play,” the youth sports industry now generates about $40 billion in annual revenue. Aspen’s 2024 “Parenting Survey” revealed that the average U.S. family spends over $1,000 on a child’s primary sport in 2024, a 46% increase since 2019, and some families spend up to $20,000 annually—numbers that fuel a system that advantages people who can afford it.
As the cost of participation rises, so does the pressure on families to treat youth sports less like recreation and more like a necessary path through an increasingly competitive landscape. Many parents are also looking for what sports have long promised at their best: time away from screens, physical confidence, belonging, discipline, resilience, and the experience of being part of something larger than oneself. But access to those lessons now often depends on money, time, and transportation. Private coaching is the new frontier in youth sports, with families racing to hire personalized instruction, another insurance policy. Fear of scarcity has propelled this change; with colleges seeing record applicant numbers, parents look for any form of leverage, betting that starting sports early in childhood is a smart investment. Eventually, this outside machinery makes its way inside schools.
When Athletics Reshapes School Life
All of us in who have been in independent school education over the last 25 years can see the direct impact of the pay-to-play model on our schools’ athletic programs. An investment in club sports now heavily influences whether a student will ever play on a varsity team, as junior varsity teams no longer centrally feed varsity programs. At the varsity level, coaches are rarely classroom teachers anymore; instead, they—usually graduates of successful college athletics programs—are viewed as being better equipped to deliver wins than to deliver lectures.
For the more seasoned faculty-coaches who have translated their skills to this new model, workload has risen exponentially, with hours spent recruiting athletes to campus, and more hours spent then marketing them to colleges. Meanwhile, less-resourced schools that can’t invest comparably in their athletics programs lose out, their teams unable to compete at the same level.
In this new model of professionalized play, the stakes for athletes are always high, their athletic futures always on the line, even though statistically the vast majority of them won’t ever play in college. Even while playing on high school teams, many continue to participate in club practices and tournaments, their weekends consumed with travel. They must constantly document and update their successes, managing their public image for possible recruiting. In the stands, college recruiters sit and take notes—surveillance that drives anxiety and self-consciousness in athletes. The possibility that high school athletes could earn name, image, and likeness money further heightens the stakes, threatening to crowd out the intrinsic motivation that first draws many students to sports.
The Costs Students Carry
We have also seen a clear impact on schools more broadly. Many of our prospective families have meaningfully invested in club sports and want to see high school teams deliver results; operating within a marketplace where clients have power, schools know they must provide strong returns. Admissions offices must work to fill teams with successful student-athletes. College counseling offices benefit from recruited athletes that boost matriculation numbers to elite schools. Development and communications offices calculate that successful teams are more likely to attract alumni dollars. At Milton, our school pep rallies and holiday tailgates, promoted by these offices, have emerged amid this broader shift, linking school spirit and community more directly to athletic success.
This new version of athletics shapes our academic program. We shorten class time but not practice time when we have a special schedule. We hold afternoon games sacrosanct, even tailoring our winter exam schedule around athletics. Student-athletes miss class time for games and tournament play, sometimes leaving school for longer stretches to compete at higher levels.
Simultaneously, our classroom experience shifts. Who can blame a sophomore or junior already committed to a college for not investing fully in a discussion about a reading? For student-athletes, high school has become another system to manage and game—a shift from the pluralistic underpinnings of a liberal arts education. More than once, a student has let me know that a certain lower grade would threaten a college athletic scholarship. One classroom teacher recently remarked that he feels like a “shift worker” rather than an influential adult, displaced by the student-athletes’ athletic universe. In fact, though we still promote the notion that student-athletes can also be artists and actors here at Milton, very few can afford the time.
But the deepest costs are not measured in programs or schedules; they are carried by students themselves. Our students have been raised in this model; they don’t know life otherwise. But they do feel its costs. One student-athlete recently wrote in my class about the anxiety of returning from an injury and wondering whether recruitment was now off the table. Another interviewed a peer about the years she felt she wasted playing hockey never to receive a college offer: “I lost my childhood,” she lamented. Again and again, I hear stories of overuse injuries and burnout. Even athletes who still love the sport wonder how high school might have looked different had they been able to design their own time.
Reclaiming the Purpose of Play
At best, we adults have watched this happen, stepping aside for a cultural trend’s momentum; at worst, we helped drive a change we suspect benefits adults, institutions, and systems of power more than children and their education. Ironically, in a moment when schools want to claim distinction from each other to attract prospective students, they have embraced homogeneity, following the irresistible appeal and safer bet of everyone else is doing it.
We cannot turn back the clock, but we can name how we got here and examine what this moment asks of us.
Perhaps with more intentional counter-messaging and limit-setting, we can take back some of the beauty of amateur play, where athletes can compete with lower stakes, can mess up and try again without cost; where they can choose to diversify or redirect their play based on personal motivation; where they can play to commit to present joy rather than future prospects.
In fact, until the 1990s, when the rules shifted, the Olympics were designed to honor amateur athletes competing for the sheer love of the sport rather than compensation; the 1980 U.S. hockey team to last win Olympic gold was a team of amateurs—a far cry, of course, from the highly managed professionals who now compete. Still, basking in victory with boyish joy, Jack Hughes summoned the Olympic spirit in his comments to a reporter: “I love the U.S.A. I love my teammates. It’s unbelievable.”
Norway, the country of only 5.3 million that, yet again, topped the medal count in the most recent Winter Olympics, prioritizes the “Joy of Sport for All” throughout the development of its young athletes, a philosophy outlined in its Children’s Rights in Sports platform. Germany, too, offers another model: Youth sports there are anchored largely in community clubs and associations, often supported through public structures, rather than organized primarily through schools.
That joy is what made Hughes’ Olympic moment so moving: beneath all the machinery around modern sports, the game still mattered.
Most poignantly, athletics teach us to serve the success of the whole rather than the achievement of the individual, a mindset sorely needed now. Schools, invested in fighting for better versions of our collectives, should work to recenter the best lessons of an athletic education.