Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Youth sports has become a cultural and political lightning rod in recent years. My guest today is an expert in that area, particularly the ways in which law and government policies have impacted it. Dionne Koller is a professor of law and the director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore. She's the author of a new book titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." Professor Koller, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Dionne Koller: Thanks so much for having me here.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with something definitional. What do you mean when you use the phrase ‘youth sport’, are we talking about anything under pro, anything before college? What are the definitions there?
DK: Well, Grant, I'm really glad you're asking that because that was an immediate stumbling block when I started to research youth sport and I wanted to figure out what's going on in the United States. We don't have a uniform definition of youth sports, actually, that makes data collection difficult. It can be anything from a running club with kids, cup stacking, to the type of travel ball that we see all over the place. So there is no uniform definition. The definition I adopted for the book is the one that I believe is the model that I believe is most predominant in the US, which is adult led, organized youth sports activities.
GR: Okay, great. And so looking at it, and that's obviously a very broad category, what have been some of the major trends in recent years in that area?
DK: Well, the trends have been really going in a problematic direction, which is the trend is toward increased professionalization, and professionalization includes a few things. First of all, it's the emphasis on early sports specialization, getting kids to pick a sport and get really good at that and play it year round. It's the emphasis on competition and winning. So again, getting young kids traveling and going to tournaments and competing as much as possible with the ideal of win, win, win. And so all of that early sports specialization, emphasis on competition and winning really leads to, as the medical community has talked about, things like overuse injuries, really an epidemic of those types of things. So it's all those things together that we call professionalization of youth sports.
GR: Yeah, I wanted to come back to that notion of professionalization and some of the problematic things it entails. But let me ask this question first back to, you know, particularly the title of your book. So how have laws and public policies affected that trend that you just sketched out?
DK: Well, another thing that surprised me as I started looking at this is law and public policy hasn't affected it in the sense that there is very little law or regulation of youth sport at the federal or state level. I think a lot of parents think, like other products or experiences that impact kids, isn't somebody out there making sure this is safe? The answer is, by and large, no. So what I conclude in the book is that the way law and policy has shaped ultimately youth sports in the United States is through the lack of regulation by choosing not to regulate. It's sort of been described as a Wild West situation. You can have some really great programs and experiences and some that really aren't so great. And so the lack of any regulation, lack of minimum safety standards, those types of things, that's a choice too, Grant. And so I talk about that in the book, which is, our policy is let it be whatever it's going to be.
GR: Well, yeah, on that point then, that's really interesting because a couple of things strike me. One, on the one hand, you know, with the professionalization, it seems like sports are getting more and more sort of rule oriented, you know. But on the other hand, from a governmental perspective, like you say, it's the Wild West. What do you think some of the reasons are that we have been loathed to involve government regulation and other kinds of things related in that field. Is it because we don't want to bother the parents, it's sort of leave it to the parents? What's the thinking behind that?
DK: Well, there's a couple of different things. And certainly in the United States, we have a very heavy emphasis on parental authority. That is a big theme in the law of families. And in fact, I talk about in the book there's something called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. One of the rights that the international community recognizes for children is the right to play and the right to developmentally appropriate play. We're the only country in the world that hasn't signed on to that, Grant, because we emphasize parental authority. But one of the other things that I talk about, and this has been something that I've done a lot of research on, is that we see courts, Congress, state legislatures say over and over again, we can't regulate sports, including youth sports. We need to take a hands off attitude, because if we do, it will destroy sports, right? This notion of, I call it the ‘sportspocalypse’ argument. That if you do anything to make changes or requirements in sports, it'll destroy sports. And Grant, if you go back to even the 1970’s with Title IX opening up sports to women and girls, that argument was made over and over. Stay out of sports, don't touch sports, you're going to destroy, for instance, men's college football, you're going to destroy men's sports. And I think both of us know that did not happen.
GR: So it sounds like that it's not really a liberal or a conservative point of view. It sounds like this is something, one of the rare things that is, I guess, bipartisan these days.
DK: Well, youth sport is very bipartisan. There's a youth sport caucus in Congress, yet everybody says, isn't it just great? We can all agree that youth sport is great and let's just leave it alone. But what I talk about in the book is that there's a wide open space between kind of micro-managing T-ball leagues and doing absolutely nothing. And we are very much on the doing nearly nothing side of that.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Dionne Koller. She's a law professor at the University of Baltimore and the author of a new book titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." So walking into this topic as someone that doesn't know a tremendous amount about it beforehand, but based on what I do know about law and, you know, this realm of activity, I would have thought that liability law, you know, either through legislation or case law would have had a huge impact on this area. Is that something that has shaped it in any particular way?
