Private equity has become the face of everything families dislike about youth sports: rising fees, long drives, packed calendars, and the suspicion that every step in a child’s development now comes with another invoice.

Some of that criticism is earned. But making private equity the entire story is too convenient. Capital did not create the demand for better fields, dependable ice time, qualified coaches, or competitive opportunities. In many communities, investors moved into gaps that schools, municipalities, and volunteer organizations struggled to fill.

The harder question is what we intend to do about those gaps and what terms we set for the businesses filling them.

The Debate Has Moved

Congress is paying attention. In May 2026, Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Chris Deluzio introduced the Let Kids Play Act. It would restrict investors designated as “vulture investors” from owning youth sports entities and require covered investors to divest within two years. Its scope extends beyond clubs and leagues to facilities, tournaments, camps, and technology platforms. The measure remains a proposal, not an enacted remedy.

At a June House hearing, lawmakers heard competing accounts of private investment. The leader of a community hockey association described losing access to its home rink after an investor-backed operator bought the facility. A private sports center founder described how outside capital can help build places for local children to play. The hearing’s chair, Rep. Kevin Kiley, said two things could be true at the same time: investment can fill gaps left by declining local support, while consolidation and mandatory add-ons can leave families with fewer choices and higher bills.

That is a more useful starting point than deciding every investor must be either a savior or a villain.

Families have reason to be frustrated. The Aspen Institute’s Project Play found that the average sports family spent $1,016 on a child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46% from 2019. That is an average for one primary sport, not the cost of an elite travel season, and it does not show that private equity caused the increase. Higher registration, travel, lodging, camp, and instruction costs all contributed.

Why the Money Is Coming

Youth sports presents an attractive business opportunity: committed customers, recurring spending, and thousands of local operators that investors believe they can bring together. A family might pay a club, rent space at a facility, enter a tournament, book travel, buy video access, and seek training or recruiting help, all around the same athlete.

Bringing those services together could make the experience easier. It could also give one operator more opportunities to charge the same family.

The deals show how broad the opportunity has become. Unrivaled Sports raised $120 million in 2025 in a round led by Dick’s Sporting Goods, at a reported valuation above $650 million. GTCR-backed Ascent Sports Group acquired youth sports streaming platform LiveBarn in a deal reported at roughly $400 million. Investors are not simply buying teams. They are assembling facilities, events, technology, media, and services around participation.

One headline investment figure is most interesting to dig into. S&P Global Market Intelligence reported $2.11 billion in private equity and venture capital transactions in amateur sports in the first five months of 2026, compared with $550 million in all of 2025. But S&P says that increase was driven largely by TPG’s $2 billion acquisition of Learfield, a collegiate athletics services company. The figure shows investor interest in the broader amateur sports market. It does not mean $2.11 billion flowed into children’s leagues.

The story is substantial enough without over-indexing the numbers.

Investment Is Not Extraction

Better infrastructure costs money. A rink needs maintenance. A field needs lights. A well-run program needs trained coaches, background checks, scheduling, insurance, and staff who can stay longer than a season. Streaming can let relatives watch a game they otherwise would miss. Better technology can spare volunteers hours of administrative work.

The problem begins when an operator’s advantage comes less from improving those experiences than from controlling the choices around them.

If the same company controls the rink, the club, the league, and the tournament calendar, a family may have few practical alternatives, even when each charge appears voluntary on paper. If a tournament requires a designated hotel, or video and recruiting tools are presented as essential to being seen, the total bill is no longer captured by the team fee. These are among the practices lawmakers raised at the House hearing.

Ownership structure alone cannot tell a parent whether a program is good. A nonprofit can be poorly run; an investor-backed facility can serve its community well. The better test is whether an operator improves the experience, expands who can participate, and leaves families with real choices, or uses control of the pathway to make them spend more.

The Missing Middle

This is where the debate too often stops short. Restricting a particular kind of investor might curb harmful conduct. It does not, by itself, reopen a closed rink, add a school team, restore a town league, or find dependable coaches.

Project Play’s research offers an important reminder: community-based teams, free play, and school teams remain more common settings for children’s primary sports than travel clubs. That is the foundation of sport: free play, even if the private club pathway exerts growing influence as athletes get older.

We should protect affordable, local sports rather than treat them as a consolation prize for children who cannot afford something else. That requires public investment, but it need not require public ownership of every pool, rink, or indoor field. A school district or municipality could partner with a private operator for space and expertise while setting explicit terms for pricing, access, and community use. At the June hearing, witnesses pointed to partnerships between public agencies and private businesses as a way to bring in investment without surrendering those guardrails.

Premium academies and ambitious travel teams still have their place in the matrix. Families should be free to choose them. But premium cannot become the only credible way to play, improve, or be noticed.

Name, image, and likeness opportunities add another layer of pressure. Visible college athlete deals can make a child’s sports journey feel like an investment portfolio: training, results, video, audience, exposure. That perception may lead families to buy more services earlier, whether or not those purchases materially improve a child’s prospects. We should be especially wary of selling possibility as probability.

Better Terms for Capital

A serious youth sports investor should welcome questions that distinguish building from extraction. Before a municipality signs a facility agreement, a club sells, or a family commits to a season, the answers should be clear:

• What is the full cost of participation, including travel, admission, video, uniforms, and required add-ons?

• Which services are truly optional? Can a family decline them without limiting a child’s opportunity?

• Can independent teams use the facility or enter the event on fair terms?

• How many subsidized places are available, and can families find and use them?

• What happens to community access, pricing, and existing programs after an acquisition?

• Who can use a child’s video, performance data, and likeness, and for what purpose?

• Does the model keep more children playing over time, or does it depend on moving families into increasingly expensive tiers?

Those questions apply to every operator, not only private equity.

Private capital did not break youth sports. It found a system with unmet demand, uneven public support, and families willing to make enormous sacrifices for their children. In some places, it has helped improve several underlying systems that have not been updated for centuries. In other places, those entities have gained leverage over families with nowhere else to go.

If policymakers focus only on getting investors out, they may leave the underlying shortage untouched. If investors focus only on capturing more of each family’s spending, they will prove their critics right.

The better ambition is to build enough affordable, local, well-run places to play that private providers have to earn families’ business, not rely on families having no alternative.

I understand why some in the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement are celebrating the Senate’s passage of the Protect College Sports Act. They fought for provisions intended to protect sports, scholarships, and walk-on opportunities. Those are worth defending. The Senate passed the bill 77–22, and it now faces an uncertain path through the House.

I can find no reason to celebrate.

The problem is not protecting college roster spots. It is treating those protections as though they secure Team USA’s future, or as though they justify giving the institutions that govern college sports more legal protection without comparable power for athletes. The Olympic movement’s own history warns that a federally recognized governance structure does not, by itself, ensure athletes have the economic resources or influence they need. The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act gives athletes formal representation in USOPC governance, but a seat in that structure is not the same as control over how the movement creates and shares value.

The athletes we will cheer at LA28 began developing more than a decade ago. The leadership in Colorado Springs will have every opportunity to stand beside them, celebrate their medals, and present those results as evidence that the current system works. But those athletes came through youth, club, college, and national-team pathways built more than a decade before today’s decisions about who gets access, who gets a roster spot, and who can afford to keep competing.

The old system was far from equal or perfect. It did, however, give many athletes room to develop through school and community sports, followed by college programs that offered coaching, facilities, competition, and time. Now families face rising costs at the grassroots level, while college teams and developmental roster spots face mounting pressure.

The USOPC knows how much it depends on college sports. In Paris, 75% of the U.S. Olympic team and 53% of the U.S. Paralympic team had competed collegiately. That makes non-revenue sports and developmental roster spots worth defending. It also makes the cuts happening now a warning, not a problem a Senate bill provision can solve.

The bill does not bring back the developmental rosters that existed before House v. NCAA. At qualifying schools, it temporarily protects an aggregate count of non-revenue-sport roster spots and athletic-aid opportunities based on 2024–25. Schools can still shift opportunities among sports, some can seek waivers, and the requirements eventually expire.

READ THAT ONE AGAIN! - the requirements eventually expire!

A floor under the total doesn't guarantee a spot for a particular team, walk-on, or late bloomer.

Nor does it restore programs schools have already cut. A report from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office says colleges have eliminated more than 100 women’s and Olympic-sport programs since 2023. We should also be honest about the national picture: Division I teams and roster spots have increased over the past five years. Both facts can be true. A new roster spot at one school does not reopen a discontinued swimming program at another or replace the coaching and developmental route it offered athletes in its community.

That is why I resist calling the bill’s roster provisions a solution to the Team USA pipeline. They may prevent some future cuts at some schools. They do not rebuild lost programs, guarantee opportunities in every sport, or address whether a young athlete can afford to reach a college roster in the first place.

With the Los Angeles Games in 2028 and the Utah Winter Games in 2034, the USOPC has an extraordinary platform on American soil. Its leaders should use that platform to confront a weakening pathway from school and community sports through college and beyond. They should stop treating the nonprofit governance structure established under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act as a reason not to rethink how the movement creates and shares value. Public-interest governance and a parallel commercial model that sends more resources to athletes and the organizations developing them can coexist.

Instead, they are celebrating narrow protections in a bill that would give college sports institutions more legal power, while leaving the USOPC’s own authority largely unquestioned, without confronting who will fund the next generation of Team USA.

A strong medal count in LA28 would show what an earlier generation of opportunities made possible. It would not vindicate the people currently governing the system, and it would say nothing about whether a child entering sport today can afford to become a future member of Team USA.

I made that distinction in The Broken Pipeline: college sports can keep producing visible success while the opportunities behind it contract. Teams and developmental roster spots matter not only to the athletes currently on them, but also to late bloomers who need time, coaching, and competition before anyone knows what they might become.

The pressure starts well before a college coach offers a roster spot. Rising costs shape who can enter and remain in youth sports. After college, too many Olympic and Paralympic athletes must piece together jobs, family support, and fundraising to continue competing. As I argued in Private Equity Didn’t Break Youth Sports, blaming the latest source of private capital misses the longer retreat from accessible, school-based opportunities.

College sports is essential to the Team USA pipeline, but it is not the whole pipeline. Congress cannot rebuild that pathway by declaring a few campus safeguards and calling the job done, nor should it be asked to do the work that sports institutions have failed to do themselves.

That work belongs to athletes, colleges, clubs, national governing bodies, sponsors, and investors. They should build a stronger commercial model that sends more of the value athletes create back to athletes and to the organizations doing the coaching and development. They do not need Congress to run that model, and they do not need the institutions already in control to own every part of it.

Congress does have a responsibility when sports institutions ask for special treatment under federal law. The Senate-passed bill would establish national rules and give the organizations enforcing them specified legal protections. Before granting those protections, the House should ask what athletes receive in return: fair treatment, a meaningful share of the value they create, the freedom to earn from their skills and public profiles, enforceable rights, a real voice in the rules that govern them, and accountability for promises made in their name.

I want lasting protections for Olympic and Paralympic sports. But I cannot celebrate provisions that give institutions greater control without giving athletes comparable opportunity, economic power, and a meaningful say in their future, or offering a credible plan to keep the pathway open for those coming next.

Are we protecting the opportunities and a route for the next generation, or protecting the institutions that have failed to build one?

As the parent of a future college athlete, I am saying ‘NO’ to the Protect College Sports Act.

And shame on the NCAA for using a database of young people it encourages families to enter as early as sixth grade to lobby those children and their parents for legislation that primarily expands the NCAA’s own power.

An email sent to the NCAA Eligibility Center database

the only way I know is my 17-year-old son forwarded it to me asking if he should act on it

is framed as a friendly invitation to “get involved.” It tells students and families that Congress is considering a bill that would “protect the opportunities you’re working toward,” and then directs them to contact their senators in support of the bill.

But that message carries a different weight when it comes from the organization that controls a crucial gate on the path to NCAA participation.

The NCAA Eligibility Center says that students may register at any age and specifically encourages sixth graders considering college sports to create a Profile Page. It also makes clear that students who want to compete at an NCAA school must register with the Eligibility Center. That gives the NCAA a direct line to families long before a child is old enough to understand federal legislation, antitrust law, labor rights, NIL policy, or the tradeoffs embedded in a major college-sports bill.

That should concern every parent and school administrator.

A Captive Audience Is Not Advocacy

The problem is not that the NCAA has an opinion. Every organization has the right to advocate for its preferred public policy.

The problem is the relationship between the NCAA and the people receiving the message.

A sixth grader or any child under the age of 18 exploring college athletics is not able to vote, let alone a policy insider. Most parents are not policy insiders and take what the NCAA says as fact, and will oblige because the NCAA is the gatekeeper to their student-athlete’s future. We are trying to help our children make sound decisions about education, health, academic eligibility, athletic development, recruiting, costs, and future opportunities. We reasonably assume that an eligibility registration system exists to protect and help a child navigate the path to college sports, not to turn our family into a lobbying target for the organization that may someday regulate our child.

The NCAA email asks families to:

• Learn about the Act through the NCAA’s own advocacy page.

• Contact their senator “with a click of a button.”

• Share the message with teammates, coaches, administrators, and family.

• Support a bill presented as necessary to protect health care, scholarships, NIL rights, agent regulation, and women’s and Olympic sports.

Those are legitimate subjects for public debate. But presenting the NCAA’s preferred legislation as a straightforward, child-centered protection package leaves out the central question:

Who gains new authority, and who loses leverage?

The NCAA’s own advocacy materials describe a proposal that would preempt certain state laws, establish nationwide rules on eligibility and transfers, and provide targeted antitrust protection for NCAA enforcement of rules governing eligibility, transfers, academic requirements, and revenue sharing. That is not a minor technical adjustment to the current system. It is a major shift in the legal balance among athletes, schools, conferences, and the NCAA.

Parents should not be encouraged to click a button before they have been given an honest explanation of what that button supports, and what it actually means for their child and family.

College Sports Does Not Need Immunity

Tom Farrey recently called the Cruz-Cantwell approach a “Frankenstein-like bill” aimed at “saving” college sports. The phrase is spot on.

College sports has real problems.

• The transfer portal can be chaotic.

• NIL arrangements need transparency and consumer protections.

• Athletes deserve health protections, meaningful academic support, safeguards against predatory agents, fair access to representation, and stronger enforcement against bad actors.

But none of that requires Congress to give the NCAA and its member institutions broad protection from antitrust scrutiny.

The NCAA and college leaders have had decades to build a fairer and more durable system. READ THAT AGAIN! AND AGAIN!

They could have created transparent NIL rules, meaningful health care protections, enforceable scholarship commitments, athlete representation, and sensible transfer standards long before Congress became their preferred escape hatch.

They could have treated athletes as essential partners in a multibillion-dollar enterprise rather than people to be regulated from above.

