Youth Sports in the US, 2026: 27M Athletes, $20B Market, and What It Means for League Admins

US youth sports closed 2025 as a roughly $20 billion industry, with around 27 million children aged 6 to 17 participating in organized leagues. The headline number obscures more than it reveals, participation grew in some sports, fell in others, and the operational reality of running a league shifted in ways nobody covers.

This piece is the attempt to put the right numbers next to the right experiences. Sources are the Aspen Institute Project Play State of Play 2025 report, SFIA participation data, and our own cohort of 80 leagues across 9 sports.

Participation, by sport

Soccer remains the largest organized youth sport in the US by participants, followed closely by basketball. Baseball has slowly recovered from a decade of decline. Flag football is the fastest-growing sport in the country among kids aged 6 to 12 - more on that below.

• Soccer: 5.6M kids in organized programs, up ~2% YoY. Most growth in U6 to U10.
• Basketball: 5.1M kids, flat YoY. Holds steady across all age groups.
• Baseball: 3.9M kids, up ~3% YoY after a decade of decline. Little League membership stabilized in 2024.
• Flag football: 1.6M kids, up 13% YoY. NFL investment + LA28 Olympic inclusion drove the spike. This is where new leagues are forming.
• Tackle football (under 14): 880K kids, down 5% YoY. Concussion concerns continue to push families toward flag.
• Hockey: 480K kids, flat. Cost is the binding constraint.

The money

US families spend, on average, $883 per child per sport per year on registration, equipment, travel, and apparel. Travel programs push that number above $4,000 for some sports (hockey, baseball showcases, lacrosse). Recreational community leagues, where most of the country still plays, average $200 to $400 per registration cycle.

The total $20B market breaks down roughly as: $7B on registrations, $5B on equipment and apparel, $4B on travel/lodging for travel programs, $2.5B on coaching and clinics, and $1.5B on facility costs and other. League management software is a tiny sliver - about $400M in 2025, growing 18% YoY as more leagues digitize away from spreadsheets.

The volunteer collapse

The number that does not show up on the financial side, but that explains everything: 1.6 million volunteers ran organized youth sports in 2025, down from 2.1M in 2019. The pandemic accelerated a long decline.

Fewer volunteers running the same number of programs means each admin handles more, burns out faster, and quits sooner. The average tenure of a volunteer league admin in 2025 was 2.3 seasons. In 2015 it was 4.1 seasons. The institutional knowledge of how to run a league is leaving faster than it is being replaced.

The operational implication is direct. Software that takes the admin from 6 hours a week down to 2 is no longer a productivity improvement. It is the difference between the league existing next year or not.

Where new leagues are forming

We tracked new league formations across our cohort and external registry data. Three patterns:

1. Flag football leagues in suburban Texas, Florida, and Georgia, most starting from scratch with no previous association infrastructure. These are admins running their first-ever league, with no spreadsheet legacy.
2. Pickleball youth leagues, niche, but the fastest-growing new league category by percentage. Small rosters (40 to 80 kids) typically tied to existing adult pickleball clubs.
3. Reformed local soccer associations, older leagues that lost their main admin and are rebuilding under a new board. These leagues already have rosters and history; they need a system that can import their data and pick up mid-season.

The participation gap

Project Play's most-cited finding: only 36.9% of kids from households earning under $25K play organized sports, vs 60.6% of kids from households earning over $100K. The gap narrowed slightly in 2024-25 thanks to municipal recreation league expansion, but it remains the dominant equity issue in US youth sports.

For league admins, the operational lever here is the scholarship / financial aid workflow. About 45% of community leagues offer some form of financial aid; only 60% of those track the application and approval cleanly. A simple scholarship workflow inside the registration flow can quietly double the number of low-income kids who actually enroll.

What this means for league admins right now

Three practical implications:

• If you run a soccer or flag football league, you are likely to grow 5% to 15% next season. Plan capacity (fields, coaches, equipment) for it.
• If you run baseball, the recovery is real but uneven - travel programs are growing faster than rec programs.
• The volunteer pool is your binding constraint. Anything that shaves an hour off a coach's week or an admin's weekend is worth more than any feature that does something fancy.

Where we go from here

The youth sports industry in 2026 is healthier than it was in 2020 by every quantitative measure, participation, revenue, coverage. But the people who hold it together are stretched thinner than ever. The next decade will be defined less by which sport dominates and more by whether the boring operational work of running a league becomes 5x easier or stays the same.

We are betting on 5x easier.