DK: Well, I think it does and it doesn't, Grant. And that's a really, really good point. And I think it's the instinct that you have is the thought that many people have that, oh my goodness, aren't there lawsuits aplenty and all kinds of liability going on? There certainly are lawsuits in youth sports, high school sports and private organized youth sports. There certainly are, because there are lots of injuries, there's lots of harm to go around, sports can be a dangerous activity. But what I found is that there aren't actually, when it all comes down to it, there isn't an excessive amount of liability, for instance, assigned to use sport providers. There's lots of immunities and protections built into the system. Parents can sign liability waivers for their kids, and that's very often a condition of participating. Volunteer coaches get immunity in most states from most types of tort lawsuits. The standard for recovery in a tort lawsuit involving sports is a little bit more of a difficult standard to meet than, say, in a typical tort case. So once I really drill down, I think, Grant, there's a fear of liability. And that's talked about a lot, saying if you allow these lawsuits to happen, it's going to ruin all of youth sports. So there's a big talk and fear of it. Is it sort of manifesting in reality? Not to my eyes.
GR: Interesting. Interesting, because I just put myself in the situation of if I were approached and said, you know, we'd like you to be a parent coach on something, my first reaction would just be like, I do not want to expose myself to all of the possible lawsuits coming from that. So it's interesting to know that that the standard for liability is much higher. I was also curious to know whether some sports have seen greater changes than other sports. So, I mean, I know colleagues are always complaining about having to drive their kids to this soccer match, this soccer match, this soccer match. I don't hear that so much about baseball, for example.
DK: Well, actually, I didn't find in my research that there was kind of one sport that was less kind of professionalized than another. I think we see these changes are being driven across really all youth sports. We have been able to monetize and professionalize and drive growth and revenue generation in anything from volleyball to taekwondo, you name it. So I didn't really find that there was a sport-specific difference. But what I found is that the changes have continued to accelerate as state and local governments have emphasized, what I discovered is something called youth sport tourism, attracting tournaments to their localities.
GR: Say more about that. So the states then are, they're tuned into this and they're trying to profit off of it, so to speak.
DK: That's exactly right. So I discovered this when I went looking at state law and I was looking for state statutes saying, surely there must be some minimum safety standards here, for instance. And the statutes that were popping up that I found, Grant, were a lot of statutes that were about stimulating economic development within states saying, okay, we're going to pass a bond measure to build a youth sport megaplex because we want to attract tournaments here. And to give you a personal example, my son played ice hockey and we live in the D.C. metro area, plenty of rinks around here, but I was constantly on the road going to Pittsburgh and Detroit saying, why are we always in a tournament here? The answer is youth sport tourism. This is a deliberate sort of policy choice to attract parents who have disposable income, to fill hotel rooms, to fill restaurants, get these tournaments going. And it becomes a big boost to local economies.
GR: That's interesting, big business. So one huge question that has been in the media a lot and was part of the most recent election rhetoric regarding youth sports has been the question of gender identity and participation and competition. It's been especially, I think, high profile and collegiate, in Olympic level sports. But I just wonder, you know, I'm sure you've looked at that. I'm sure you've thought about that. What do you make of this? And is there for lack of a better question, some way out of what seems to be a political morass here?
DK: Yeah, I mean, I think there's many, many levels to that. And so let's just start with kind of a factual level. How many, for instance, and the issue, Grant, it comes up around trans-girls and women. That's really the issue. So if you look at really numbers, we just don't have the numbers to support the level of sort of fear and panic that's been going on. And in fact, when I look closely, you look closely at some lawsuits that have been brought over this, and courts have dismissed those lawsuits saying we can't find any evidence of harm. That because a trans-girl, for instance, participated on a high school cross-country team. It didn't displace or hurt anybody else. So I think factually it's been way overblown from that perspective. I think the other thing to look at is that a lot of times, and just looking at this objectively, who's making these arguments and how are they being made and why? And when you look at it, the ostensible reason is we need to preserve sport opportunities for women and girls. And as a researcher, I can say the best way to do that is let's enforce Title IX, let's enforce the laws that are on the books that we have never been very good at enforcing. And so to the extent we're worried about collegiate, say, sport opportunities for women and girls, the best thing we can do is not over fund and overemphasized say, a college football team to the detriment of participation opportunities for girls. In terms of just sort of what should we do about it? Well, I'm very clear about this, I don't address it, the book's really not about that, it's really just about youth sports. But in my other writings and work, sport is a very nuanced space, Grant, there are many different levels of competition. Olympic and Paralympic is very different than, say, a youth sport T-ball league, of course. And so because sports are literally made up games, they are made up by us and for us, there are certainly ways that we can make up these experiences so that everybody can participate regardless of their gender identity, regardless of, are you a trans-girl or not? We can make up these games in lots of different ways, and I think we should.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Dionne Koller, a Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore. She's written a new book, it's titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport" and we've been discussing the topics that the book entails. So I want to follow up on, even though it's not part of your book, specifically, but I want to follow up with another question about the transgendered issue in sports. And maybe I have been captured by this, you know, overhype in the media relative to the number of cases we're talking about. And I remember in particular on this, seeing the Olympic boxing matches that, you know, got played over and over again with, I believe those athletes were from Russia or some country in Eastern Europe. I just wanted to throw this out to you and it's about the partisan politics that have surrounded this. Democrats have been associated, I think, more with, let's let those transgendered athletes play on women's teams. And Republicans seem to be more associated with, this as some kind of violation of the, you know, women's sports and it's not fair for the other girls on these teams. The strange thing in this, it seems to me, is that there is a biological component to it as well as a cultural gendered component. And it seems odd that in this particular instance, the Democrats don't seem to be following one of the other things that they have put forward in recent years, which is to follow the science, you know, we have to follow the science on it. It seems like in this in this case, they're not following the science. I don't know if there's any law about that or anything that you have to say about that. But it struck me as a as an irony to the political discussion in this instance.
