Youth Enrichment Brands — the parent company of i9 Sports, US Sports Camps, School of Rock and SafeSplash + Partner Swim Schools — recently launched the Generation Real Project.
The initiative is “dedicated to combating the current youth mental health crisis by rebuilding the real-world experiences, environments, and communities that build the essential infrastructure of a healthy childhood full of confidence, resilience, and joy.”
YEB is working with four other organizations on the initiative — Apex Leadership Co., Avid4 Adventure, KidStrong and Tutu School. The campaign kicked off with an essay on childhood in the digital age by YEB CEO Rob Price; YEB is also commissioning educational resources for parents that it says will be available by back-to-school.
Buying Sandlot recently caught up with Price -- who also has executive experience in the food and healthcare industries — to discuss Generation Real, private equity in youth sports and more.
Generation Real — if you could just distill it, how would you describe is and what you are aiming to do with it?
The Generation Real initiative has been gurgling for quite some time. At its simplest level, it’s a little bit of a liberation movement. Kids have been captive by two trends that are really unconstructive.
One is this whole digital displacement — displacing real activity with simulated stimuli. The second is toxic achievement syndrome, where kids’ motivation has been rewired about activity for the sake of achievement and acknowledgement as opposed to for the sake of fundamental human development.
We talk about confidence, resilience, joy, which we think is the X-factor for a formative childhood that turns into an exceptional adulthood. This liberation movement is really focused on thinking about youth enrichment differently to combat digital displacement and toxic achievement syndrome.
And these trends are impacting all of the age groups that YEB’s brands cover, which includes toddlers?
That's the thing that I think has been so jarring to me. I remember when I started playing wreck soccer for Dutchess Recreational Vehicles and Busy Bee Carpets in Poughkeepsie, New York. The idea that at that age my parents would already be worried about travel and club and NIL and my college application …
I'd say across the board we've seen in our business that age is much less of a differentiator. Because the moment that parents get swept up in the chaos of it all, the moment they get the first exposure to another parent or an institution driving them to think about childhood as a pre-professional experience — it’s almost impossible to break free from it.
So yeah, we see it at 3. We see it at 4. Conversations I've had with parents would make your hair stand up.
Does it surprise you that more parents do not show more agency and say no at times?
I think it's a paradox. There's a piece of parenting — and I can identify, my kids are in their mid-to-late 20s. So some of this is true confession.
You go into every situation with a biological desire for to create this healthy, wide-eyed, improvisational, serendipitous experience for your kid. But you're also wired with the competitive streak on behalf of your kids. Half of you wants your kid to have a joyful playtime with another kid and half of you at your dinosaur brain wants your kid to eat the other kid tt make sure that they're well fed. It’s very biological.
This is not about us as an institution grabbing the lapels of our parents and saying, “Why don’t you get your head in a good place?” I think we're acknowledging the challenge. The challenge in this environment, which is hyper-energized by digital content and comparison changes in sport. A greater pervasiveness of sport as a part of the fundamental journey to college and beyond, and just the interconnectedness of parents.
I think we have to accept and respect that parents, even though they should have the agency, we're all frail. I think that the institutions like ours, what we should be doing is not, you know, finger-wagging, but to say, “We get it.” Let's create an environment where there's less of a compromise between those two positions.
We're not opposed for our kids to become professional musicians or athletes. We just want them to do it for the right reason. And for the vast majority of our kids, who will not become professional athletes and professional musicians, we want music and sport and whatever other enrichment we do, we want all of that to be deeply embedded in their consciousness.
It's easy to become unsympathetic to the parents. But the parents are in a difficult spot. They're programmed to drive for their children's achievement. We we get that and we're going to endeavor to support that. But in a different way and a little bit more of a holistic way.
You have partnered with child development experts on the project, but also other companies and organizations. How important is that collaboration to the initiative?
We don't want to hold this in. We don't want to keep this in. We're collaborating with folks who might even be perceived as competitors. We're collaborating with like-minded folks who get it. And my view is I'd be willing to talk to everybody and encourage them to do it, share our resources, and I would advise them the same things. Every one of them, either on their board of directors, or as a board advisor, or as a secondary expert advisor, have somebody in their network that actually is as equipped to understand the wiring of a child's mind, as a lot of us are equipped to understand concussion prevention and skill building.
Your brands offer in-person experiences for both kids and parents. How beneficial is that to a project like this?
We have a point of view in this regard — part of the reason sport has been so endemic to human development is because it is communal. Even in sports that are individual achievement in nature, you're still within a community of competitors who are affectionate to the same thing.
