Jabari Young's daughter quit soccer. He'd already bought the cleats, the shin guards, the shorts — standing in Dick's Sporting Goods studying the other parents in line, all of them loading up equipment for kids who may or may not still be playing the same sport in six months. The soccer shoes are sitting in a closet right now. Then she wanted basketball. So now Jabari is navigating a completely different calculation: does he hire a trainer, does he take her to the playground himself, does he spend the money or doesn't he?
His daughter is twelve.
That's the episode. Not whether youth sports is worth the investment — it clearly can be. Not whether private coaching works — it does, and I'll tell you exactly why. The episode is about sequence. About what happens when the business logic of elite athletics gets imported into a moment that hasn't earned it yet. When the infrastructure of professional sports — trainers, showcases, recruiting services, star ratings, position specialization — gets layered onto a ten-year-old who hasn't yet decided whether she even likes the thing she's being optimized for.
The money is moving earlier and earlier. The question is whether the kid is ready to receive what the money is trying to buy.
The $40 billion number nobody is auditing
Jabari came with the research. Youth sports overall: $40 billion industry. Sports coaching — IBISWorld calls it that — $15.4 billion, with $2.8 billion of that in personal coaching alone. Camps, separately: $7.8 billion of that $15 billion. These are not small numbers. These are numbers that have attracted the same institutional attention as any other asset class — Cal Ripken Jr. taking investment from Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment to scale youth academies, Chris Paul building out EYBL infrastructure off the back of his camps, former players converting their network and credibility into a pipeline with real economics attached.
I was part of that world briefly. I had an EYBL team in Oregon. And what I learned — what I highly disliked — was the expectation that came attached to it. Parents weren't just expecting me to develop their kids. They were expecting me to fund the whole operation. Coaches passed along requests — not from the athletes, from the families — to cover not just the child's costs but the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, aunts, uncles, travel, all of it. For a kid who wasn't yet generating any revenue. Wasn't yet winning anything. Wasn't yet even close to the threshold where any of that math makes sense.
I don't remember a single parent asking someone to pay for their flight to watch me play AAU. They drove. They saved. They showed up on their own because watching me was something they wanted to do, not a service someone owed them.
The business got there before the ethics did. That's the honest summary of where youth sports is right now.
The case for paying — and the case for waiting
Here's where I'll complicate this, because I don't think the answer is just let kids be kids and don't spend money. That's too easy and it isn't what the evidence says.
My parents paid for a trainer. Ryan Paul, across the river in Vancouver, Washington — I drove to him two or three times a week, sophomore through senior year of high school. My Uncle Joe was the one who pushed for it, said the high school level wasn't going to keep developing me, that I needed to see what competition looked like at a national level before I got to a national level. He was right. That training — the one-on-one time, the work ethic it built, the psychology of learning to push yourself when nobody's watching — followed me to Nebraska. Eighty guys on scholarship. You either came in with that internal drive already constructed or you got lost in the crowd.
Andre Miller, apparently, has gone on record saying he wouldn't pay for a personal trainer under any circumstances. I understand the principle. I disagree with the application. The principle is that talent is talent and you can't manufacture it by throwing money at it. That's true. The application — that individual coaching has no value — misses what the coaching is actually doing. It's not only teaching moves. It's building the relationship with work. It's teaching a young person how to fail in front of someone they trust, how to receive correction, how to come back tomorrow after a bad session. My trainer Keith D'Amelio has been with me fifteen years. He's been my psychologist as much as my strength coach. He saw me and my wife when we trained together, heard about the trials of playing twelve years in the league, knew when to push and when to back off. You cannot replicate that in a camp with a hundred kids.
The nuance is this: the coaching has to match the moment. A four-year-old in swim lessons with five other kids — that's exactly right. Shared cost, group setting, still getting hands-on attention, learning to wait their turn and compete in the same motion. A twelve-year-old who's starting to show real ability in a sport she loves? That's when individual investment starts making sense. But the keyword there is loves. The kid has to have already fallen in love with the thing before you build the infrastructure around pursuing it.
PULL QUOTE: "I don't cover youth sports, and I always try not to pay too much attention to it because this is a time when kids are supposed to be falling in love with the sport." — Jabari Young
The redshirt gamble and the contract it costs you
Jabari's producer flagged a trend I want to address directly because I haven't heard many people run the actual math on it: parents holding their kids back a grade, intentionally, to give them a physical and developmental advantage over younger competition.
