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Attention Span Media Calls for Widespread Effort to Reform and Improve Youth Sports

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Report: The Future of Youth Sports

Youth Sports Is Dead. Long Live Youth Sports


SAN FRANCISCO and BOSTON (PRWEB)

Attention Span Media, a strategic marketing and strategy agency, today announced that it has published “The Future of Youth Sports,” a deep dive into the cultural, technological, and economic forces that drive the $30 billion global youth sports industry.

The 46-page report was nearly completed in early 2020 before COVID-19 shut down almost every form of sports. Attention Span pushed the release date out by more than a year in order to explore and include the pandemic’s momentous impact on all components of youth sports. The project features ten topics, envisioning both positive and negative scenarios for youth sports in a post-pandemic world.

The publication—available for $24— is an extremely readable and actionable starting point for a wide spectrum of stakeholder audiences; including young athletes, parents, coaches, sports industry insiders, legislators, and regulatory bodies who are alarmed and dismayed at the trends and interested in improving the state of youth sports.

The days of youth sports as casual, mostly inclusive, relatively inexpensive activities intended to provide kids with a way to spend some of their free time getting exercise while learning how to compete with and collaborate with each other, are over. Little league baseball and self-organized playground games like H-O-R-S-E and stickball have been replaced with expensive nationally touring travel leagues, personal coaches, increasingly early specialization and high-pressure tryouts for elite teams.

“This report explores how the end of amateurism in youth sports has eroded away the traditional pathways that connect youth sports to success in college and beyond, looks at the ramifications of this sea-change for both the sports industry and society as a whole,” said Josh McHugh, a youth sports parent and coach as well as the CEO of Attention Span Media and the report’s editor in chief.

Previous Attention Span Media sports industry research, notably the Future of Sports 2.0, has called attention to the need for reform across several areas of the youth sports ecosystem.

The 2021 “Future of Youth Sports” calls for 10 specific reforms to fix youth sports, to include:


  • De-emphasize elite teams. Promote leagues and organizations that open teams to all players and “Make Youth Sports Fun Again.”

  • Get kids moving. Ensure that kids engage in actual physical movement and resist trends towards categorizing sedentary video games as actual sports.

  • Bring back recess. Require schools to schedule multiple recess periods where kids can engage in unstructured free play.

  • Increase access for underserved communities. Encourage municipal government and private industry to work together to bring down the inflated and ever-rising costs of youth sports.

  • Create a more level playing field for all genders. Begin all-gender games, leagues, teams and activities from an early age.

  • Help young athletes manage the new flow of endorsement money. Now that NIL rules allow for sponsorships, endorsement contracts and revenue from social media to go directly to the athletes, they’ll need help dealing with sponsors – and keeping a healthy perspective on what’s important.

  • Reduce early recruitment. Release athletes in revenue-generating sports like football and basketball from the need to specialize and excel too early and allow them to enjoy a broad youth sports experience.

  • Increase resources for “Alt” sports. Expand kids’ horizons beyond the traditionally most popular team sports and increase the options and benefits for a broader category of athletes.

  • Eliminate sexist toxicity in esports. With esports now incorporated into hundreds of collegiate sports programs, the industry must self-reform or add external oversight to ensure safety and equality for women participants.

  • Merge digital games with physical sports. Create opportunities for kids to increase their exercise levels with emerging digital exercise platforms and devices.

Attention Span Media is a strategic marketing and business business strategy agency. We are a team of makers, polymaths, coders, craftsmen, creators, entrepreneurs, journalists, critics, innovators and travelers. We are passionate about doing inspired work with great partners and clients.

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