Instead, the Protect College Sports Act asks Congress to create nationwide rules while providing the NCAA and its member institutions special legal protection to enforce them. The Senate’s description of the legislation includes NIL requirements and a limited antitrust exemption related to certain joint media-rights arrangements. The broader NCAA-backed policy agenda also seeks protection for institutional authority over athlete compensation, transfers, and eligibility.

That should make every parent, administrator, coach, guidance counselor, and fan stop and ask what is actually happening.

When an organization repeatedly loses in court, or faces credible legal challenges to restrictive rules, the answer should not automatically be to change the law so that the organization can no longer be challenged. The answer should be to ask whether the rules are fair in the first place.

Here is what no one is talking about:

• College sports is not on the verge of disappearing if Congress rejects the NCAA’s preferred legislation.

• Ratings are strong.

• NIL has helped some elite athletes remain in school longer.

• Women’s sports are growing.

• Niche sports are finding audiences.

• The commercial center of college athletics is not as fragile as the NCAA’s lobbying rhetoric suggests.

The question is not whether college sports will survive without special protection. It will.

The question is whether Congress will use this moment to build a system that gives athletes meaningful rights, or simply reinforce the authority of institutions that have governed without adequate athlete voice or accountability.

The Olympic Warning

There is one important point where the claim that college sports will be fine requires more caution: the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline may not be fine.

The United States may lead the medal table at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. That would not prove the underlying system is healthy. Olympic outcomes lag institutional decisions by years. The athletes likely to compete in Los Angeles were developed through college, club, and high-performance systems that existed before the recent acceleration of roster reductions, sport eliminations, and resource concentration.

A strong showing in 2028 could mask, rather than disprove, the erosion already underway.

For decades, college athletics has provided much more than scholarships to athletes in non-commercial sports. Colleges have supplied coaching, facilities, athletic training, medical support, regular high-level competition, teammate depth, academic structure, recruiting networks, and a bridge between youth participation and international performance.

For many Olympic and Paralympic athletes, particularly late bloomers and athletes from middle-income families without access to elite private club systems, a college roster has been the pathway.

When institutions cut teams, reduce roster sizes, eliminate walk-on opportunities, or redirect resources toward football and basketball, they do more than rebalance an athletic department budget. They reduce the developmental capacity on which swimming, track and field, rowing, wrestling, gymnastics, diving, and other Olympic sports have depended.

The immediate loss may be one team or one roster spot. The longer-term loss is a generation of athletes who never receive the coaching, competition, support, or time needed to become elite.

The decline of college-supported Olympic-sport pathways does not show up immediately on a medal stand. It first appears as fewer young athletes continuing beyond high school, fewer developmental opportunities, fewer late bloomers, fewer affordable options outside wealthy regions, and fewer athletes who can take the risk of pursuing international competition. By the time the impact is evident in medal counts, the missing generation of developing athletes will be difficult to replace.

The warning is especially relevant because college programs have historically supplied a central part of the U.S. Olympic talent infrastructure.

Private markets do not reliably replace that infrastructure. Strong club systems may exist in selected sports and affluent regions, but they are expensive, unevenly distributed, and inaccessible to many families. Where college sports once offered partial scholarships, walk-on opportunities, large training groups, subsidized coaching, and institutional facilities, the replacement can become a pay-to-participate system shaped increasingly by geography and family wealth.

That is why the meaningful question is not whether the United States can win medals in 2028. It can and most likely will, and the hype and results will sweep the long-term problem further under the rug and out of the spotlight.

The question arising from the LA28 success is whether the country will retain the broad, affordable, and geographically diverse development system needed to sustain Olympic and Paralympic success in 2032, 2036, and beyond.

Farrey is right to reject the NCAA’s apocalypse narrative. College sports will not collapse if Congress refuses to give the NCAA the legal protections it wants. But “college sports is doing fine” and “the Olympic development pipeline is secure” are not the same claim.

The commercial center of college athletics may be healthy while the development system for Olympic sports becomes increasingly fragile.

Institutional Protection Is Not Athlete Protection

Families should also consider the broader warning from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic system.

The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act created a federally recognized structure intended to support American Olympic and Paralympic sport. But formal institutional status, nonprofit governance, patriotic language, and athlete-centered messaging have not guaranteed that athletes can earn a sustainable living from their sport or that they have meaningful power over the institutions governing them.

A recent account of a U.S. bobsled athlete illustrates the economic reality. Competing at a high level in the sport required him to maintain a full-time engineering job and rent out his home while competing internationally. Even a place on the top USA Bobsled team could provide no more than approximately $1,200 per month.

That is not merely a story about one athlete’s resourcefulness. It reflects a structural reality across much of Olympic sport.

Athletes in many non-commercial sports sustain their careers through outside employment, flexible employers, family resources, a spouse’s income, personal assets, fundraising, camps, coaching, appearances, and occasional sponsorships. They are expected to train and compete at an international level while also assembling the personal financial infrastructure needed to remain in the system.

Take away the outside job, flexible employer, family support, rental income, personal assets, and side work, and the picture becomes clearer. Sport-derived income alone would leave most Olympic-pathway athletes below a meaningful threshold for self-sufficiency. For many, it would leave them below the federal poverty line.

The athlete may wear a national-team uniform, but often still personally finances the opportunity to represent the country.

That is the lesson Congress should take from the Olympic model. Institutional legal protection does not automatically produce athlete economic security. Nonprofit status does not equal accountability. A national governing structure does not guarantee meaningful athlete voice. A system can invoke education, national pride, health, and opportunity while still relying on athletes’ financial precarity, private resources, and limited bargaining power.

Congress should not repeat that mistake in college sports.

The answer is not to give the NCAA broad new legal insulation and hope its institutions preserve Olympic opportunities voluntarily. Nor is the answer to pretend that college sports has no responsibility for the youth and Olympic ecosystems from which it draws talent.

If Congress creates a federal framework, that framework should require real athlete rights, independent oversight, financial transparency, meaningful governance power, and measurable commitments to preserve participation pathways.

Stability Cannot Mean Silencing Athletes

Supporters call the Protect College Sports Act a path to “stability.” The NCAA says that the proposal would replace a patchwork of state laws, preserve a five-year eligibility framework, allow reasonable transfer limits, strengthen enforcement, and codify athlete protections. Those protections include post-eligibility health care, degree-completion support, scholarship guarantees, NIL privacy, agent-fee limits, and representation on governance boards.

Some of those provisions are constructive. They deserve a place in any eventual national solution.

But parents should not be forced to choose between chaos and NCAA control.

A better system would pair national standards with genuine athlete power:

• Independent health and safety protections that athletic departments cannot weaken.

• Guaranteed multiyear scholarships and meaningful degree-completion assistance.

• Strong oversight of agents, collectives, and NIL intermediaries.

• Transparent NIL agreements and practical protections against exploitation.

• Meaningful athlete representation with actual voting authority, not simply a seat at an advisory table.

• A lawful process for athletes to organize and bargain collectively where appropriate.

• Rules created with athletes, rather than simply imposed on them.

• Protections for non-commercial sports and Olympic development pathways that cannot be discarded solely because they are not immediately profitable.

Professional leagues do not solve every problem. But they demonstrate an important principle: when compensation, mobility, eligibility, commercial rights, and working conditions are at stake, the people whose labor creates the product should have a meaningful role in negotiating the rules.

It is also important to be accurate about the legal history. The Northwestern football unionization effort did not result in an NLRB ruling that college athletes are employees. In 2015, the National Labor Relations Board declined to assert jurisdiction rather than deciding the employee-status question on the merits.

Families deserve an honest conversation about athlete rights. They do not need rhetoric that treats employment status and collective bargaining as settled questions. Nor do they need legal uncertainty used as a reason to give institutions more control while athletes remain outside the room.

The broader point is clear: Congress should not use a college-sports bill to reduce athletes’ legal and economic leverage while granting more protection to the institutions that already dominate the system.

Youth Sports Cannot Be Ignored

The most consequential omission in this debate is what it says, or deliberately omits, about youth and school sports.

College athletics does not exist in isolation. Its incentives flow downward. Families experience them through year-round travel schedules, private training bills, club dues, showcase fees, recruiting pressure, early specialization, injury risks, and the growing assumption that every 11- or 12-year-old needs to begin building a college-sports résumé.

Youth and school sports touch the lives of roughly 30 million young people. Yet only a small percentage of high school athletes will compete in college. The college recruiting ecosystem can nevertheless make families behave as if every child’s future depends on entering the race early and never stepping out.

Parents are increasingly dissatisfied with the costs, pressure, specialization, and uneven safety protections built into this model. Yet Congress is considering a proposal that would entrench important incentives within that system without a serious public examination of its downstream effects or a requirement that college sports help improve the broader ecosystem.

That is why it is especially troubling that the NCAA is sending a political call to action into a pipeline that reaches children as young as sixth grade.

A young athlete’s contact information should not be treated as a political asset. A family’s decision to understand eligibility should not become implied consent to participate in institutional lobbying.

Before Congress creates a new federal college-sports framework, it should examine:

• Whether the framework will make youth sports more accessible or more expensive.

• Whether it will reduce or intensify pressure for early specialization.

• Whether it will improve health, safety, and long-term athlete development.

• Whether it will reduce the advantage held by families able to afford elite club systems.

• Whether major college sports institutions will be required to invest in community, school, and youth sports access.

• Whether young athletes and parents will have a meaningful voice before national rules are adopted.

• Whether Olympic and Paralympic development will remain available to talented athletes who do not come from affluent families or elite private pipelines.

The Senate’s September 15 cloture vote, 74 to 24, to begin consideration of the Protect College Sports Act makes this debate immediate.

That urgency is exactly why families should not be rushed into clicking a button in an NCAA advocacy email.

What Congress Should Do

I am not asking Congress to ignore college sports. I am asking Congress to do its job more thoroughly.

Before granting special antitrust protection to the NCAA and its member institutions, lawmakers should conduct a full public examination of how this legislation would affect athletes, families, youth sports, women’s sports, Olympic and Paralympic pathways, lower-resource schools, and communities already priced out of the escalating youth-sports system.

Congress should insist on a framework that:

• Protects athletes’ independent legal rights rather than insulating institutions from accountability behind nonprofit status.

• Requires authentic athlete participation in decision-making, including voting power where policy directly affects athletes.

• Separates health and safety oversight from athletic departments’ financial interests.

• Protects education without using the term “student-athlete” to deny economic reality.

• Establishes meaningful safeguards for youth-sports access, affordability, safety, and inclusion.

• Requires college sports to contribute to, rather than merely extract from, the wider U.S. sport ecosystem.

• Protects Olympic and Paralympic development pathways by preserving participation opportunities, roster access, scholarships, and institutional capacity in non-commercial sports.

• Makes any federal preemption or antitrust protection conditional on enforceable public-interest obligations, not voluntary promises.

My child’s future, and any young person’s future in sports, should not be used to sell Congress a bill that gives the NCAA more control, more insulation, and more authority without demanding sufficient accountability in return.

So, to the NCAA:

stop treating young people in your Eligibility Center database as a ready-made lobbying list.

And to Congress:

do not confuse protecting college sports with protecting the institution that has long governed it.

Protect the athletes. Protect the families. Protect the children entering this system years before they can vote, and long before they can understand the political campaign being conducted in their name.

For years, I have been all in on wearable technology.

Not casually interested. Not simply wearing a watch to count miles. I have been deeply engaged, maybe even a little obsessed, with what smart sensors, health platforms, and performance apps might reveal about how I train, sleep, recover, work, travel, and live.

I have tried most of it: running watches, rings, sleep trackers, recovery platforms, heart rate monitors, cycling computers, smart goggles, activity sensors, and apps designed to make sense of nearly every signal coming from the body. If it measured readiness, stress, sleep, heart rate, training load, pace, movement, or recovery, I was interested.

Some of it has been useful. Much of it is technically impressive. A few products have genuinely changed how I train and how I think about performance.

But over time, I have begun asking a more fundamental question:

Why does this technology deserve a place on my body and in my mind?

That is the question the wearable technology industry needs to answer more honestly.

The Battle for Real Estate

Wearable technology is now deeply embedded in health, wellness, performance, and sport. Watches and trackers sit on wrists all day. Rings capture sleep data through the night. Apps assign scores to recovery, stress, readiness, cardiovascular health, and activity. Sensors are being built into shoes, glasses, footbeds, clothing, bikes, goggles, and almost anything that can sit close to the human body.

The premise is powerful. Better data should lead to better decisions. Better decisions should lead to better health, more sustainable training, improved performance, and perhaps a longer, more capable life.

In theory, that makes sense.

But the market is crowded with companies that remain more focused on the technology than the person using it. They celebrate the precision of the sensor, the sophistication of the algorithm, the volume of data collected, and the elegance of the dashboard. They often spend less time considering the emotional reality of the consumer experience.

The human body is not simply another data source, and a person’s attention is not free real estate.

To wear a device is to invite it into intimate parts of daily life: sleep, fatigue, movement, anxiety, aging, ambition, recovery, and self-image. A company is not simply asking a consumer to purchase hardware. It is asking for access to routine, attention, trust, and judgment.

That is a much bigger request than the industry often acknowledges.

I have not rejected technology. I have become more intentional about when I use it, where it belongs, and what I expect it to do.

Today, I wear technology primarily when I am training and when it has a clear, practical job. The best tools help me understand the work, improve the experience, or make the activity safer. They support the session without becoming the focus of it.

When I run, I use a Garmin watch and Avelo shoes.

The Garmin gives me the information I need: pace, distance, route, effort, and heart rate when it is useful. It helps frame the run without turning every mile into a negotiation with a screen. The Avelo shoes represent a newer, potentially more interesting category of performance technology. They are still earning their place in my personal fitness technology stack, but the opportunity is clear. Sensors are moving closer to the actual mechanics of running, enabling us to understand how we move, not simply how far or how fast we go.

When I swim, I wear FORM goggles.

This is technology that fits naturally into the activity. In the pool, real-time information can be genuinely useful. Pace, intervals, distance, and performance feedback can influence what happens during the workout, not just summarize it afterward. The data is immediate, relevant, and connected directly to the work being done.

When I ride, I use a bike computer, power meter, heart rate monitor, and flashing radar light.

Each tool has a defined purpose. The bike computer provides navigation and the broader context of the ride. The power meter helps quantify effort and manage intensity, particularly on longer rides or structured training days. The heart rate monitor provides another useful layer of context around effort, fatigue, and how the body is responding. And the radar light may be the most valuable technology of all. It improves situational awareness, alerting me to approaching vehicles and making the road environment a little more manageable.

Not every piece of athletic technology needs to promise optimization. Sometimes its greatest contribution is safety.

That has become my standard:

Does this technology have a legitimate job to do?

Technology Should Serve the Moment

The difference between useful technology and intrusive technology is often simple.

Useful technology is present when it improves a specific moment. Intrusive technology continues collecting, scoring, interpreting, and commenting long after its value has diminished.