The logic is understandable. Your son is on the small side. Hold him back a year, he comes in bigger, stronger, more coordinated than the kids he's technically playing against. He gets more reps, more looks, more recruiting attention. Maybe it works.
Here's what that decision looks like from the other end.
If you engineer a one-year advantage at age ten, you are also engineering a one-year disadvantage at age twenty-two. The NFL doesn't care how dominant your son was in eighth grade. It cares how old he is when he comes out of college — and once a player crosses thirty, that contract money drops fast. A younger player who developed naturally and came out at twenty-one might get three contracts. Your son, who was held back and comes out at twenty-three, might get two. The parents made a decision about youth sports that cost their kid a second NFL contract. That's real money. That's not a hypothetical.
My kids are March babies, which puts them on the younger end of their grade already. We genuinely don't have that problem. But the parents who are considering it should run that calculation all the way to the professional side before they make the call.
What the star ratings actually measure
I was a three-star recruit for most of my high school career. Pacific Northwest — not exactly a football hotbed. The recruiting services weren't watching Oregon the way they watched Texas and California. I went to a Nike combine and became a four-star. I was never able to get to five.
I also went to the US Army All-American game, played on the offensive line — not my natural position — and shut down the number one through number five defensive tackles in the country.
The star system measures exposure. It measures whether you were seen, in the right place, by the right evaluator, at the right time. It doesn't measure what you can do at the next level. I know this because I lived it. I was a four-star who played like a five-star when he finally got in front of five-star competition, and I know training mates who were highly rated coming out of high school and didn't make the league, and a best friend from Nebraska who went through the exact same process I did, trained the same, competed the same, and didn't make it. That last part is what I want every parent to hear before they spend $10,000 on a recruiting service. Can you handle that outcome? Can your kid? Because the gap between preparing properly and being guaranteed anything is enormous, and nobody's camp brochure is going to tell you that.
What I'd actually do, sequenced correctly
Three things, in order, that I think get this right for a family navigating the business of youth sports right now:
- Let them try everything until they beg to specialize. Taekwondo, swimming, soccer, basketball, baseball — I want my kids doing all of it. My son Khari is already bombing baseballs over the fence in our backyard at four years old, nearly cracking my windows, and I'm watching that with genuine interest while keeping my expectations appropriately zeroed. When a kid specializes early because a parent decided it's time, they're optimizing for a version of their future that might not fit who they actually become. When a kid specializes because they can't stop thinking about one sport, because they're asking to go back, because they're organizing their free time around it — that's the signal. Wait for the signal. The sports will tell you.
- Pay for quality coaching at the right time — not instead of letting them fail, but as the framework within which they learn how to fail safely. Kids don't want to fail in front of their parents. I see it already with my four-year-olds doing schoolwork — they won't miss a count or get an ABC wrong in front of me because they don't want to disappoint. With a coach they trust, they can get it wrong, get corrected, come back and try again. That psychological space is what individual coaching actually buys. When Jabari drops his daughter off at practice and sits in the car, he's doing this correctly — he's removing himself as the person she's performing for so she can actually play. The trainer formalizes that. The group session at five kids lets you split the cost. You don't need to go find the most expensive option on the first try.
- Watch the moment it stops being fun, and treat that as data. Jabari's daughter quit soccer. His immediate instinct was to frame that as money wasted — the shoes, the shin guards, the registration fees. I'd frame it differently. She tried it. She found out it wasn't the thing. Now she knows. That knowledge cost him a few hundred dollars and saved both of them years of forcing something that wasn't right. The commercialization of youth sports wants to turn that moment into a sunk cost that justifies more investment. It isn't. It's a kid telling you something true about herself. Listen to it.
The NIL money is creeping into middle school now. Sixth, seventh, eighth grade kids are being positioned for deals before they have any framework for what those deals mean or what they cost. My kids, if they're fortunate enough to be in that conversation someday, will be in a position to make decisions that aren't about the size of the check. Most kids won't be. Most kids will be making the biggest financial decision of their young lives without ever having been told that the moment they sign something, the sport changes into a job.
Let them play first. Let them fall in love with it or decide they don't. The business will still be there when they're ready.