A lot of this emanated from the experience when I was running School of Rock for seven-and-a-half years (as president and CEO) before it came into Youth Enrichment Brands and seeing the incredible transformational power of the ensemble. And what I found more interesting was coming into then an athletics-anchored business, I looked at the i9 fields, I looked at our camps and in our swimming pools. This is exactly the same phenomena. The phenomena is that the zeal, the love, the executive skills, the deep learning about sport and ambition happens in a community.
Thinking about our growth, we're pretty single-minded in looking for additional community-anchored, in-person, real world, IRL, touch grass kind of experiences. Those are the ones we're most interested in. We think it's the best therapeutic product.
When we discuss youth sports, do people too often lose sight of the fact that, hey, some of these kids are going to make it and become professional athletes? Or professional musicians? And how do we balance their journey with everyone else?
They do. We have many case studies in all of our businesses of kids who have excelled in the things that they started in our environment.
It's such a great question because the temptation is to try to accomplish [everything]. I don't think that we can. I think in an ideal world, you start and say, “What is the irreplaceable part of the experience for every aspiring athlete?”
And I don't mean aspiring professional athlete. When I say aspiring musician, I don't mean every professional aspiring musician.
I think for me, the groundwork is the ability to play on the team, the ability to be resilient, the ability to have confidence even when you don't have all the competence. The ability to find the experience of playing joyful, even when you lose. Not that you shouldn't feel a zeal to win, but you have to have the resilience to lose. And joy is the deep pool that we draw upon in order to overcome that
In some respects, since that is the raw material for everything else, I actually think we can be all things to all people for that.
Then as you have kids that say themselves, not their parents, they say the sorting hat has worked. I have been selected by baseball by the baseball gods. This is my destiny. It's all I want to do. We don't begrudge that at all. We just want to make sure that it's not an imposition, and that it's not a captivity. It's not a parent working out their own little league dreams of bygone days.
And if that means their next step is to go into club ball or to go into travel or to do a program at an elite enterprise, we don't see that as losing a customer. We see that as launching a customer.
But the other thing is that we're also very attentive to have an enormous amount of range in the curriculum. Our strongest players right now at School of Rock are out there on a professional tour. We’ve got 154 of these kids traveling the country from all over the world. You close your eyes, you're listening to professional musicians. You look at our best players in some of our most intense Nike Sports Camps, these are kids who are going to be D1 athletes.
There is so much discussion about youth sports and private equity, in Washington and around the country. What is your vantage point as the leader of a company that is PE-backed (owned by Roark Capital) and getting thrown into a big group while people may not understand what you do?
It’s really interesting to me, and I'll bring an answer to it that draws on some of my other experience. I'm in my mid-50s now and I've had a few stops along the way. The benefit that I've had in the different parts of my professional journey is I've worked for public companies. I've worked for family-owned companies. I've worked for employee-owned companies. I've worked for private equity-owned companies.
What I've learned is that ownership structure has almost nothing to do with the effectiveness of an enterprise that being great at impacting the lives of their customers and their stakeholders and being good citizens. The ownership structures that I've been exposed to that had the biggest scaling effect on driving access and driving participation, giving back, often are within the private equity environment.
I find it curious, but I understand legislatures don't have that professional experience. It's not where you get the funding from. It's what you do with it.
We're a passion-based business. We curate people in our franchisees, our camp directors, our team members who want to change lives. They don't sit there and agonize over what kind of EBIDTA margin are we going to generate? The KPIs we're talking about — are we saving lives? Are we changing lives? Are we getting more enrollment?
I think one of the things that makes it easier for us to maybe answer this question is we are on the highly participative side of the equation. I don't think it's responsible to put parents in a position where they have to spend $20,000, and I especially think that's bad when the kid's miserable about it. I’m sympathetic to some of the consequences of what areas are hot in youth sports and youth development right now, but that's more an ideological and a business positioning point than an ownership question.
Family money, public money, private money, employee money and, frankly, government money goes to where the demand is. I think it's more a question of what is it about a society where we're pre-professionalizing childhood. If that becomes part of the dialogue in DC, count me into the dialogue. I think it can be a real distraction about what the cap table looks like because I don't find that's influencing our behavior at all.
The conversation should be about what people who are organizers, conveners, stakeholders are designing. Not how it's being funded. … The idea of concentrating on cutting off one or two or three zones of funding just doesn't seem logical to me, given our experience. If you ask our customers if they are they happy with the experience, they don't ask us who's on our cap table.
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