A runner may benefit from pace and heart rate data during a training session. A swimmer may benefit from live feedback in a structured workout. A cyclist may benefit from navigation and a radar alert on an open road.

But that does not mean the same person needs a device interpreting every hour of every day.

The modern wellness ecosystem has built much of its business around continuous tracking. More data is assumed to be better. More measurements are assumed to produce better insights. More insights are assumed to create better behavior.

That chain is not always true.

More data can create clarity, but it can also create noise. It can lead people to question how they feel until an app confirms it. It can turn sleep into a test, recovery into a score, and training into a negotiation with an algorithm.

A person wakes up feeling rested, but the readiness score is low. Suddenly, they are unsure whether to trust their own feelings and experience.

A person feels tired after a difficult week of work, travel, family commitments, and training, but the app suggests they are ready to go. They may ignore a signal that deserves more attention.

The issue is not that the technology is wrong. The issue is that the technology is incomplete.

A device can measure selected signals. It cannot fully understand the context of a life.

The Body Is Still the Best Sensor

We have become remarkably good at handing over judgment to devices.

Before a run, many people check the score. Before a hard workout, they check recovery. After a night of sleep, they check whether the algorithm agrees that it was restorative. We have been trained to look first at a dashboard and only then at ourselves.

I am trying to reverse that order.

Right now, I am enjoying the silence that comes from not being tracked all day. I am listening more closely to what my body is telling me before looking to an app to give me an answer.

That does not mean abandoning data. It means returning data to its proper role.

The body communicates constantly. It tells us when effort feels easy or disproportionately hard. It tells us when soreness is ordinary training fatigue and when it may be developing into something more persistent. It tells us when sleep has been thin for several nights, when travel has taken a toll, when stress is beginning to accumulate, and when a workout should be adjusted.

Those signals are not perfect. They are influenced by mood, motivation, emotion, weather, workload, and habit. But they are real. Often, they are richer than a single number on a phone screen.

The best wearable technology should strengthen that awareness, not replace it.

A Periodic Return to Data

I may return to more continuous tracking at some point.

Maybe it will be quarterly. Maybe twice a year. I have not decided yet.

There is a strong case for using wearable technology as a periodic check-in rather than a permanent presence. A few weeks or a month of more comprehensive tracking could reveal patterns that are hard to see in the normal pace of life: changes in sleep consistency, resting heart rate, recovery, training load, stress, or the accumulated effect of travel and work.

Used this way, technology becomes a diagnostic tool.

It can help confirm an instinct, identify a pattern, or raise a question worth exploring. It can offer a more objective view of a season of training or a demanding stretch of life without requiring every day to be graded.

That may be a healthier relationship with the category for many people.

Technology should not become a permanent referee in the relationship between an individual and their body. It should be a resource available when needed.

A readiness score can be a prompt. It should not be a verdict.

The Design Challenge Ahead

The greatest opportunity in wearable technology is not simply to build better hardware.

It is building products that understand the difference between measurement and meaning.

The companies that win will not necessarily be those that collect the most data, send the most notifications, or persuade users to wear a device every hour of every day. They will be the companies that create trust by being genuinely useful.

They will know when to provide information and when to remain quiet.

They will respect the reality that people do not live inside a controlled laboratory. They live complicated lives. They train around work, school, travel, children, stress, injuries, relationships, and changing priorities. They do not need another system telling them they have failed because sleep was imperfect or because a hard day did not produce the right score.

They need tools that help them make better decisions in the real world.

That requires a more human centered approach to product design.

A runner should want to use the technology on the trail because it clarifies the run.

A swimmer should want it in the pool because it improves the workout.

A cyclist should trust it on the road because it adds awareness and safety.

When the session ends, the user should be able to take the technology off without feeling as though they are missing something essential.

What Earns Its Place

The future of this space will not be determined only by sensor accuracy, artificial intelligence, hardware design, or the next wave of health data integration.

The biggest question we need to ask is whether a product earns its place.

Does it help someone train better without making training more complicated?

Does it improve safety without creating fear?

Does it provide useful context without creating dependency?

Does it make a person more aware of their body, or more dependent on a screen?

For me, the answer is becoming clearer.

I want technology when I am running, swimming, or riding because it can improve those activities. I want it when it has a defined purpose. I want it when it offers a useful signal, greater awareness, or practical protection.

But I do not need it to narrate the rest of my life.

For now, I am choosing more silence. More instinct. More attention to what the body is already saying.

Perhaps that is the real promise of great wearable technology: not that it teaches us to trust the machine more than ourselves, but that it helps us become better listeners when the machine is turned off.

It comes up on every call. It appears on virtually every membership page, investor deck, and brand-strategy document. It is embedded in the language of fitness clubs, endurance events, training platforms, run crews, cycling concepts, wellness spaces, outdoor brands, and digital subscriptions.

The pitch is familiar:

Join the community.
Become part of the community.
Pay for access to our community.

But community is not a product feature. It is not a line item in a benefits grid. It is not a premium amenity that can be placed behind an annual fee, bundled with programming, or offered in exchange for a monthly charge.

A membership can be sold. Community cannot.

Memberships, Subscriptions, and Entries Are Transactions

Memberships, subscriptions, and event entries are clear commercial exchanges. A person pays for something, and an organization delivers something in return.

That value may be substantial:

• Access to a facility, clubhouse, trails, equipment, recovery services, or workspace.

• Coaching, classes, training plans, and expert guidance.

• Discounts, priority entry, insurance, race registration, or equipment benefits.

• Curated trips, rides, runs, events, and social programming.

• Family programming, youth activities, child care, hospitality, or convenience.

• Content, data, digital tools, and a more structured experience around a sport.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. A well-designed membership should be direct about what it offers and why someone should pay for it.

The problem begins when “community” becomes shorthand for a weak or insufficiently differentiated value proposition. Instead of explaining the tangible value of the service, the brand sells the implied emotional promise of belonging.

That is a different, and much more precarious, claim.

Community Is What Happens Between People

A real community is not primarily the relationship between an organization and its customers. It is the relationship among people connected through a shared activity, identity, place, ritual, or purpose.

It develops over time. It is voluntary. It has its own rhythms, inside references, leaders, traditions, tensions, friendships, and points of view. It does not need to be administered into existence. And it does not disappear simply because a company changes its pricing, updates its app, loses a sponsor, changes ownership, or shifts to a new business model.

Community is horizontal.

It is the runner who sees another familiar name in a Strava group and sends a note: “A few of us are running at 6:30 tomorrow, want to join?”

It is the small group that organically turns a Saturday ride into coffee afterward.

It is the swimmer who initially comes for lane access but keeps returning because of the people on deck.

It is the group chat that starts around a race and becomes a place for training advice, job leads, family updates, injury support, and plans unrelated to the organization that originally brought everyone together.

No membership platform created those relationships. At most, it created the conditions in which they could happen.

That is an important distinction.

The Strava Test

The simplest way to identify real community is to ask a simple question:

If the organization, subscription, app, facility, or membership structure disappeared tomorrow, would the people still find one another?

Would they still organize a workout? Meet for coffee after a run? Travel to a race together? Share advice? Support one another through injury, a job change, or a difficult stretch of life? Continue using the same routes, meeting at the same trailhead, or observing the same small rituals?

If the answer is yes, there may be a real community.

If the answer is no, there may be a customer base, an audience, a loyalty program, an event field, a membership roster, or a well-managed group experience. Each can be valuable. None should be dismissed. But none is automatically community.

A Strava group can be more of a community than a branded, fee-gated “community” with polished content, private events, and a sophisticated membership funnel. The difference is not the platform, the price point, or the brand aesthetic. The difference lies in whether people relate to one another in ways that are self-directed and durable.

Why the Difference Matters

The industry’s confusion between membership and community is not merely a language problem. It produces bad strategy.

When organizations assume they can build community by charging dues and organizing events, they often overestimate the strength of the relationships in their ecosystem. They mistake attendance for affinity. They mistake activity for belonging. They mistake a database of paying members for a social network with its own agency.

They also create the wrong expectations.

A customer can reasonably expect the things a membership explicitly promises: access, programming, hospitality, coaching, discounts, facilities, events, content, and service.

But no organization can guarantee friendship. It cannot guarantee social chemistry. It cannot guarantee that a new member will feel known, included, or at home.

Those outcomes may occur. They may be among the most meaningful consequences of participation. But they are not inventory.

When “community” becomes the headline benefit, brands are effectively asking people to pay for belonging. That can feel transactional at best and manipulative at worst; particularly when the underlying offer rests on scarcity, status, access, and a well-managed sales funnel.

Community Has Become a Catch-All

Part of the problem is that “community” has become a catch-all word for nearly every social or relational function around a sports brand.

A company says it wants to “build community,” but what does it actually mean?

Does it mean acquiring customers? Retaining subscribers? Recruiting ambassadors? Paying affiliates? Partnering with creators? Generating user content? Activating local clubs? Hosting events? Building a loyalty program? Developing an owned social channel? Finding product testers? Creating a referral loop?

Those are all legitimate business activities. They may all matter. But they are not the same thing, and calling each of them “community” blurs the work instead of clarifying it.

A creator may have reach. An affiliate may drive measurable sales. An ambassador may lend credibility. An early customer may provide useful feedback. A local run club may offer access to an existing social network. A loyalty program may improve repeat purchases. A branded event may generate content and bring people into the funnel.

None of those things is automatically community.

The imprecision is not harmless. It turns community into a euphemism for customer acquisition, content production, social proof, and retention. It also leads organizations to believe they own relationships that they merely benefit from, or, worse, that they can manufacture belonging by placing a logo, a signup form, and a recurring payment mechanism around a group of people.

A more disciplined organization uses more disciplined language.

Call creators creators. Call affiliates affiliates. Call ambassadors ambassadors. Call customers customers. Call a paid product a membership or subscription. Call a local run club an independent run club. Call engagement engagement. Call retention retention.

And reserve “community” for what it actually describes: the voluntary, self-directed relationships that develop among people and endure beyond the company’s ability to program, monetize, or control them.

A Better Way to Say It

Organizations do not need to banish the word. They need to use it with more humility and precision.

A company can credibly say:

• We create opportunities to meet people who share your interests.

• We host rides, runs, races, classes, gatherings, and local events.

• We provide a physical or digital home base for people pursuing an active life.

• We make it easier for people to participate consistently.

• We create repeat occasions for members to spend time together.

• We support local leaders, club captains, coaches, volunteers, and organizers.

• We provide the structure, place, tools, and hospitality that make connection more likely.

Those are substantial claims. They are also honest ones.

The language shifts from “buy our community” to “join a club, platform, event, or program that gives you meaningful reasons and repeated opportunities to connect.”

The organization sells what it controls. Participants create what it does not.

What Organizations Can Build

Sports and wellness businesses can build excellent membership propositions. They can build clubs, facilities, events, routes, coaching platforms, content products, race series, training groups, hospitality experiences, and digital networks.

They can build the scaffolding.

They can also cultivate conditions in which community is more likely to emerge:

• Consistent, recurring opportunities for people to participate together.

• Welcoming environments that lower the social friction of joining in.

• Space for member-led rides, runs, workouts, events, and traditions.

• Recognition for volunteer leadership rather than top-down control of every interaction.

• Shared rituals that become meaningful through repetition.

• A tolerance for organic interaction that does not always serve the brand’s content calendar or conversion funnel.

• A willingness to let members connect and organize beyond the company’s direct control.

But the moment an organization tries to own every interaction, monetize every gathering, control every message, and make every relationship contingent on continued payment, it stops nurturing community and starts managing customer retention.

Those are different objectives.

Let’s Call It What It Is

There is no shame in being a membership organization.

A gym is a gym. A private club is a private club. A training platform is a training platform. A race series is a race series. A subscription is a subscription. A Strava group is a digital gathering place. A loyalty program is a loyalty program.

Each can offer real value. Each can bring people into closer proximity. Each can become the setting in which genuine relationships form.

But the relationship is not the product.

The strongest operators understand this. They do not hide a transactional offer behind vague claims of belonging. They make the membership proposition compelling on its own terms: exceptional access, useful services, thoughtful programming, hospitality, expertise, convenience, and a distinctive sense of place.

Then they do something more difficult: they make room for people to create their own connections.

Community is not a benefit that a brand hands down to its members. It is what members build with one another when the brand has done enough to bring them together, and has the good sense not to confuse the invitation with the outcome.

I drew this a long time ago.

It was the Competitor Group (CGI) era. Rock ‘n’ Roll was the biggest marathon series in the world; Competitor magazine was still landing in mailboxes and free at specialty retail stores; Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, and VeloNews were on the newsstand; and every strategy conversation in the building came back to the same question: how do we turn a race entry into a relationship?

We were, at the time, very good at the top of the funnel. We knew how to buy runners into the start line. What we could not quite figure out, and what the whole industry could not quite figure out, was what to do with them once they said yes, and how to bring them back after they crossed the finish line.

So I started doodling and sketching what I saw as the connected runner consumer journey.

A single connected loop, with transactions marked wherever the runner was already reaching for a wallet, and a scribbled note at the bottom that has aged better than almost anything else on the page: everyone is on some type of journey.

For years, this map was directionally right and operationally out of reach. The industry knew the journey existed. It just did not know how to price it, staff it, or own it.

The 2026 RunSignup midyear report is the first time I have seen clean, industry-scale evidence that this is finally changing.

The Number That Matters Is Not the Participation Number

Almost every trade write-up of the RunSignup data leads with and focuses on the same line: races grew 5.9% per event in the first half of 2026, on top of 5% in 2025. Large events with more than 5,000 participants grew 8.2%. Race churn is running below pre-pandemic norms. Running, as an industry cliché goes, is back.

All true, not surprising, but not the most interesting or relevant data.

The most interesting number, and the one that made me stop and think, is that per-race revenue grew 9.9%, nearly two full points faster than participation (RunSignup). Revenue outpacing bodies is not a headline about a running boom in progress. It is a headline about a change in the business model. Something other than “one more runner in the start corral” is finally growing the bottom line.

Look at what else moved in the same report:

• 5Ks now average 1.3 price increases per race, up 30% year over year. Marathons average 2.5, up 13.6%. Even 10Ks and half marathons are seeing significant increases (RunSignup).

• The average marathon price range moved from $84.01 to $111.22 in 2025 to $89.16 to $120.19 in 2026 (RunSignup). The “same race, same product, one fee” model is quietly dying.

• Registrations 120+ days out jumped to 16.4%, up 84.2% year over year. Race-week registrations fell 26.6% to 17.4% (RunSignup). Marathons are now 55.4% pre-booked more than four months in advance.

• 63% of transactions are on mobile. And get out your iPhone: 31.9% of May payments were made via Apple Pay (RunSignup).

