Vinny Amorosa’s rise as a budding wrestling star left his father, Joe, wrestling with his approach to youth sports.
Read more Youth sports costs are skyrocketing. Some parents and kids say ‘it’s worth every dime.’
Vinny is already a multiple-time youth state champion at 10 years old, but as he’s piled up tournament wins, Joe has taken a hard look at his son’s pursuit of the sport. The family spends about $10,000 a year on Vinny’s club wrestling and the various tournaments he travels to, both in- and out-of-state. Amid that investment, Joe has battled through his own cognitive dissonance.
That’s because participation in all youth travel sports requires a healthy bank account, a wide-open calendar and the balancing of the intertwined dreams between kid and parent. And as the youth sports landscape has changed, the pressure to join clubs in every sport has increased, with families fearful that not traveling to compete will stunt their kids’ athletic development.
Even in an individual sport like wrestling — where the only equipment required is shoes, headgear and a singlet — the true cost for high-level youth sports participation can be staggering.
“All of youth sports has become a fear-of-missing-out gig,” Joe Amorosa said. “It’s like, ‘Well, we have to wrestle so much to keep up with the Joneses.’
“If kids win everything and they’re all-in from an early age, everybody will talk about how great they are at the beginning of it, but there’s a price to be had for that. And I’ve learned that that price tag, both for the kid and for the parents, isn’t necessarily what you may want.”
The Aspen Institute’s Project Play parenting survey conducted in 2024 estimates that the youth sports industry generates over $40 billion annually, and that mark is expected to reach around $70 billion by 2030.
That explosion has accelerated over the past couple of decades as club sports with an expensive pay-to-play, travel-based model have overtaken the youth sports landscape. Kids are starting travel sports at increasingly younger ages, and it’s become a boon for club organizations, training facilities, and the various cottage industries that have sprung up in conjunction, such as private skills and strength trainers.
The price that Amorosa pays for his son to wrestle is not uncommon. Families are willing to open their wallets for tens of thousands of dollars annually for one child to play a single travel sport. Amorosa notes that there are families in his own club who spend much more on wrestling than he does.
“The more extreme you go into it, the faster the wheel spins,” Amorosa said.
“We’ve done the extreme already (with travel wrestling), so I’ve seen it. And you get to the point where you just keep revving the RPMs, because it’s never enough,” Amorosa said. “Because if you win Tulsa Nationals, you should win Reno Tournament of Champions. You do well there, you should go to the Super 32 (in North Carolina). You can get to this black hole that you can’t escape if you let it consume you.
“And let’s be honest, this is all a money-making affair, across every sport. It’s like a Trojan horse that families feel like they have to get on because the feeling is like, ‘If I miss out on this, my kid’s not going to be good enough.’ And I think that concept is flawed, even though I also agree with the other argument that says this is how we produce the best elite athletes in every sport.”
Amorosa is analyzing the costs and the benefits in real time, especially as his younger son, 8-year-old Geno, goes through the same process as his older brother. Amorosa is cognizant of the concept of “early ripe, early rot,” in which youth sports stars burn out and lose their desire to play as they get older.
“If you talked to me like two years ago, you would speak to a Joe that would say, ‘Let’s wrestle a hundred bouts a year. Every weekend, every tournament, we’re going to find all the toughest guys here and elsewhere. We have to double bracket (in two age divisions). We’re going to beat them all up. We’re going to chase some losses.’ But now I’m of the camp where it’s like, ‘I need to find the most fun versions of the sport for my sons.’
“… Regardless of how much we’ve already invested in the sport, we want to make sure there’s tread on the tires left for when the bigger decisions have to be made later (in his athletic career).”
‘You got a check? We’ll get you on a team.’
Project Play’s 2024 youth sports parent survey found that American families paid an average of $1,016 in a single year for their child’s top sport. But that data was mined mostly from parents who identified community-based teams, free play and intramural/interscholastic teams as the most common settings where their child participates in a sport.
