Private Equity Found Youth Sports. Your Club Dues Are the Product.

Walk into a big volleyball convention like Mandalay Bay on a spring weekend and you will find over a hundred courts packed wall to wall, running matches from morning until night, three days straight. Nearly a thousand teams. Every one of them paid roughly 950 dollars just to walk in the door. That number is the smallest part of the bill.

There is a private volleyball league called League One Volleyball, LOV for short. Only two years old, and it already owns ninety youth clubs across the country. Investors have poured almost two hundred million dollars into it, money that expects a return. That money isn't coming back from ticket sales. It's coming back from your club dues.

Here's the part that should actually worry you. This isn't one league doing one shady thing. It's a playbook, and it's running in nearly every sport your kid could pick.

In ice hockey, one company now owns more than forty rinks across the Midwest and East Coast. It runs the rinks, it runs the leagues, and it sells families a paid subscription just to livestream their own kid's game. Try to stream it yourself with your own phone instead, and your kid's team can lose its spot in the standings. That detail actually made it in front of a United States senator, because a parent stood up and asked why filming her own child playing hockey was suddenly against the rules.

In competitive cheer, one company, Varsity Brands, owns the competitions, the apparel, and a professional league, all at once, with exclusive contracts locking up a lot of the venues where kids compete.

In baseball, two of the men who own the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils have been buying up youth sports facilities and calling it an investment opportunity. One of them actually said the quiet part out loud in an interview. Youth sports is a roughly 40 billion dollar business growing at a high single digit rate every year, and the earlier a kid gets locked into a travel team, the more money can be pulled from that family over time.

We want to be straightforward with you about sourcing. The specific funding figures, ownership details, and investor names above come from outside reporting and investigative journalism on these stories, not from our own line by line audit. We're confident enough in the reporting to share it with you plainly, and we're telling you exactly where it came from so you can judge that for yourself.

Here's where all this actually lands on your wallet. The average travel sports family spends somewhere between 3,500 and 20,000 dollars a year, and that number is up 46 percent since 2019. Families making under 100,000 dollars a year are now about half as likely to have a kid in organized sports at all. And here's why the dream keeps getting more expensive to chase. In the early 1990s, Division I and II schools handed out about 250 million dollars a year in athletic scholarships combined. Today that number is north of 4 billion dollars. More money in the system means more incentive to convince every parent their kid is the exception. Fewer than 2 percent of high school athletes ever actually receive one.

It doesn't have to work this way. Norway put a bill of rights for children in sports on paper back in 1987. It guarantees kids the right to a safe training environment free of inappropriate pressure from adults, and the right to choose which sport and how many sports they play, with participation prioritized over outcomes at every level. Norway has just over 5 million people, roughly the population of Minnesota, and still out medals the United States at the Winter Olympics. Turns out Norwegian kids aren't built any different than ours. Norway just built its youth sports system around the kid instead of around the money.

There's finally movement on this in Washington too. A bill called the Let Kids Play Act is being introduced by lawmakers from both parties, and it would ban private equity ownership in youth sports, end stay to play requirements that force families into a tournament's preferred hotel, and redirect money back into local communities instead of investor returns. Honestly, whether it passes or not almost doesn't matter. Congress talking about banning this tells you everything you need to know about how bad it's gotten.

So don't let a nicer jersey or a bigger tournament talk you out of doing basic math. Ask your club exactly where every dollar of your dues goes. Run your own numbers before tryouts, not after you've already signed. Use our True Cost Calculator to see what a season actually costs before you commit to one, and go through our Coach and Club Questions Checklist before your next tryout. And if you want to push back locally, know that most youth sports organizations run on public fields and gyms rented through your city's parks department. That permit is leverage. A community that asks its local parks department to require background checks, safety training, and real cost transparency before handing out field time can change its own youth sports culture without waiting on anyone in Washington.