Read down the list and the story is very clear. Runners are committing earlier, on the device they carry through every stage of preparation, at prices that vary meaningfully across a tiered ladder. Events are finally being paid for the journey, not just for the bib.

The Top-of-Funnel Trap

I think back to understand why this matters, and I remember what we were actually doing at CGI, and what almost every large event company was doing at the same time.

We were spending an enormous share of our marketing energy at the very top of the sketch, the “marketing / advertising / decision” cone in the upper-left corner. National magazine media buys. Search. Direct mail. Local media. Ambassadors. Registration promos to fill the next race in the series. That work was measurable, defensible in a budget meeting, and immediately connected to a registration transaction.

Everything else on the page was, in practice, someone else’s business.

Training plans lived on third-party sites and in coaches’ inboxes. Training gear was at the specialty run retailer. Photos were from a separate vendor, with its own logo on the picture or as a watermark. Charity dollars flowed through Crowdrise, Charity Miles, and dozens of platform partners. Travel and lodging were handled by hotels and OTAs. Nutrition was at a booth at the expo. The “post-event glow” was part of an emerging trend on social media, mostly in blogs and online reviews. Re-engagement belonged, mostly, to whichever race the runner heard about next from a friend.

The event owned the transaction. Everyone else owned the journey.

This was not a moral failing; it was the incentive structure that drove us to fill corrals and drive EBITDA. Filling the top of the funnel was legible and rewarded. Serving the converted runner, the person who had already said yes, was diffuse, cross-functional, and hard to attribute. So the industry did what industries do when the metrics are misaligned with the strategy. It overinvested in acquisition and underinvested in the customers it already had in the database.

The runner, meanwhile, kept living the whole journey. She just did it across a dozen apps and vendors, none of whom were the event she was training for.

Ahead of Our Time

The group at CGI was keenly aware of the trends, the opportunity, and the pressure. To the chagrin of private equity owners who wanted to squeeze the most out of what we already had, we tried to shift the trend and reinvent the model from within.

We took a strategic stake in MapMyFitness, joining Austin Ventures and Milestone Venture Partners in the company’s $9 million Series B in June 2012, to give runners a GPS and training-tracking home connected to the events they were training for. We built a co-branded runner-travel platform with Travelocity, offering race-specific hotel blocks, bundled air and lodging, and itineraries built around early race-day starts for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon cities, because we knew a destination marathon was a trip before it was a race. We launched Gear Buzz, a flash-sale platform and short-form gear-review video segment pushed through Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, VeloNews, and Competitor magazine, with brands including Brooks and The Sports Authority, because a runner training for a half marathon was going to buy shoes, and we did not see why those dollars should leave the ecosystem. We ran an entire charity department that worked hand in hand with cause partners to build real programming, not just a fundraising minimum. We leveraged our own media to launch SportsCenter-style online segments: RunCenter, TriCenter, and VeloCenter. We understood that the athlete’s attention between races was as valuable as the race itself.

It was an incredible group of people reinventing an industry, redefining a business, and bringing outside business practices into what had, until very recently, been a mom-and-pop trade.

Some of those bets were early. Some were the right idea at the wrong altitude of capital, technology, or organizational patience. What they all had in common was an accurate read of the map. The runner’s journey was a business, not a marketing funnel, and the event company that owned it would compound value in ways the pure registration model never could.

The industry, and its owners, were not quite ready to hear that yet.

What the 2026 Data Actually Shows

A decade later, reframe the RunSignup numbers using the same journey map, and they no longer look like a pricing story. They start to resemble the ownership story we were trying to write.

Revenue growth outpacing participation is what happens when the converted runner is finally asked to spend on more than the entry fee: merchandise, hospitality, deferrals, insurance, add-ons, premium experiences, photos, team fees. The gap between 9.9% and 5.9% is where the middle of the funnel is finally showing up on the P&L.

More price steps per race is what happens when organizers stop treating registration as a single transaction and start treating it as a designed pricing ladder. It is not a punishment for late buyers. It is a recognition that the early buyer and the late buyer are different customers with different jobs to be done.

Earlier registration is the most important structural shift of all. When a marathoner books more than four months out, the organizer inherits a long, high-intent engagement window that used to belong entirely to third parties. That is the exact stretch of the sketch, from Registration through Preparation, Training, and Milestones, where the industry historically had no product. Now it has time, permission, and a mobile checkout waiting.

Large events pulling ahead is what “sense of belonging / community” from the bottom of the napkin looks like when it hits the top line. Scale, brand, and identity are once again worth paying more for. Runners are not buying a course. They are buying a place to belong.

Mobile and Apple Pay are the connective tissue. The connected journey was always going to require a device the runner carried through every stage. Now she does, and she pays with a glance.

None of this is being announced. It is happening inside the pricing pages and product roadmaps of every large event company in the country, and the data has finally caught up.

What Is Still Missing

Staring at the sketch ten-plus years later, I see that the industry is finally monetizing about half of it. The other half still has holes.

• Preparation and training are still overwhelmingly owned by third parties: Strava, TrainingPeaks, Runna, coaches, YouTube. Events have the intent data and the goal date. Very few have a training product runners actually use.

• Sponsor activation at milestones, the “sponsor incentives” box on the sketch, still consists mostly of banner ads and expo tables. Useful, contextual, journey-aware sponsor product is largely unbuilt.

• The spectator is still, for most events, a free user. Live tracking exists. A spectator product does not.

• Post-event glow and re-engagement is the highest-intent moment in the entire calendar year, and most events waste it with a “save the date” email and a discount code.

• The handoff back to the next goal, the loop from Post-Event Glow back to Decision, is the weakest link in almost every portfolio. Retention still leaks to the next shiny race and the next third-party platform.

Each of those is a business, not a feature. Each is a place where an organizer who understands the journey can build durable margin and, more importantly, a durable relationship.

The Standard the Sketch Sets

There is a version of this shift that is just yield management with better branding: squeeze the procrastinator, charge more for the same t-shirt, and call it a tiered experience. If that is where the industry lands, the runner will notice, and eventually so will the churn number.

The sketch, for all its scribbles and dated thoughts, still sets a higher standard. Everyone is on some type of journey. Weight loss. Personal best. Team building. Altruism. Vanity. Belonging. The job of an event company, and the actual product, is to help the runner complete their journey, not to extract from it.

The 2026 data shows the industry now has permission and the tools to build for the whole map. Earlier commitment, mobile-native checkout, tiered pricing, higher revenue per runner, healthier large events, low churn. That is the enabling environment we would have paid real money for at Competitor. It is also, arguably, what let CGI sell to Calera Capital for close to $250 million in December 2012, on the back of a five-year revenue CAGR of 26% and an adjusted EBITDA CAGR of 39%, even though the connected journey we were sketching would take another decade, two more owners, and a mobile checkout to arrive at scale.

The question for the next five years is whether the industry uses this new environment to comfort the afflicted, the runner who has already said yes and is waiting for us to show up for the rest of her journey, or whether we go back to afflicting the comfortable by buying strangers into the top of a funnel we still do not own.

The sketch, drawn a decade too early, still points the way.

In my career, I have had a front-row seat to much of the growth and trends in the endurance and participatory sports industry, from Rodale’s publications Runner’s World, Bicycling, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Backpacker to the build and explosive growth of the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon Series. I’ve worked on building event marketing platforms, from media empires to leading an endurance event portfolio, to become the world’s largest endurance sports platform, all tapping into destination experiences, charity platforms, and cultural moments.

The lessons have never been about more miles.

The lessons have been about people wanting a reason to train, a reason to travel, a reason to gather with friends and family, a reason to support a cause, and a reason to believe they were capable of more than they thought.

I’m viewing HYROX as the fourth wave of this movement, which is gaining attention and serious consideration for significant capital investment.

It is easy to call HYROX the next big fitness trend. Many would say we are well beyond it being a trend. HYROX may be the most visible early expression of the fourth wave of mass-participation fitness: a standardized, global, hybrid sport built around year-round training, shared experiences, destination travel, measurable progress, and repeat participation.

But I see an inherent warning embedded in its rise.

The opportunity is enormous. So is the risk of becoming culturally “cringe” before the brand becomes emotionally durable.

The Waves That Built the Market

The first wave was the original running-and-endurance boom. Beginning in the 1970s, running became accessible to ordinary people on a large scale. Local 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, marathons, and early triathlons gave people a clear challenge and a finish line.

IRONMAN emerged from that era, with its first race held in Hawaii in 1978. The brand transformed an extreme endurance test into one of the most powerful achievement identities in sport. It taught the industry that hard could be aspirational. A participant did not simply sign up for a triathlon. They committed to a transformation that involved training, equipment, coaches, travel, sacrifice, and a finish-line moment that changed how they saw themselves.

Mike Reily’s iconic voice proclaiming “…you are an IRONMAN” became more powerful than “I finished a triathlon.”

The second wave came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when participation events became branded, global, destination-led experience series.

Rock ’n’ Roll was part of that movement, with the first Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego in 1998, bringing music, running, and community together for nearly 20,000 participants. It was not just a marathon with bands. It was an effort to make the entire experience bigger than the race itself.

Crossing the finish line and the athletic accomplishment still resonated. But the event expanded to include live entertainment, sponsor experiences, spectator energy, charity, medals, city identity, travel, and a reason for friends and family to become part of the weekend.

At the front of the race were elite athletes like Ryan Hall, Kara Goucher, Shalane Flanagan, and Meb Keflezighi. They brought legitimacy, aspiration, and real competitive drama.

At the back were “jolly joggers” and walkers stopping at mile after mile to dance to the bands, smiling and soaking in the full experience.

That was not a contradiction. That was the product.

A Rock ’n’ Roll race could be a personal-best attempt, a first-half-marathon breakthrough, a charity fundraiser, a destination weekend, and a citywide celebration, all on the same course.

The third wave took fitness into physical gyms, the community, and spectacle.

CrossFit transformed training into identity. It created coaches, local tribes, benchmark workouts, measurable progress, and the feeling that the gym was a sport.

Obstacle course racing, through Tough Mudder, Spartan, Rugged Maniac, Color Run, and others, made physical challenge social. The proposition was simple: recruit friends, get dirty, overcome obstacles, take photos, and celebrate together for social currency.

CrossFit built a powerful, cult-like training culture. OCR built powerful shared moments.

But each had limits. CrossFit could feel technical, intense, and culturally intimidating. OCR relied heavily on novelty, expensive outdoor operations, complicated logistics, and uneven repeat participation.

HYROX has the opportunity to combine all the strengths from the prior phases.

Why HYROX Is a Fourth-Wave Platform

HYROX gives people a clear, repeatable test: running combined with functional workout stations, in a standardized order, against a clock.

That standardization is not boring or easy. It is the operating system.

A marathon is meaningful because 26.2 miles means something. A half marathon is meaningful because 13.1 miles means something. The city, the crowd, the weather, the course, and the memories may change, but the distance remains recognizable.

That common standard enables training plans, personal records, qualifications, coaching, clubs, content, and lifelong participation.

HYROX brings that same logic to hybrid fitness.

A participant knows what they are training for. Coaches know how to prepare them. Gyms can organize programming around the race. Friends can train together. Athletes can compare performances across cities.

Similar test. Different story.

That has made a powerful foundation for a global participation platform.

The fourth wave will be defined by brands that connect local training behavior to global experience. People will train at their neighborhood gym with friends and coaches, then travel to compete in a recognizable sport with a meaningful score, a global community, and a destination worth remembering.

HYROX is well positioned to lead that wave if it builds the system around the race, not just the race itself.

Race in the Front, Party in the Back

The mass-participation formula has not changed.

The front of the field needs to be credible. HYROX needs elite athletes, consistent standards, transparent judging, meaningful rankings, a championship pathway, and stories that make the best athletes worth following.

Elite competition gives a sport aspiration.

But the back of the field must feel welcomed, not tolerated.

The first-time participant should not feel like an extra in an influencer’s highlight reel. They should see a place for themselves from the moment they register. Doubles and team formats must remain central. Gym groups should feel like a place where they belong. A parent returning to fitness, a runner learning to lift, a former athlete rebuilding confidence, or two friends making a shared commitment should all see themselves in the event.

The best HYROX participant may never contend for a podium.

But they may train for months, race with a friend, bring family, travel to another city, raise money for a cause, share their result, recruit others, and register again next year.

That is the real participation flywheel.

Charity Can Deepen the Meaning

Rock ’n’ Roll became more powerful because it was never only about running.

Nonprofits used the series as a platform to support participants and raise millions of dollars for causes that mattered. Runners did not merely buy an entry. They publicly committed to something bigger than themselves.

Choose a cause. Set a goal. Ask people to support you. Train through the hard weeks. Cross the finish line knowing that your effort created an impact beyond your own accomplishment.

HYROX has a natural opportunity to build this into its culture.

The physical challenge is real. That gives people a powerful reason to connect their effort to a mission, a person, a community, or a cause. A meaningful charity strategy could create an on-ramp for new participants, deepen emotional commitment, bring nonprofits into the ecosystem, and create stories that are more human than another personal-record graphic.

“I am racing HYROX” says something about fitness.

“I am racing HYROX for this cause” invites a community into the story.

Destination, Not Just Location

Rock ’n’ Roll participants did not simply travel to a race.

They traveled to a destination for a race weekend.

They came with friends, family, training partners, and fundraising teams. They chose cities they wanted to experience. They explored neighborhoods, booked restaurants, planned celebrations, and turned a personal athletic goal into a shared cultural moment.

The race was the anchor.

The destination created the story.

That distinction matters for HYROX. A race can be transactional: register, arrive, compete, leave. A global experience series gives participants a reason to choose the city, coordinate a group, stay longer, train together, celebrate together, and leave with a memory that lasts beyond the result.

Rock ’n’ Roll used city-specific medals and multi-event rewards to make this behavior visible. Participants collected locations, earned recognition across the series, and turned a race calendar into a personal quest.

Which city is next?

HYROX can build the same loyalty behavior. City-specific achievements, regional circuits, global challenges, travel programs for gym communities, and rewards that feel earned can turn an event schedule into a map of personal achievement.

A medal should not be a promotional trinket.

It should be proof of commitment, travel, friendship, and accomplishment.

The Residency Opportunity

HYROX’s residency concept could become one of the most consequential ideas in the category.

Traditional mass-participation events create a powerful but compressed weekend spike. Flights fill up. Hotels become expensive. Restaurants, roads, venues, and airports are strained. Everyone arrives, races, and leaves in the same narrow window.

That can create energy. It can also create friction.

A residency creates a different relationship with a host city.

Rather than forcing every athlete, spectator, sponsor, and activation into a single weekend, HYROX can spread participation over a longer period. Athletes can arrive and depart at different times. They can train in local gyms. They can attend community workouts. They can explore the city, eat in local restaurants, recover locally, and build a real trip around their race slot.

The city becomes part of the experience, not just the backdrop.