As part of this series, The Denver Post’s straw poll of over four dozen local sport-specific stakeholders and parents found that the cost of club/travel sports is many times greater than the $1,016 figure.
“One of our data points shows a 46% increase (in average family spending on sports) since 2019,” said Caleb Coats, the project director for Project Play Colorado. “But that’s just average costs, and I also think that’s based on the sticker price and not completely factoring in the real cost. I would even say that what we see in terms of cost (from surveys) is actually much lower than the reality.”
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Travel sports are usually associated with a specific club, and annual fees to be a part of that club — which typically includes being able to train at the club’s facility, fields the team would practice on and sometimes paid coaches — can often range from $2,500 to $5,000 for sports such as baseball, softball, basketball, lacrosse and volleyball. But then there are additional costs such as tournament/league fees that are sometimes not included in the club fee, uniforms and travel — the big wallet-buster. How much a family spends depends on how often and how far the family’s athlete travels.
That’s where costs for youth sports can be exorbitant, with a handful of families telling The Post they spend up to $20,000 and more for their kids to play a primary sport from spring through winter and to travel to tournaments across the country. Families are starting travel ball as young as 7 years old.
Many sports have a tiered club system, with costs increasing as you move up the tiers. Club basketball has embraced local, regional and national models for teams, with the latter being the most pricey. Similarly, in youth hockey, the AAA level is the most expensive. A longtime club director and a hockey parent told The Post that a year in AAA can cost a family north of $35,000 due to the significant travel involved.
Youth sports expert Gary Thrapp said the result of this massive youth sports industrial complex is “a huge gap between the money you can spend, and knowing what the value of that money is being spent on. Spending big money doesn’t mean you’re getting a good experience or getting good results. And the tough part as a parent is you won’t really know until maybe 10 years later whether that was all worth it.”
A pillar in the solidification of that youth sports industrial complex within American society is the lowered bar for participation in so-called “elite” travel teams.
A couple of decades ago, there were traveling teams in many sports, and those teams consisted of the state’s true top-end talent. But the infiltration of private equity into the youth sports sphere — where clubs, complexes and trainers are central figures, while city-run recreational leagues have taken a back seat — has oversaturated and diluted the number of teams across the elite travel-sports spectrum.
As Thrapp and others emphasized to The Post, “we went pretty quickly from that travel model of very select teams with the best players seeking out the best competition to, ‘OK, just show up. You got a check? We’ll get you on a team.’”
‘A Disneyland of youth sports’
Dr. Travis Dorsch, a Utah State professor and founder of the Families in Sport Lab whose research on youth sports has been published nationwide, said the whole system “feels like an arms race.” But he also pointed out that there’s a reason families like the Amorosas are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars annually in their child’s athletic experience.
“We have two vastly different sports journeys in America right now,” Dorsch said. “There’s the elite pursuit, a trajectory that requires a lot of money and time investment, and there’s the recreational trajectory — sort of a, ‘I know I’m going to get left behind (talent-wise), but at least I can play.’
“I think everybody involved in this has realized that people care about sports in the U.S. and we also care deeply about families, so when you put those two together, (clubs and businesses) have tapped into that. They’ve given families an experience — a Disneyland of youth sports, so to speak — and charge them an arm and a leg for the experience that it seems like they want. And for the most part, parents are just operating within that context that exists.”
That context is highlighted by an opportunity gap, parents’ recruiting gambles and the demise of the neighborhood team.
“Youth sports, as it stands, can get a bad rap, but we’re doing some good things,” Dorsch said. “Every kid now, assuming they have the resources to do so, can find the opportunity to play at the level they want. And just like we do in schools, every kid should be given the opportunity to have some accelerated development if they’re physically, mentally and emotionally ready to do so.
“However, at the same time, we’re making it so exclusive and creating so many barriers that really a lot of the kids can’t even access those opportunities. So it’s some good (in the youth sports landscape,) and I think a lot of bad.”
READ PART II NEXT: How the youth sports industrial complex has widened the opportunity gap and diluted the neighborhood team
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