The House Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee held a hearing on youth sports yesterday.
The hearing’s title was a tad dramatic — “Benched: The Crisis in American Youth Sports and Its Cost to Our Future” — but the content was pretty substantive as things tend to go in Washington these days.
Four witnesses fielded questions from a group of backbenchers for a little over 90 minutes:
Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program
Steve Boyle, 2-4-1 Sports
Katherine Van Dyck, American Economic Liberties
John O’Sullivan, Changing the Game Project
The main topics of discussion: Youth sports participation rates, access barriers, rising costs and private equity’s involvement in the space.
Some quick highlights and takeaways:
Van Dyck was the most forceful witness. An FTC attorney during the Biden Administration, she came in guns blazing against PE’s youth sports involvement and called on Congress to curb PE with existing and new antitrust laws.
She said there should be a ban on vertical integration and consolidation in the space, name-checking Black Bear Sports Group as an example. Van Dyck also suggested platforms that sell exposure to college coaches and recruiters could be making illegal claims.
The other witnesses expressed some reservation about PE and its role, but their broad strokes take was gaps and shortfalls in the traditional youth sports model have created vacuums that PE has filled. They mainly focused on the benefits of youth sports and ways to fund recreational and school sports to create opportunities, improve experiences and grow participation in line with the campaign to reach 63% participation by 2030.
Farrey also played a big role in the hearing. He reiterated his idea to use federal sports betting tax revenues to fund youth sports. He also said there is a need for more federal data on youth sports so the information can trickle down and inform decisions and strategies at the state and local levels.
Another interesting idea from Farrey: All youth sports organizations — not just ones that fall under a NGB’s umbrella — should be required to register with U.S. Center for SafeSport and to adhere to its compliance and safety measures. He said only about a third of orgs currently sit under an NGB and registration would be incentivized with offerings like subsidized background checks.
Farrey also implored Congress to consider the youth sports impacts of any legislative measures addressing college sports.
The hearing was undeniably politicized at points. Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) referred to Van Dyck as "the Democratic witness" and the liberal committee members grooved her several fastballs in their questioning. Farrey had to weave around a question about transgender athletes in girls sports from Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.).
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