This creates a more sustained impact:

• Participants have more flexibility and a richer destination experience.

• Friends and family can enjoy the city without navigating it on an overcrowded weekend.

• Local gyms, studios, coaches, hotels, restaurants, and retailers gain more ways to participate.

• Sponsors have more meaningful touchpoints than a single expo activation.

• Host locations benefit from a more distributed visitor economy.

• HYROX develops a deeper, more authentic local connection.

Done right, a residency is not an operational workaround.

It is a new kind of destination product.

Scale Without Losing Exclusivity

The hardest challenge for every successful participation brand is preserving the feeling that created demand as it grows.

Growth can become a trap.

Registration turns into a frantic scramble. Prices rise. Race waves become crowded. Hospitality becomes a transaction. The event feels less personal. The participant feels less like a member of a community and more like a unit of volume.

That is how a differentiated brand becomes a commodity.

The residency model can provide an answer. It allows HYROX to expand access while protecting the quality of race waves, athlete services, local programming, hospitality, and community moments.

Scale does not mean simply adding more people.

Scale means preserving the quality of the experience while creating more ways to belong.

Premium does not have to mean exclusionary.

A first-time doubles team can choose a standard race slot and a community workout. A returning athlete can earn earlier access, location rewards, or a limited-capacity training experience. A gym group can build a complete travel package centered on racing, local programming, hospitality, and celebration.

Everyone takes the same core test.

But everyone has a path to a deeper relationship with the brand.

HYROX’s Cringe Problem

Here is the risk.

HYROX’s greatest near-term threat may not be a competing race series. It may be cultural overexposure.

Every fast-growing participation brand develops a language, aesthetic, and set of rituals. Those can create belonging. But they can also become a shortcut to parody when the brand takes itself too seriously.

HYROX is already exposed to that risk.

The name itself, commonly interpreted as “Hybrid Rockstars,” carries a high level of built-in self-regard. The social feed often amplifies the most performative version of the category: shirtless selfies, dramatic finish-line collapses, cold plunges, protein stacks, cinematic training edits, and declarations of warrior-like transformation.

To critics, the event can become an expensive indoor workout staged in a convention center and presented as an epic heroic odyssey.

The low-skill, repetitive movement profile creates another opening. CrossFit purists may dismiss it as watered-down functional fitness. Endurance purists may see it as fitness theater. Others may read the entire category as first-world manual labor: paying to push sleds, drag weights, and carry sandbags indoors.

Those reactions should not be ignored.

The parody reel around “HYBRID ROCKSTAR” is a small but useful warning. The community already recognizes that the language can tip into comedy.

This does not mean HYROX is failing. In fact, brands only become targets of parody once they have entered the culture.

But the internet is fast. A status marker can quickly become a cliché. Ironman’s M-Dot tattoo is both a meaningful symbol of a major accomplishment and a familiar target for cultural jokes. HYROX needs to understand that dynamic before its own symbols get defined by outsiders.

Take the Race Seriously, Not Yourself

Gen Z and younger consumers do not reject ambition.

They reject unearned gravitas.

They want brands that understand two things can be true at once:

This is hard.

And this is also a little ridiculous.

That is the shift HYROX needs to make quickly.

The brand should move from “Hybrid Rockstars” toward a more grounded proposition: train, show up, do the work, laugh at the chaos, and come back better.

The tone should be more self-aware and more human.

Less cinematic self-mythology.

More honest truth.

The content should celebrate:

• The athlete who underestimated the sled.

• The doubles partner who disappeared during wall balls.

• The post-race limp down the hotel stairs.

• The person who said they were “just doing it for fun” and then immediately checked the rankings.

• The family member who still cannot explain what a SkiErg is.

• The friend group that turns a race into a weekend they will talk about for years.

The message should be simple:

Take the test seriously. Do not take yourself too seriously.

That is not a retreat from elite sport, premium experience, or high performance. It is what makes those things believable and sustainable.

Build a Sporting Life, Not a Personal Brand

The early adopter “hybrid athlete” has helped HYROX grow. That influencer archetype will not be enough to sustain it.

The durable hero is not always the person with the perfect physique, sponsor code, and dramatic finish-line collapse.

It is the person who trains with a sibling. The gym community that travels together. The parent returning to fitness. The former runner learning to lift. The former lifter learning to run. The first-time doubles team. The athlete raising money for a cause. The participant who misses their target, laughs, and enters again.

Rock ’n’ Roll worked because it could hold elite legitimacy and mass inclusivity on the same course.

HYROX should aim for the same thing.

At the front, sport.

Throughout the field, humanity.

The Real Opportunity

The commercial opportunity far outweighs the entry fees.

The fourth wave will be built around the full participant journey: training, coaching, gyms, apparel, footwear, equipment, recovery, nutrition, charity, travel, hospitality, content, community, recognition, and repeat participation.

HYROX athletes live in several consumer categories at once. They run. They strength train. They attend group classes. They buy performance products. They follow coaches. They use health data. They travel for events. They share their journey publicly.

A HYROX athlete does not simply need generic running gear or gym apparel with an event logo. They need products that work through running, sled pushes, burpees, carries, lunges, and wall balls. Apparel must manage sweat, stay in place, resist abrasion, and allow full movement under fatigue.

That is not merchandise.

That is a real product category.

The brands that win will not simply sponsor the race. They will make preparation, race day, recovery, travel, and the decision to come back better.

The Test Is Retention

Every participation boom has a first finish line.

The durable ones create a second, third, and tenth.

IRONMAN proved that hard can become an identity. Rock ’n’ Roll proved that a race can become a destination, a charity engine, a city celebration, and a global experience series. CrossFit proved the retention power of local training community. OCR proved the appeal of shared challenge and social adventure.

HYROX has the chance to bring those lessons together.

The key measure is not first-time registrations.

It is whether people return.

Do they train between races? Do they improve? Do they bring friends? Do they fundraise? Do they travel to another city? Do they collect meaningful achievements? Do they build a relationship with a local gym community? Do they laugh at themselves along the way?

If the answer is yes, HYROX will become more than a fitness boom.

It will define the fourth wave of mass participation fitness: a global platform where people train with purpose, race with friends, travel for experiences, support causes, earn meaningful recognition, and come back for the next story.

Randy Levine’s recent opinion piece in the Sports Business Journal, “Trump council’s Randy Levine: Congress must act to fix college sports,” got me thinking and sent me back to two articles I wrote earlier this year:

“An Executive Order Won’t Save College Sports. Here’s What Might.” and “The Broken Pipeline: How the Collapse of College Sports Threatens U.S. Olympic Dominance.”

Levine is right: Congress needs to get involved.

The current system is a mess. NIL rules vary by state. The courts keep changing the operating environment. The transfer portal has become a full-time roster-management issue. Revenue sharing is here, but nobody has confidence that the current structure will hold. Meanwhile, the gap between the schools that can spend at the top of the market and everyone trying to keep up continues to widen.

Nobody is operating with real certainty. Athletes do not know what rules will apply from one year to the next. Schools are trying to make decisions about rosters, scholarships, staffing, and sports sponsorship without knowing what the rules will look like in six months. Conferences are caught in the middle, trying to create standards they may not have the legal authority to enforce.

The people most likely to feel the consequences are often the ones with the least leverage: women’s and Olympic sports, especially at schools where football and men’s basketball consume the resources and attention required to compete at the top of the market.

So yes, Congress should act.

But before it does, we need to be clear about what we are trying to save.

Are we trying to build a modern college-sports system that recognizes where the market, the law, and athlete expectations have already gone? Or are we trying to put the old system back together with a federal seal of approval?

Those are not the same thing.

An Executive Order Won’t Fix This

The White House can make college sports a priority. It can direct agencies, push for coordination, and elevate issues such as athlete safety, transfers, eligibility, women’s sports, and Olympic-sport opportunities. That matters, and the recent executive actions did exactly that.

But an executive order is not a durable solution.

It cannot resolve the antitrust questions now at the center of the college-sports business model. It cannot create a national NIL system that survives the next administration or the next court ruling. It cannot fully resolve the conflict between state laws. And it cannot answer the basic question that keeps coming back: what rights should athletes have in an enterprise that depends on their performance, their identities, and their ability to draw an audience?

That requires Congress.

The new revenue-sharing model only reinforces the point. Direct payments have begun, but the system is still provisional, with unresolved questions around compensation limits, NIL enforcement, Title IX, and long-term athlete protections. As Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione put it, the current arrangement is “not, in its current form, a long-term solution.” That is why Congress should not treat the settlement framework as an endpoint. It is a bridge to whatever comes next.

The danger is that Congress sees the chaos and tries to solve it by giving schools, conferences, and the NCAA a version of the authority they once had, without confronting why that authority stopped working in the first place.

That would create order. It would not necessarily create a better system.

We Have Been Here Before

The closest comparison may be the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

The original Amateur Sports Act of 1978 brought order to a fragmented Olympic system. It created the governance structure for the U.S. Olympic movement, empowered national governing bodies, and gave the U.S. Olympic Committee a central role. At the time, that was important and necessary.

But the Act was built around an amateur model just as the business of the Olympics was changing. Television rights were becoming more valuable. Sponsorship was becoming more sophisticated. Professional athletes were entering the Games. Athlete endorsements and commercial opportunities were growing. The Olympics were becoming a global media and commercial enterprise, while much of the governance language and institutional thinking still reflected an amateur-era model.

The law eventually had to catch up.

The 1998 amendments removed amateurism as a formal eligibility requirement and more fully integrated the Paralympic movement. Congress later passed the Empowering Olympic, Paralympic, and Amateur Athletes Act in 2020, strengthening oversight, safety, and athlete representation. Athletes now hold at least one-third of voting power on USOPC and NGB boards, including representation from recent competitors.

Those changes were meaningful. They also came after the world around the system had already changed.

That is the point college sports should take seriously.

The Ted Stevens Act was not a mistake because it created structure. The problem was that the structure was built for an economic reality that did not last. By the time the law adjusted, the market had already moved well ahead of it.

Congress should learn from that.

Do not write a law for the version of college sports people wish still existed.

The Business of College Sports Has Changed

There is still a tendency to talk about NIL, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, and athlete marketing as if they are temporary distortions of a stable amateur model.

They are not temporary.

They are the market catching up with the value athletes have been creating for decades.

Football and men’s basketball are not simply campus activities. They are major media and entertainment businesses. Their economics drive conference realignment, coaching salaries, facilities, donor behavior, recruiting, scheduling, and increasingly the entire strategic direction of athletic departments.

NIL has made athlete marketing a legitimate part of the landscape. Revenue sharing has made it even harder to maintain the fiction that athletes are not central economic participants. The transfer portal has exposed what many people were reluctant to call a labor market, even though athletes have been making labor-market decisions all along.

They look at playing time. They look at coaching stability. They look at the roster. They look at money, academic fit, location, brand opportunity, and what each decision means for their future.

That is not going away because coaches, administrators, or fans are tired of it.

The Olympic movement went through a similar shift. The IOC generated $7.6 billion in revenue during the 2017–2020/21 cycle, a reminder that the Olympics stopped being a pure amateur enterprise long ago.

College sports is now in their own version of that transition.

The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

The biggest problem with the current debate is that it tends to start and end with football and men’s basketball.

That is understandable. They drive the money. They are the reason Congress is being pushed to act. They determine which conferences grow, which schools get left behind, and how the industry thinks about revenue sharing.

But they are not the entire system.

For swimming, track and field, gymnastics, wrestling, rowing, volleyball, water polo, fencing, skiing, and many other Olympic sports, college athletics is still the main pathway between youth competition and elite international sport.

There is no deep professional system waiting to take its place.

A handful of professional teams, prize purses, clubs, training centers, and sponsors cannot replace the number of roster spots, scholarships, coaches, facilities, competition opportunities, and academic support that colleges provide.

This is no longer a forecast. It is the operating model. Schools that opted into the House settlement can distribute up to $20.5 million per year directly to athletes, but that amount covers all sports in the department. Early allocation plans for a number of major programs have indicated that football will receive roughly 75 percent of available direct-payment pools, with much of the remainder flowing to men’s and women’s basketball. The exact allocations will vary by school, but the direction is clear: everyone else is competing for the margin.

We can call this revenue sharing, market correction, or modernization. But the math does not change. Unless a school finds new money, every new dollar committed to the revenue engine increases pressure on sports that lack their own media leverage.

When a school cuts a swim team, a wrestling program, a gymnastics team, or a track program, it is not just cleaning up a budget.

It is taking capacity out of the American athlete-development system.

That reduction moves through the entire pipeline. Fewer college opportunities affect recruiting. They affect club teams and coaches. They affect the choices families make when they are deciding whether to invest time and money in a sport. They affect whether a talented athlete can keep developing after high school.

Then, years later, they affect the national-team pool.

This is the hard truth: a school may be making a perfectly rational decision when it sends more money toward football, men’s basketball, facilities, coaches, and revenue-sharing obligations. But when every school makes the same rational decision, the result is a much weaker Olympic-development system.

The damage will not always show up in next year’s budget. It will show up years later, when fewer athletes enter the system, and the national-team depth that once looked automatic is no longer there.

That is what I meant by the broken pipeline.

What Congress Should Actually Do

The Protect College Sports Act has useful components. It attempts to establish national NIL standards, reduce conflict among state laws, and provide limited antitrust protection in defined areas.

That is a start. It is not the end of the conversation.

A law that gives institutions more control, limits athlete mobility, and protects schools from legal exposure may make athletic departments feel more stable. But it will not create a durable solution if athletes have no real say in the system, if Olympic-sport protections are just language on a page, and if schools receive legal protection without clear obligations in return.

If Congress gives college sports national preemption or limited antitrust protection, it should receive enforceable commitments in return, not aspirational language, advisory committees, or promises that disappear when the budget tightens.

That should include:

• Clear national NIL rules, including contract disclosure, agent standards, education, and protection from bad deals.

• A real athlete voice in governance, with voting power rather than another advisory group.

• Narrow antitrust protection tied to measurable obligations, not broad immunity.

• Scholarships, medical care, insurance, mental-health support, and degree-completion protections that do not disappear because an athlete transfers, gets hurt, loses a coach, or is caught in a roster cut.

• Sport-by-sport transparency on spending, roster opportunities, scholarships, and program cuts.

• Real enforcement around women’s and Olympic sport participation, not another promise that disappears when budgets tighten.

• A serious funding strategy for athlete development as more of the money concentrates at the top of college sports.

The U.S. cannot keep asking colleges, national governing bodies, and nonprofit sports organizations to carry out a national athlete-development mission without ensuring economic support for it. The Olympic system has lived with that tension for decades: a public-facing national responsibility carried largely by private organizations with uneven resources and uneven commercial leverage.

