The Real Cost of Getting Girls into Sports

Women's sports are booming. In 2025, Americans consumed 46 billion minutes of women's sports content. The WNBA just signed a $200M annual media deal, tripling its previous deal. The 2024 NCAA Women's Basketball Championship drew 18.9 million viewers, beating the men's tournament for the first time in history. Sponsorships are flooding in. Ticket sales are surging. Female athletes are household names.

At the top of the funnel, the picture has never looked better. But spend any time below the surface—in recreation leagues, registration wait lists, or group chats where parents ask "how do I get started?"—and a very different picture comes into focus.

The US youth sports ecosystem is a $40 billion industry. That $40 billion built around children's sports hasn't translated into better access. The system that is supposed to move kids from curiosity to participation is still losing too many before they ever really begin.

Over the coming weeks, we're looking at the specific factors that make the early sports experience harder than it should be for girls and their families. Today, we're starting with the most tangible one: cost.

The price of entry

Here's the starting line: the average family in the U.S. now spends $1,016 on their child's primary sport every year.

That figure represents a 46% increase since 2019, growing at twice the rate of overall inflation. When other sports are included, that number rises to nearly $1,500 annually for one child.

This average obscures a wide range. Track and field can run as low as $191 annually. Elite volleyball club participation, including gear, travel, and tournaments, runs approximately $7,000 per year. What used to be a low-cost community experience increasingly reflects the privatization of the youth sports industry.

Public and community-based programs that once served as an affordable on-ramp have been hollowing out for years. School sports budgets have been flat or declining. The private market has rushed in to fill the gap. The result is a system where the price of getting started keeps rising before a child has the chance to discover whether she truly loves to play, or even worse, where she may miss out on the chance to try altogether.

The invisible invoice

Hard costs are only part of the story. Parents of young athletes are signing up for the equivalent of a part-time job.

On a typical day their child plays, parents spend an average of 3 hours and 23 minutes on sport-related responsibilities. That includes attending practices and games, communicating with coaches and other families, managing laundry and equipment, driving, and preparing food.

And for the over 60% of parents who also volunteer as coaches, team parents, officials, or administrators, add another four-plus hours per week.

For families with schedule flexibility, reliable transportation, and disposable income, this is already demanding. For families without it—single-parent households, parents working multiple jobs, families without a car—it's a dealbreaker. At average minimum wage, three-plus hours of time is roughly $22 per practice day. Over a season of 40 practice days, that's nearly $880 in opportunity cost alone.

That is what makes cost in youth sports so easy to underestimate. The bill is not just registration fees and shin guards. It is also the hours of driving, missed work, juggling extra childcare, and the emotional labor of keeping the household running.

Who pays the most

These costs don't fall evenly on all families. Children from the highest-income households are now far more likely to play organized sports than children from the lowest-income households, with this gap widening to 20.2 percentage points in recent years. In 2023, children from the lowest-income homes played sports at half the rate of those from the highest-income group. And the lowest-income bracket was the only income group where youth sports participation actually declined, even as every other income level recovered after the pandemic.

There's also a compounding dynamic for the girls who do manage to enter. In many sports, private club participation quietly functions as a competitive advantage. Girls whose families cannot afford the club circuit often arrive at school tryouts with less exposure, less repetition, and fewer chances to develop.

Taken together, the issue is not just who gets to start, but who gets to stay, compete, and keep progressing once they do.

What we're losing

It's tempting to treat this as merely a budget exercise. The benefits of participating in sports shows the impact is much bigger.

Girls who participate in sports show higher confidence, stronger academic outcomes, and lower rates of depression.

More than three-quarters of working women report that sports participation shaped their self-image. The research is consistent: the benefits of playing extend far beyond the field or court.

At the exact moment women's sports have never been more visible or more valuable at the collegiate and professional levels, the starting line for too many girls is still too expensive to reach.

Cost is where this story starts, but it isn't the only reason girls miss out on sports. In upcoming pieces, we'll look at the physical literacy gap, logistical barriers, and the role of confidence, each one a different facet of the same broken on-ramp.

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