DK: Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons why it played as a political issue that it did, it looked almost disingenuous. How are you denying biology, right? I think from a sports long policy perspective where I come out, Grant, is it's really important to remember there are different levels of sport with different purposes. So the Olympic and Paralympic level is a different setting, it's a different context, we have different goals. Then, for instance, open youth sport, which we say is just every kid should have an opportunity to participate and get exercise and learn some life lessons, right? So at the youth sport level, there really isn't evidence that there is a problem, for instance, of transgender girls sort of invading sports spaces and taking slots away. As you kind of climb the hierarchy, certainly in different sports, there's no denying biology and that biology can make a difference. And then we have to start looking more closely at what the policies are for participation. I will say that the political sort of moment that we experienced was unfortunate from my perspective, not because, biology is real, Grant, and we need to look at that, but there have been, for instance, at the college level or at the Olympic and Paralympic level, common sense policies in place to make sure that people were sort of, relatively, people who were competing in different categories sort of belonged in those categories and we weren't displacing folks. I think what we ended up doing, especially at the Olympic and Paralympic level, is grouping different things into the trans-women and girls participation issue. For instance, there are some individuals, it's naturally occurring, they are intersex. The Caster Semenya situation, which she was a runner, took the world by storm, people said this is unfair. That's a naturally occurring phenomenon and that just happens. And just like I'm not Simone Biles, I'm not four foot eight and not going to be an Olympic gymnast, I'm not Michael Phelps, I'm not built to swim. Other people are born intersex, and that's just the way they were made. So I think we also conflate some of these issues. The biology is that there is not sort of clear cut demarcations, man and woman. But by the time you're talking about that nuance in a political discussion, people have long since tuned out.
GR: Yeah, I was going to say good luck. So I want to come back to something that was at the core of your book and what you talked about at the outset of our conversation here, which is that professionalization of youth sport. And it does really seem like that's been one of the big changes I've seen. It's, you know, it does feel like these are more pro teams. They’re traveling, there are all these different sort of tournaments, it's expensive, some of it involves overnight travel. So why has that happened? Is that because some families just have more money than they know what to do with? I mean, what are the forces pushing that?
DK: Well, you're exactly right, that's the heart of the book. And I said, how did this happen? How are we here today? And what happens is, Grant, at least in my opinion, my analysis is, without any minimum kind of regulation or policy standards, except for, kids should play sports, right? We leave it to the free market to kind of set up what the youth sport experience is going to be and in that case, more is more because you have people out there who are willing to pay and they'll put their kids in it and there's more money to be made. So there's on the one hand, that sort of free market drive for, hey, there's a market here, let's do it. On the other hand, you have the drive from parents. Parents want to be good parents. I put my kids into youth sports, I believe in sports, I love sports, I was an athlete myself. So I say this is a good thing, I'm a good parent by doing this. The problem is, is that, and there's literature on this from the psychological community, once you're a parent and you get a taste of seeing your kid perform on the weekends, boy, it sure is fun and you like it. And it's almost a feedback loop where, look, Johnny's doing great in the hockey tournament, that must mean I'm a good parent, he's thriving, this is all good. You get kind of benchmarks, they won the tournament. You're willing to spend more, you're willing to do more, you push more. And so the confluence of parents working together in the free market and parents believing hey, this is good for my kids, right? And of course, then you add in all the other variables, maybe this will get them a scholarship, this will teach them life lessons. You sort of sprinkle all that in and what you get is a recipe for a professionalization of youth sport.