The new system is already testing the limits of institutional rulemaking. The College Sports Commission is intended to enforce the direct-payment framework, while the Deloitte-operated NIL Go clearinghouse is designed to review certain third-party NIL arrangements for valid business purpose and market comparability. Challenges to compensation restrictions, NIL enforcement, and Title IX allocation decisions are already part of the landscape. That is not a side issue. It is evidence that the current model is an interim structure, not a durable settlement.

The Question Congress Has to Answer

The most important question is not whether the biggest athletic departments feel more stable after a new federal law passes.

The question is whether the system still works for the athletes and sports that do not have the same media leverage.

Will a young swimmer still have a path to college? Will a wrestler have meaningful opportunities outside a shrinking number of programs? Will a gymnast, rower, skier, volleyball player, track athlete, or water polo player still have a bridge from youth sport to elite competition?

Will athletes have real influence over the rules that affect their health, compensation, eligibility, and careers?

And will schools that receive legal protection be required to uphold their side of the bargain?

Those are the questions Congress should answer.

Levine is right that Congress needs to act. But Congress should not pass a 1978-style answer for a 2026 sports economy, protecting the revenue engine while the athlete-development pipeline beneath it slowly disappears.

College sports needs a national framework. It needs rules, accountability, a sustainable funding model, and a governance structure built for the market we actually have, not the amateur model we keep pretending is still there.

This is about more than the future of intercollegiate athletics. It is about the broader infrastructure underneath it: the physical-education teacher introducing a child to movement, the school program that makes sport accessible, the unstructured play that builds confidence and curiosity, the community coach, the local club, and the young athlete who discovers a sport before anyone tells them there is a business model behind it.

College sports sits in the middle of that system. It gives young people something to pursue, creates a bridge from youth participation to high-level competition, and supplies a critical part of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic pipeline. If we hollow it out in the name of protecting the revenue engine, the damage will not be confined to the college campus. It will travel backward through the entire system and eventually show up in the athletes who give us a reason to cheer for Team USA every two years.

Not the kind you see from the stands. Not the highlight-reel version of the Instagram posts I made during the event, where everyone is smiling, crushing their starts and swims, and the athlete is holding a ribbon at the end.

I mean the real version.

The early alarms. The pullout couches. The meal planning. The warm-up schedules. The recovery gear. The checking and rechecking of heat sheets. The drop-off, the time, the anticipation before the first race. The pride welling up into tears as you see them in “the zone” with headphones on, looking like Michael Phelps staring down the competition. The quiet moments before a race, when you are trying to look calm while your heart is doing something entirely different

A week at Nats in Ocala, Florida, with my son was good for the soul.

Somewhere between my early morning miles and his hotel-room recovery routine, I was reminded of something important about sports parenting.

Our job is not to carry the pressure for them.

It is to create enough calm around them so they can learn and grow to carry their own.

The Parent’s Race

Parents have their own version of competition week.

We feel the nerves before they do. We replay the possibilities. We look at the meet schedule one more time, even though we already know exactly when the session begins.

We worry about sleep, nutrition, hydration, recovery, traffic, lane assignments, goggles, suits, weather, and whether the athlete is really as relaxed as they say they are.

We want to help. Of course we do. And, many of us want to race!

But there is a fine line between being prepared and making the experience heavier than it needs to be.

The young athlete already knows what is at stake. They have put in the work. They have shown up for the early practices, the hard sets, the dryland sessions, the missed weekends with friends, and the long season that brought them to one week in Florida.

They do not need us to add another layer of anxiety.

They need stability. They need a wingman.

That does not mean indifference. It means being attentive without becoming overbearing. It means having the snacks packed, the ride ready, and the recovery tools available, then letting the athlete decide whether to read, rest, watch bad television, or sit quietly in the hotel room before a race.

Let Them Own It

My son’s morning routine was different from mine because it should be.

I needed a run to settle into the day. He needed stillness. Summer reading. Texting friends and social media silliness. Compression boots. Shoulder recovery. A little mindless TV.

His approach was not a lack of seriousness. It was his way of preparing.

That is one of the harder lessons in youth sports. Parents can confuse their own preferred routine with the athlete’s best routine.

The truth is that young athletes need room to discover what works for them.

They need to learn how to prepare when the stakes rise. They need to learn how to manage nerves, recover after a disappointing swim, and reset before the next opportunity.

Those are not just athletic skills. They are life skills.

The goal is not to create a perfect performance environment. The goal is to give them enough space and support to figure out how to perform when things are not perfect.

At a meet like Y Nats, everything can feel bigger and heavier.

The pool deck is bigger. The arena is larger. College coaches are walking around in their school gear. There are more fans, and the cheering is louder. The competition is deeper. The margins are smaller.

A great swim can bring exhilaration. A missed goal can bring frustration.

Both are part of the experience.

The athlete who learns how to navigate those moments is building something more durable than a time on a scoreboard.

The Moments Between Races

The best parts of a trip like this are not always the races.

Sometimes it is the early quiet in a hotel room before the day begins. Sometimes it is the drive to the pool. Sometimes it is the post-race meal, when the conversation has nothing to do with a split, a place, or what comes next.

Those moments matter because time and youth sports move fast.

Seasons overlap. Training schedules fill up. Travel becomes routine. It is easy to let the calendar turn the whole experience into a transaction: effort in, result out.

But that is not why most of us got into this.

We want our kids to find something that challenges them. Something that teaches leadership, sportsmanship, competitiveness, and humility. Something that gives them friends, structure, confidence, resilience, and a relationship with hard work.

We want them to experience the satisfaction of doing something difficult well, as well as the humility of falling short and coming back for another try.

The podium, the time, the cut, and the ranking can all be meaningful.

But they are not the whole story.

The whole story is the shared experience: the early alarms, the hotel breakfasts, the forgotten snacks, the recovery gear spread across the room, the nervous energy, the proud moments, and the simple privilege of being there.

Good for the Soul

A week in Ocala reminded me that sports parenting is not about trying to make every moment perfect.

It is about being present.

Be prepared, but do not project your anxiety.

Offer support, but do not take ownership of the performance.

Celebrate the work, the teammates, the experience, and not just the outcome.

And remember that, eventually, they will not remember every heat, every split, or every place. They may remember the hotel room, the terrible television, the smoothies, the early morning quiet, and the fact that you were there.

That is good for the soul.

Last week, I spent five days in the chlorine tank at the FAST Aquatic Center in Ocala, Florida, where thousands of parents and families, coaches, volunteers, and officials gathered to support young athletes from over 95 YMCAs competing at the YMCA National Long Course Championships.

It was exhausting. It was emotional. It was extraordinary.

And I would do it again tomorrow.

This was a big one for him. Five days of long-course racing at the end of a summer he had worked so hard to qualify for and be ready to represent his new team. So, in true Pool family fashion, we overprepared.

We packed one entire bag for the trip with Hyperice gear (the massage gun, the X2 shoulder system, his Normatec Elite compression boots), a Magic Bullet blender, and his specific nutrition preferences (Skratch Labs drink mix, Clif Bloks, Honey Stinger Waffles, and assorted other items). He recovered from a big injury earlier in the year and put in the hours upon hours of work, so if we were going to Ocala for five days of championship swimming, we were going to treat it as it should be treated: FIVE DAYS OF CHAMPIONSHIP SWIMMING!

We arrived at the Courtyard Marriott on Monday and set up camp to be ready for the first events Tuesday morning.

He got “the big bed.” I got the pullout couch.

We unpacked, hit the nearby Publix for the other essentials, and then I set up an athlete’s table in the room with all the essentials for the week. It looked less like a hotel room and more like a small performance lab for a healthy NIL athlete run by someone with no sleep and no budget discipline.

Every morning, I was up at 5:00 a.m. I would tiptoe to the bathroom, get my running gear on, guzzle down my IM8, grab a bar, and slip out unnoticed for a run.

That was my time to clear my head, catch up with mom back home, and run out the butterflies.

Then I came back, made smoothies, got breakfast together, packed snacks, checked the schedule, checked it again, and started getting him ready for the day.

He had a better plan.

He would sit on the bed, work through his summer reading, watch terrible TV, and cycle through the Normatec boots and the X2 shoulder system.

Monday evening, we arrived at FAST for a team warm-up session. I walked towards the stairs up to the stands and saw something that stopped me.

This is cool. Is this part of the facility, or is it here for the meet?

Then, at the top of the stairs, on the concourse under the stands. There it was.

Hyperice had set up a full recovery station on the concourse.

Row of chairs. Normatec boots. Products to try. Products to buy. A legitimate recovery experience in the middle of the YMCA National swim meet.

Not a professional event. Not a college championship. A youth swim meet with athletes 18 and under, and Hyperice was treating it like the big time.

The photo I took of the empty chairs was the last time I saw them empty. For the rest of the meet, the recovery space was full. Athletes were in line. Coaches were using it. Officials were using it. Parents were using it. I watched people walk away carrying newly purchased Hyperice gear.

That is what good event activation looks like.

It is not a logo on a banner or someone handing out a free sticker. It is showing up with something people need, in the moment they need it.

I caught up with Grant Geisler, who was running the Hyperice program, and we had a great conversation. We also shared some appreciation for Jess Miller, who recently left the company and, I’m sure, played a role in deciding that this was a great place for Hyperice to have a presence.

I was already a Hyperice customer. I swear by the products. My son swears by the products. But seeing the company show up in Ocala at YMCA Nationals and give young athletes the same kind of recovery experience typically reserved for professionals or more well-known events gave me a new level of respect for the brand.

The swim meet is over. We made it home (a whole other story about a brand - goes by AA - that is on the opposite side of the brand respect spectrum). The pullout couch is behind me.

My ‘Sports Parent Rehab Program’ is very much underway, wearing MY Normatec compression boots!

On the wall of nearly every YMCA in America, there is a poster. You have seen it.

Four words printed in bold, usually over a photo of smiling children mid-swim, mid-sprint, or mid-jump. The YMCA has defined those four words as the cornerstone of character since 1994, guiding “everything we do,” the organization says. They are printed in handbooks, recited at banquets, and cited in fundraising appeals. They are the bedrock of the mission.

At USA Swimming, there is a mission statement. You may have seen it or read it somewhere:

There are core values too:

Those words are printed in bold on the organization’s website and in its materials. They are meant to define the sport's culture and the standards by which it operates. They are supposed to describe a system that is inclusive, athlete-centered, and responsible to the people it serves.

So, someone explain to me what happens when the rulebook contradicts every single one of those words.

Subscribe now

The Story That Started This

A teenage swimmer has spent months earning his place on this team. He posted a legitimate qualifying time at a nationally recognized high school championship, and by any honest standard, he earned the right to stand on the block at YMCA Nationals. But now he is being told that his time may not count because it was entered into a database the organizing committee does not recognize as valid.

Not because of talent. Not because of effort. Not because of character. Because his official time lives in the wrong system.

That is the absurdity at the center of this story. The YMCA National Long Course Championships uses SwimCloud to upload swimmers, manage entries, and run the meet. I understand the need for valid, officially recognized qualifying times. I understand that a rule meant to protect competitive integrity should prevent teams from stacking their national rosters with outside ringers who never earned their place. But that is not what is happening here. This is a kid who has done everything right, only to be told that the time he earned does not count because it is in the wrong database.

He qualified. He earned it. He belongs there.

And the system’s response? Sorry, wrong database.

Bureaucracy Is Not Neutral

We tell ourselves that rules are rules, that consistency matters, that exceptions are dangerous. And there is truth in that, up to a point. Rules exist for a reason, and good institutions honor the intent of those rules, not just the letter.

But youth sports organizations and the adults who run them across America have quietly crossed a line. They have become so consumed with administering policy that they have lost sight of the human being standing on the other side of the form.

Dropout rates for organized youth sports programs average 35% in any given year, and 21% of those who leave cite conflicts of interest as their reason for quitting. We build elaborate eligibility systems and then pretend to be shocked when kids walk away.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has documented that approximately 70% of children drop out of organized sports by age 13.

SEVENTY PERCENT!

By the time a kid is old enough to drive, most of them have already been processed out of the system, burned out, aged out, or simply made to feel that the sport does not want them. We are not losing these kids to bad coaching or poor facilities. We are losing them to an environment that has made compliance more important than belonging.

The Y’s Own Words Are an Indictment

The YMCA is explicit: Youth Development at the Y means nurturing the potential of every child and teen and supporting youth in cultivating the values, skills, and relationships that lead to positive behaviors, better health, and educational achievement. The organization says its work is built around achievement, relationships, and belonging.

Now ask yourself: what message does a swimmer receive when he is told that his qualifying time, swum at a well-documented, HY-TEK-recorded, USA Swimming-sanctioned championship meet, does not count? What relationship is built when the institution that claims to be his community refuses to advocate for him? Where is the belonging when the team that calls itself a family leaves a kid on the outside looking in at nationals?

The YMCA’s own stated purpose says its programs do not just build better players; they build better people by modeling good sportsmanship and rewarding effort rather than just outcomes. That is a beautiful sentence. It deserves to be lived, not just posted.

This Is a Symptom of a Much Larger Crisis

This is not a YMCA problem alone. It is a symptom of a rot that has spread throughout the American Olympic movement and youth sports at every level.

In youth hockey, governing bodies devote enormous resources to policing player movement while investing almost nothing in actually developing players. Rules are written and applied aggressively, trapping young athletes in environments where they cannot grow, while the adults who built those rules face no accountability whatsoever. The process leaves parents feeling helpless, afraid to speak up, and without a governing body willing to intervene.

In swimming, arguably the sport with the highest stakes given America’s Olympic identity, the dysfunction has reached a crisis point. Michael Phelps issued a public indictment of USA Swimming last year, citing a drop in performance at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where Team USA captured just 44% of available medals, its lowest share since 1988. He accused the organization of poor operational controls and weak leadership, and said he would hesitate to put his own sons in the current system. Twenty-three Olympic gold medals, and he does not trust the institution he helped build to protect the next generation.

Rowdy Gaines called it a leadership void. The Guardian called it a credibility gap. And beneath all of it, the grassroots pipeline, the very infrastructure that feeds talent from community pools to Olympic podiums, is quietly crumbling.

The House v. NCAA ruling has further accelerated the erosion of the collegiate pipeline that USA Swimming relied on for decades to produce world-class athletes. Fewer scholarship opportunities, shrinking rosters, and reduced access to facilities are compounding with each passing year.

The collapse is not sudden. It is incremental. And it is already underway.

When Turf Protection Trumps the Athlete

There is an even more uncomfortable truth sitting just beneath the surface of all this: the system is not just overregulated, it is fractured by competing empires.

USA Swimming and the YMCA are two of the largest and most influential swimming institutions in the United States. In theory, they should function as partners in a single ecosystem, aligned around a common purpose: to help kids fall in love with the sport and help the best of them go as far as their talent and character will take them. In practice, they behave like neighboring fiefdoms, each guarding its own territory, its own rulebook, and its own brand of integrity.

That is how you end up with a qualifying time, swum at a fully sanctioned, properly officiated, nationally recognized championship meet, being treated as invisible. Not because it is not legitimate, but because it was earned under someone else’s banner. The swim counts everywhere except in the one place the athlete needs it to count.

This is not a paperwork glitch. It is a choice.

When organizations design eligibility systems that prioritize protecting their own events, membership models, and political capital over the basic question, “Did this kid earn it?”, they are not acting in the best interests of athletes. They are acting in their own best interests. Turf protection becomes the real mission, and youth development becomes the marketing language draped over it.

Both sides are responsible.

USA Swimming has been publicly called out for weak leadership and poor operational controls at the very moment America’s Olympic pipeline is under strain. The YMCA hangs banners about character and belonging while enforcing rules in ways that actively undermine both. When one system refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the other, when neither is willing to flex its own bureaucracy for the sake of a clearly deserving athlete, that is not a gray area. That is shared failure.

Because these two institutions are not supposed to exist to defend their turf from each other. They are meant to create a seamless path for kids who love to swim.

The deeper problem is that the adults running these systems are not thinking about the athletes and families caught in the middle. They are busy fighting over calendar territory, protecting jurisdiction, and defending institutional turf while the sport’s real foundation continues to weaken. In swimming, that means YMCA Nationals colliding with major USA Swimming meets like Futures and zone championships, forcing families and athletes to choose between pathways that should not be in conflict in the first place. Instead of building a cleaner development system, the adults have created one more bureaucratic nightmare for kids to navigate. If it does not gather the best who qualified, it is not a championship. They are not asking how to make the pathway easier, fairer, or more coherent. They are asking how to protect their own lane. And that is the sickness at the heart of a system that keeps putting adult power ahead of athlete opportunity.

If a young athlete can do everything right, train with his Y team, race in a high-level meet, hit the qualifying standard, and still be told that none of it matters because the adults in charge cannot agree on whose rules count, then the problem is not the kid. The problem is a system that has confused organizational self-preservation with the greater good.

The Coach’s Impossible Choice

Let’s be honest about what this looks like from the pool deck. This is not a confusing policy or an unfortunate technicality. It is a bureaucratic nightmare built by adults who seem more interested in defending their own authority than serving the kids in their care.

The coach in this story is not the villain; he is stuck in a rigged game. If he challenges the committee, they can retaliate against him and his program. If he stays quiet, a deserving athlete pays the price. That is the sickness at the heart of this system: the people closest to the kids have to walk a thin line to protect them from the very adults who claim to be in charge of their development.

Character Is Not Administrative

The YMCA’s four core values are Caring, Honesty, Respect, and Responsibility. Let us apply them honestly to situations like this one.

Caring means demonstrating sincere concern for others, not protecting the organization from the inconvenience of a database review.

Honesty means acknowledging when a rule is being applied in a way that contradicts its own purpose.

Respect means treating a young athlete who has given everything to this program as someone worthy of advocacy.

Responsibility, perhaps the most important one here, means being accountable not just for following rules, but for the outcomes those rules produce.

A kid who aspires to attend the United States Air Force Academy is not a threat to competitive integrity. He is an advertisement for everything youth sports are supposed to build. If the YMCA cannot recognize that, it is not the kid who has a character problem.

What We Owe the Next Generation

There is a version of this story that ends well. A time gets approved, a swimmer gets on the block in Ocala, and someday he swims wearing the uniform of the United States Air Force. The YMCA and USA Swimming get to point to that moment and say, “We built that. We saw a young man with a future larger than a rulebook, and we got out of the way.”

There is another version in which the time is denied, the swimmer leaves the program, and one more athlete is added to the long list of young people who learned that the institution cared less about them than the poster on the wall suggested.

But that is almost beside the point. If a kid earns his place and still gets dragged through this kind of bureaucratic bullshit, the system has already failed. It has burned the coach, burdened the family, poisoned trust, and turned a young athlete’s achievement into collateral damage in the protection of adult turf. Whether he gets in or gets denied, the adults running the system have already lost what matters most.

We cannot afford to keep building systems that make children and their families pay the price for adult insecurity. The dropout rates are already catastrophic. The Olympic pipeline is already under strain. The credibility of every organization that puts youth development in its mission statement is already being tested by parents who have watched their children be processed rather than developed.

The poster on the wall, the statement on the website, the mission, the core values are only as good as the decision made when honoring them is inconvenient. If the people in charge care more about protecting their own turf than doing the right thing, then they are not serving the sport, the athletes, or the families who trust them. They are serving themselves.

And that is how you lose the kids, the coaches, and the future.

There are places that shape you, and then there are places that become part of your internal map. Vail has long been that kind of place for me. Not just a mountain I skied, not just a resort where I once worked as an instructor, but a place that helped teach me what a great experience feels like when it is built by people, not just by systems.

That is why I have been thinking about Rob Katz’s return and Vail Resorts’ new “Beyond Epic” language. On one level, the strategy makes perfect sense. Vail built one of the smartest business models in modern sports by turning a weather-exposed, seasonal business into a recurring revenue machine through the Epic Pass. But once a company masters access, scale, and yield, the next question is harder: can it still create wonder?

That is the question hanging over Vail now.

Because for all the talk about experience, experience can be a slippery corporate word. Sometimes it means removing friction. Sometimes it means better data, better apps, better wayfinding, better service recovery. All of that matters, and Vail has invested heavily in it through the My Epic app, mobile passes, AI support, and other tools designed to make the day easier and more seamless. But a seamless day is not always a memorable one.

And memory is where premium brands either become beloved or become interchangeable.

The Vail I remember had texture. It had quirks. It had little flashes of humanity that made the mountain feel alive. When I was teaching in the early 90s, instructors had pockets full of candy, ribbons, and pins to hand out to kids. Lift operators brought personality to their stations with music, snow sculptures, trivia, and occasional costumes. The mountain did not feel over-managed. It felt inhabited. That may sound like nostalgia, but it is actually a serious point about brand design. Personality is not fluff. It is part of the product.

Later, I watched my son grow up on that same mountain. In the absence of what Vail delivered to me in my day, he collected pins and stickers from Charlie’s T-shirt shop. He held onto paper trail maps. He brought those things back to school and used them to tell the story of where he had been and what he had done. Those objects were small, but they carried weight. They turned a ski day into an identity marker. They extended Vail into the rest of his life.

That is what the best experience businesses understand. The product is never just the product. The real product is the story a customer gets to tell afterward.

Which is why one of Vail’s more revealing misses, at least to me, was the introduction of digital badges without a meaningful physical counterpart. The logic behind the badges is obvious enough. Track engagement. Reward participation. Build habits. But if a child earns something in the app and there is no simple way to redeem it for a patch, a sticker, a photo, or some small physical token at the base area, then the loop is incomplete. The system recognized the behavior, but it failed to create the memory.

That kind of miss matters more than it looks.

For years, Vail has been optimized brilliantly as a machine. That is not criticism. It is a fact. The company’s operating model, its pass strategy, and its scale have set the standard for the category. Even now, the company is framing its next phase as an “Epic Experience” strategy, with Rob Katz back in the CEO role and a clear acknowledgment that growth cannot come from pass sales and acquisitions alone. The problem is that optimization has a way of sanding down personality if no one is actively protecting it.

And that, more than pricing, lines, or app functionality, is what many longtime skiers feel.

The mountain has been cleaned up, standardized, and corporatized to the point that too much of it now feels emotionally neutral. It works, but it rarely surprises. It delivers, but it does not always delight. For a premium brand, that is dangerous territory. The more polished and professional the system becomes, the more deliberate the company has to be about preserving the soul.

Investors should care about that, too.

Not because the soul is sentimental, but because the soul has economic value. It shows up in return intent, in family tradition, in advocacy, in the emotional switching costs that keep people tied to one mountain over another. It is what turns a customer into an ambassador without a media budget. It is what keeps a place from becoming just another well-run asset.

That is why I find this moment so interesting. Rob Katz is not inheriting someone else’s strategy from the outside. He is returning to a position in the company he helped define at a moment when the model's logic is no longer enough on its own. The next phase is not about proving Vail can operate at scale. It already did that. The next phase is about proving that scale and soul need not be opposing forces.

I want that to be true, probably more than most. As a lifelong skier at Vail and a former instructor, I have a soft spot for the place. I want this change to be real. I want Vail to remember that what made it special was never just the acreage, the lifts, or the pass economics. It was the feeling that the mountain had a personality, and that the people who worked there were allowed to give it one.

The 1980’s slogan “VAIL: There’s No Comparison” is what I hope comes back.

Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Not a performative nod to heritage. Something more concrete than that. A real return to the small gestures, physical artifacts, employee discretion, and unexpected moments that make guests feel that they are somewhere with character, not just somewhere with capacity.

Because once a place loses its personality, it is very hard to get it back.

If “Vail. There’s no comparison” once meant something real, then the challenge now is not to recreate the past. It is to recover the qualities that made the past unforgettable in the first place.

That is the work.

And it is work worth doing.

I watched the bike industry ignore similar warning signs and drive itself straight into a wall. Many good people and strong brands paid the price for that denial.

Trail running is not there yet. But if you look hard enough, the patterns, as Ian alluded to in his post, are uncomfortably familiar.

Growth Has Become a Belief System

Right now, “trail is booming” is not a data point; it is a worldview.

More runners. More races. More brands. More content. More everything.

In cycling, that exact mindset turned a temporary spike in demand into a permanent planning assumption. Everyone built for more, and nobody modeled what “less” or even “normal” might look like. When demand came back to earth, the industry cratered: warehouses full of inventory, bottomless discounting, layoffs, bankruptcies, and an ugly reset.

If you are building a business focused on trail running right now and your plan does not include a sober downside case, you are not being optimistic. You are following a reckless cycling path. Growth is not the problem. Blind faith in uninterrupted growth is.

“Accessibility” Is Becoming a Convenient Excuse

You will hear a lot of people say, “We’re making trail running more accessible.” It sounds great. Who is going to argue against access?

But watch how that phrase gets used in pitches:

• Justifying permanent discount cycles

• Excusing margin erosion

• Defending promotional sprawl that trains runners to never pay full price

Cycling has already proved how this story ends. Years of heavy discounting did not democratize the sport. They destroyed pricing power, gutted specialty retail, and left brands desperate to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves.

If your version of “accessibility” depends on conditioning consumers to expect 30 to 50 percent off as a baseline, you are not helping the sport. You are hollowing it out.

Community Is Being Treated Like a Hack, Not a Responsibility

“Community” might be the most abused word in endurance sports right now.

Run clubs, group runs, trail crews: done right, these are the soul of the sport. Done wrong, they are just a cheap acquisition channel with nicer photos. And you can already see the tension:

• Branded clubs spun up in key cities to “own” the scene

• Community programs run on quarterly KPIs

• Experiences built more for social content than for the people on the ground

Here is the hard truth: if you treat community as a growth hack, do not be surprised when people eventually treat your brand like a transaction.

If you are going to use the word community, treat it like a long-term relationship. Budget for it when the numbers are great and when they are not. The fastest way to lose credibility in trail is to pull the plug the minute the funnel math gets tougher.

The Race Calendar Looks Healthy Until It Does Not

From the outside, the explosion in events looks robust: stacked calendars, new formats, new distances, new locations. More opportunity for everyone.

From the inside, anyone who has actually built or operated events knows the other side:

• Crowding in key weekends and regions

• Rising costs for permits, medical, logistics, and insurance

• Organizers caught in a race to the bottom on price and perks

The early warning signs never show up in the headline numbers. They show up when:

• Sellouts get a little slower

• Repeat rates quietly slip

• The best small races disappear without much noise

If you are cheering uncritically for more races, ask yourself a harder question: are we building a durable event ecosystem, or just setting up a wave of consolidation in which a handful of big properties survive and many of the culture-building ones do not?

We Are Overcomplicating Something People Love Because It Is Simple

This is the part that the business plans and spreadsheets never capture.

Scroll my Strava, and you will not see a “market segment.” You will see early morning solo runs in the woods. No audience except the bears, deer, squirrels, chipmunks, and whatever else happens to be moving through the trees. That is the point.

The magic of trail is brutally simple:

• Move your body.

• Go somewhere beautiful or challenging.

• Come back as a slightly different human.

Every time the industry adds another layer of noise: more tech, more content, more engagement, more monetization, we should ask: does this make the experience better for the runner or for the business model? Sometimes the answer is both. Often it is not.

If the sport starts to feel like it is built mainly for reels, dashboards, and revenue targets, pure trail runners will do the most rational thing in the world: they will go find quiet trails and leave the industry behind.

If This Feels Harsh, Good

This is not a “stop growing and go live in a cabin” manifesto. Growth is fine. Professionalization is fine. Ambition is fine.

What is not fine is collective amnesia. Cycling just gave us a very expensive case study in what happens when an industry confuses a hot cycle with permanent reality and uses “community” and “access” as covers for undisciplined decisions.

Trail running is in an extraordinary moment. The question is whether it uses this window to build something resilient, or whether it throws itself the same party the bike world did and acts surprised when the bill shows up.

So here is the challenge back to everyone questioning the growth and ‘what’s next?’ question:

• What is one thing you are publicly celebrating that makes you nervous privately?

• And what would it actually look like to act on that concern now, while you still have momentum, instead of after the reset?

If you cannot answer that, go for a long run and think about it. The trail usually tells the truth.

Private capital did not break youth sports. It moved into the vacuum that schools and communities created.

At the root of this shift is a decades-long erosion of school-based physical education, arts, and athletics. As institutions failed to keep pace with the needs of modern families and athlete development, the private sector stepped in to deliver what parents were willing to pay for.

The Long, Slow Decline of School-Based Sports and Arts

For most of the 20th century, the backbone of youth activity in America was simple: you went to school, you played for your school, and your identity as an athlete or artist was built in that environment. The gym, the chorus room, the playing field, and the auditorium were central to how communities saw themselves.

Over the last few decades, that model has been quietly hollowed out.

Several trends can be attributed to driving the decline:

• Academic pressure and a testing culture pushed physical education and the arts aside.

• Liability, compliance, and risk management made school sports more administratively complex and costly.

• Facilities aged without commensurate reinvestment, especially in resource-constrained districts.

• The teacher-coach pipeline weakened as compensation, workload, and expectations diverged.

The result is fewer robust school-based programs, less consistent daily physical education, and more variability in what a student can access depending on their zip code.

Importantly, some public and private schools have resisted this trend. There are districts and programs that still offer exceptional arts and athletics, retain athletes in local systems, and reduce reliance on travel teams through smart scheduling and community alignment. But they are the exception, not the rule.

When Schools Retreat, Demand Doesn’t Just Vanish

Demand for and the reliance on athletics and arts has only increased, and become more relevant on college applications.