GR: I want to come back to one possible wrinkle about that a little bit later if we've got some time but let me ask you this question, which is kind of the opposite of the emphasis on winning. One of the other things that I have noticed in some youth sports is like a de-emphasis on what I would call a meritocracy. It's the idea of everybody gets a trophy for participating rather than you get a trophy if you achieve something. How does that fit into this?
DK: Well, I think there are there are a couple responses to that. First of all, when I went looking for a sort of youth sport policy and in terms of developmental stages, et cetera, we don't have any kind of government agency that's responsible for sports at all in this country, that's fairly unique in the world. And so we don't set any type of goals for different ages and levels based on development. So again, left to the free market. Well, if you're charging parents a whole lot of money to participate in soccer and it makes the kid happy to get a trophy and then you get more sign-ups, you're certainly incentivized to keep giving out trophies and medals and making everybody feel good because it keeps the kids kind of in in your program. So I think without any kind of thought to what should youth sport be in this country, is it about developing elite athletes? Is it for exercise? Is it about friendship and collaboration? What are we doing? Without any direction, we just get these market based impulses to, they paid a fee, you get a trophy. (laughter)
GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is University of Baltimore law professor Dionne Koller. Okay, so this is beyond the bounds of your book and what you have focused on, but I have to ask this as well. Intercollegiate athletics, they've seen a real earthquake recently through the name, image, likeness, compensation and this transfer portal, and it looks much more like a professional enterprise than did before. Where do you see this system continuing to evolve? Do you have a sense of where we're going with this?
DK: I do, Grant. And actually, that's a fair question. I don't address it in the book, but I was among the first people to testify way back in 2020. Congress held hearings on this and NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) and where were things going and I testified before Congress and I said don't panic. What has happened in intercollegiate sports and I think most people don't realize this, but the Supreme Court ruled 9 – 0 in 2021 that the NCAA was violating antitrust law with different aspects of their model which I will not go into, but basically they were violating antitrust law. This Supreme Court is not unanimous on much of anything, Grant, but that they all agreed on. Similarly, the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration, the Biden administration was opining lots of antitrust violations going on with the NCAA model. The NCAA has been on notice for years and years and years that their model restraining payments to athletes, restraining the ability to transfer, things that every other kid on campus can do, that that is an antitrust violation, meaning it's not at all been a free market and all the benefits have been flowing to coaches and administrators and of course, not students. And so what we're seeing now is as these antitrust violations have been addressed by the courts, including the Supreme Court, we're getting a free market in college sports, and that's a little messy, Grant, that's going to take some time to sort of work out because it's been suppressed, literally for decades. And so what I am here to say is, don't panic. College sports is still going to be great because even though it looks more professional, it's been professionalized for quite some time in terms of the demands on athletes working 50 to 60 hours a week. It will shake out and it will still remain what we treasure about intercollegiate sports, which is watching our favorite players play for our alma maters, including Syracuse.
GR: Yeah, well, that's good news, thanks for telling me that. So we only got a couple of minutes left. I want to try to squeeze in two questions if I can. I want to go back, and these are big issues so I apologize for the time constraint. I want to go back to the professionalization. Not all parents, though, are going to be able to afford all that. And I know that some really feel squeezed, they don't want to disappoint their children. But this is the, you know, they got to buy this kind of equipment and go to this place. I imagine that's creating some real economic problems for some families.
DK: Absolutely. And this is one of the real sort of tragedies of youth sport in the United States today. It's by and large, a pay to play system, very, very different than it was, say, 40, 50 years ago. State and local governments have pulled back. We don't have a lot of public funding for youth sport. That means that a lot of kids and families, people who want to get their kids out there, they can't afford it. And so this has been talked about for a very, very long time. When I co-chaired a congressional commission on the state of the Olympic and Paralympic movement, we looked at the youth sport pipeline. We made a recommendation to Congress. We said, get back to publicly funding widespread youth sport participation. The American public really supports that.
GR: And so this builds off of what you just said. But again, extremely briefly, just a few seconds left, what kind of changes would you make then to make it better? It sounds like more funding is one and what else?
DK: Minimum safety regulations, not micromanaging T-ball leagues, not a government takeover, but really states and the federal government can do more to guarantee a minimum safety experience for kids.
GR: All right, we'll have to leave it there. That was Dionne Koller and again, her new book is titled, "More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Shape American Youth Sport." If you're getting frustrated with that drive that you just had to take for your kid to play in a tournament, this is the book to understand why you got where you are. Professor Koller, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. Really appreciate it.
DK: Thanks so much for having me.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