To be well-rounded, competitive, and stand out on college applications, students and parents still want:

• Safe, structured environments to move, learn, and compete.

• Pathways that align with college recruiting, scholarships, and increasingly NIL opportunities.

• Development models that look more like professional systems: year-round, specialized, and data-informed.

As school systems pulled back, two things happened simultaneously.

First, local recreation struggled to absorb the gap. Municipal budgets and volunteer-led models often lacked the resources and sophistication to replace what schools had once delivered at scale.

Second, the market spotted an opening. Entrepreneurs, clubs, facility operators, and eventually private equity saw a fragmented, emotionally charged, and underserved space and began to organize it.

This is the critical distinction. Private operators did not invent the desire for youth sports and arts. They monetized the explosive growth and unmet demand.

How Private Equity Rewired the Youth Sports Ecosystem

The youth sports industry in the United States is now commonly described as a multibillion-dollar market, and that scale naturally attracts institutional capital. Private equity has moved aggressively into facilities, event operators, club systems, licensing, and technology platforms tied to participation and exposure.

Headlines focus on the downside:

• Families are paying thousands of dollars a year for travel sports.

• Consolidation and near-monopoly control over venues, fields, and ice time.

• Pricing and policies that push working-class families out of the system.

Those concerns are real and demand attention, but they are symptoms of a deeper structural reality. The center of gravity in youth sports shifted from an institution-based model rooted in schools to a market-based model rooted in the private sector, and financial optimization followed.

When the operating logic changes from serving every student in a district to maximizing return on invested capital, the ecosystem behaves differently.

That is not inherently evil, but it is inherently selective.

The True Power Shift: From Schools to the Private Sector

At the center of the system are youth talent and families, the kids and parents making daily choices about time, money, and identity. Around them, two systems now compete for influence.

On one side is the school-based system:

• Physical education

• School sports teams

• Arts and music programs

• Community identity and hometown allegiance

This system is tied to policy and public funding and historically had the mandate to serve broad populations regardless of income.

On the other side is the private sector system:

• Club and travel teams

• Training academies and performance centers

• Tournaments and showcase events

• Technology and data platforms

• Media, content, and branding

This system is tied to capital and private equity and optimizes for growth, revenue, and perceived competitive advantage.

Over the last 20 to 30 years, the arrows have shifted. Participation, especially for ambitious or elite-track athletes, now flows heavily toward the private sector, and identity is increasingly built around clubs, circuits, and training brands rather than hometown high schools.

Private equity is not ruining youth sports as much as it is scaling a model that emerged when schools couldn’t keep up.

Why Politicians Target Private Equity Instead of Fixing Schools

This is where the current political conversation starts to break down.

Local and federal politicians are focusing on private equity because it offers a clean villain and a media-friendly narrative. Bills like the Let Kids Play Act make it easy to say that lawmakers are protecting families from financial actors, and local TV coverage reinforces the message that private equity ownership is the direct cause of rising fees.

Across the country, local officials argue that private equity-backed youth leagues are pricing families out, with one report citing league fees rising by 50 percent over five years and some parents facing costs of $2,000 to $3,000 per season. That is a powerful sound bite, but it is not the same as a complete solution.

Fixing the issue at the school level is much harder. It requires school boards, mayors, county leaders, and state officials to make long-term budget choices around PE, facilities, coaching, transportation, and arts programming. It also forces politicians to confront tradeoffs, including taxes, staffing, scheduling, and whether sports and arts are treated as core youth infrastructure rather than optional extras.

Divestment, by contrast, is politically safer. It sounds like action without requiring a detailed follow-on plan for who will fund, operate, and maintain leagues, facilities, and development pathways if institutional capital exists. That is why so much of this debate feels incomplete: it names a problem in ownership structure without rebuilding the public system that created the opening in the first place.

To be fair, some local leaders are funding access programs, grants, and community sports initiatives. But these efforts are fragmented and generally too small to reverse the broader shift away from school-based sports and arts.

Risks That Must Be Addressed

None of this absolves private equity or the broader private sector from criticism. There are serious risks in the current trajectory.

First is access and equity.

Pay-to-play models disproportionately exclude lower-income athletes and communities, deepening existing inequities in health, opportunity, and representation.

Second is over-scheduling and early specialization.

The race to year-round, sport-specific training can drive burnout, injury, and reduced overall physical literacy.

Third is community erosion.

When top athletes no longer play for their local schools, the shared identity that school sports once provided starts to fracture.

Fourth is data and commercialization.

As technology platforms track performance, recruiting, and monetization, youth development risks becoming hyper-transactional.

These are design problems in the system, not simply individual bad actors. They require intentional correction, not nostalgia for a model that, in many places, no longer exists.

The Emerging Hybrid: Where Solutions Live

The most interesting and hopeful developments are happening in the middle ground between pure school-based models and pure privatization.

Public school districts can partner with private facilities and training providers while keeping athletes anchored in school teams. Community-backed schools can invest in modern facilities and coaching without replicating full pay-to-play pricing. Nonprofit and municipal models can blend performance training with access, subsidizing costs for families that would otherwise be locked out.

This hybrid approach acknowledges reality. The private sector is not going away. Institutional budgets will remain constrained. Families will continue to vote with their wallets and calendars.

The real question is whether schools, communities, and private operators can be organized into a balanced ecosystem rather than a zero-sum fight. The goal should be to keep identity and access rooted locally while using private innovation and capital intelligently.

A Better Narrative for Youth Sports

The prevailing narrative that private equity is destroying youth sports misdiagnoses the problem and misdirects the anger. It suggests there was once a healthy, equitable, sustainable system that was suddenly disrupted from the outside.

In reality, school-based systems have been eroding for decades. Families have been pushed toward private solutions by necessity as much as ambition. Private equity is now scaling and consolidating what the market had already started to build.

Private equity did not break youth sports. It exposed where the system was already broken and built a business around fixing it for those who could pay.

That framing does not let capital off the hook. It reframes the challenge in a way that invites solutions: reinvest in school-based physical education, arts, and sports as essential infrastructure, design public-private partnerships that protect access and community identity, and use policy to guard against predatory practices without freezing beneficial innovation.

If youth development, health, and opportunity truly matter, the fight is not schools versus private equity. It is fragmented, inequitable systems versus intentional, balanced ecosystems where every child, not just the ones whose parents can pay, has a pathway to move, play, create, and compete.

Most people spend the week of the 4th thinking about what they’re going to throw on the grill or where they’re going to watch the fireworks. Me? Every single year, without fail, my mind goes back to Vail, Colorado. Ford Field. Bridge Street. A pile of jerseys. The sound of a crowd that actually knew what they were watching.

If you played in the Vail Lacrosse Shootout in the late 80s or early 90s, you already know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re nodding. You might be smiling. You might be a little sad.

If you didn’t, buckle up, because I need to tell you about the greatest week in sports you’ve never heard of.

Vail Was the Center of the Lacrosse Universe

The Vail Lacrosse Shootout wasn’t just a tournament. It was a pilgrimage.

Every Fourth of July, the best players in the country: current college stars, alumni of all ages, all-star squads assembled from across every lacrosse pocket in America, descended on the Vail Valley. The fields stretched 13 miles from Vail to Avon to Edwards, and every single one of them was packed. The bars and Bridge Street were shoulder-to-shoulder every night with people who could talk lacrosse for hours and never get tired of it. As a kid, I idolized the players and collected jerseys from players on tournament-eliminated teams. When I finally got to take the field with and against my heroes: Kevin Plummer, Gary and Paul Gait, Dave Pietramala, Dave Morrow, and so many others. My personal on-field highlight was my first year playing for the hometown Vail team sponsored by The Club bar, and shutting down All-American attackman Kevin Lowe of MAB Paints in a first-round close upset. Later, I made the Team Colorado roster, and there was no better feeling than playing in Vail while wearing that uniform and the home-state support.

A friend of mine put it better than I ever could: “No NIL, no craziness, just love of the game, a bunch of Coors Lights, and playing with friends. The party after the game was just as important as the game. The brotherhood in the doing.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing right there.

You came home sunburned, exhausted, sore, and carrying a stack of jerseys from teams you’d played against, parties you barely remembered, and friendships that somehow stuck. It was a privilege to play in that setting, in front of people who genuinely loved and respected the greatest game on earth. We knew it then. We feel it even more now.

Then the Pro Leagues Appeared, And Something Left.

I say this with full respect for what the Premier Lacrosse League and professional lacrosse have built, because they’ve built something real. ESPN deal. Olympic inclusion in 2028. The sport is in nearly 100 countries. These are legitimately great developments.

But here’s what happened to Vail.

No people or excitement on the sidelines of the 2026 Elite Final game.

When professional lacrosse arrived, the best players in the country, the ones who used to show up every July because they wanted to, suddenly had contracts, schedules, and obligations. Their summers belonged to a league, not to a field in the mountains. The all-star teams stopped assembling. The electric mix of college stars and crusty alumni playing side by side thinned out. Bridge Street is still hopping, but the vibe has shifted to a more family-friendly, more subdued one, with the packed bars replaced by earlier bedtimes and younger crowds.

The tournament still happens. New generations of kids are trampling Ford Field down to dirt and dust, and that’s genuinely beautiful. But the version of Vail that lived in my bones? That was a specific, unrepeatable cultural moment, and professionalization quietly took it from us without anyone really noticing until it was already gone.

1990 Title Game

VS.

2026 Title Game

A Morning Run and a Missed Opportunity

I was running past the fields in Vail a few weeks ago during the youth Lacrosse Tournament: 120-plus teams, roughly 2,500 athletes, 4th through 12th grade, boys and girls. Play starts at first light, and the joy and cheers were echoing off the mountains.

It was hard not to smile, stop to reminisce, and soak it in.

There was a vendor area set up near the fields. I ran by for a closer look.

USA Lacrosse and the PLL are not there.

I’ll be honest, that stopped me in my tracks.

Look at who is standing on those sidelines. These are families at the very beginning of their lacrosse journey. First-time lacrosse parents trying to figure out what position their kid plays. Families two seasons in and already hooked. And this being Vail, there are more than a few CEOs, CMOs, and brand executives in that crowd; people who, on a Tuesday morning watching their kid play under the Rockies, are not thinking about quarterly results. They are emotionally open, completely bought in, and watching their child fall in love with something.

That is an extraordinary audience. And both organizations are absent from it.

USA Lacrosse needs members and advocates. The PLL needs fans who buy tickets and bring their kids back next year. With the 2028 Olympics approaching, both organizations are spending real money to grow the game, and yet they were skipping a venue with 2,500 young athletes and their families, all in peak lacrosse mode, in one of the highest-income zip codes in the country.

Both organizations will likely be at the Vail Lacrosse Shootout this week, and they should be. But that crowd already knows the game inside and out. The youth tournament is where the next generation of lacrosse families is being made. You don’t build a fanbase by only showing up where people already love you.

The Olympic Moment Is Bigger Than the Game

Lacrosse is going back to the Olympics in 2028, the first time as a medal sport in over a century. That is a massive, generational opportunity. Not just to put the sport on a global stage, but to finally tell a story that deserves to be told at scale.

The story of a game born from an Indigenous ceremony, played to heal and to honor. The story of scrappy regional cultures: Long Island, Baltimore, Syracuse, Denver, etc that kept this sport alive through sheer obsession. The story of an aging midfielder in Vail who has shown up every Fourth of July for 30 years because it’s the one week he feels most like himself.

That story doesn’t live in a press release. It lives on Bridge Street. It lives in a pile of jerseys. It lives in the “brotherhood in the doing.”

The question going into 2028 isn’t whether lacrosse can find a global audience. It’s about whether the people running the sport will be brave enough to market the people rather than the product.

Show me the athletes. Show me the families. Show me the 10-year-old girl who just made her first behind-the-back pass and doesn’t know yet that this sport is about to take over her entire life.

That’s the story. It’s always been the story.

Happy 4th, Lax People

Wherever you are this week - whether you’re grilling, watching fireworks, or sneaking away to throw around in the backyard; I hope part of your brain goes back to a field somewhere, some summer, when the game was pure, and the only thing that mattered was the next face-off.

Those of us who had Vail? We hit the jackpot.

Here’s to the brotherhood. Here’s to the pile of jerseys. And here’s to the greatest game on earth finally getting the moment it deserves.

That is why decisions such as split days, expanded fields, or additional inventory are not merely operational. They are brand architecture decisions. Expanding supply changes not only who can participate, but what participation means.

Scarcity Is Part of the Product

For many iconic endurance events, demand is driven by more than course quality or production value. The appeal is built on three reinforcing forces: scarcity, narrative, and social signaling. A hard-to-get entry creates urgency; the event’s mythology creates desire; and the public display of participation turns entry into a badge of honor.

That combination creates a powerful flywheel. Registration drama fuels anticipation; anticipation fuels social sharing and conversation; social sharing and conversation fuel aspiration; and aspiration sustains pricing power. In that kind of system, the sellout is not a side effect of demand. It is part of the product itself.

Lived Experience With Growth

This argument is not theoretical. I have lived both sides in my career.

During my time with Competitor Group, as we expanded the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon Series, growth was never just about pouring more runners into the same event. The strategy was to add new destinations with their own unique identities and stories. Each city needed to feel distinct: a different music culture, a different course personality, a different “I did this one” memory that athletes could attach to their identity.

And then there was Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas.

If there is a case study in how to grow without diluting the halo, it is what the team did by moving Las Vegas from a traditional morning start time to a nighttime experience and building the “Strip At Night” platform. Instead of simply increasing capacity, the product itself changed. Running under the lights on the Las Vegas Strip in prime time became its own form of social currency and a call to action.

Participants were not just doing a race. They were running the Strip At Night.

The team deserves enormous credit for turning that into something athletes instantly understood and wanted to be part of. Lucy, Dan, Maya, Megan, Stacey, and many others did a masterful job transforming “Strip At Night” into a clear call to action and a marketing platform with immediate cultural resonance. The uniqueness was the growth strategy. The experience was the marketing.

That is the critical difference. Growth can work when expansion creates new meaning. It becomes far riskier when expansion simply adds more of the same product and hopes the original aura survives.

What Happens When Supply Expands Without New Meaning

When organizers add a large amount of inventory to a scarcity-driven event without creating a new layer of meaning, three risks usually emerge.

• The status premium weakens because access is no longer as exclusive.

• Pricing becomes harder to sustain because consumers start evaluating the event more by its tangible features than by the privilege of getting in.

• The registration ritual loses heat because the waitlist, lottery tension, and instant-sellout energy no longer carry the same FOMO.

Year one can disguise these issues. Pent-up demand gets released, loyal participants are curious, and the market often rewards novelty. But the true test is what happens in years two and three, once the newness fades. If the event no longer feels like a must-have badge, demand often normalizes faster than operators expect.

Ironman as a Cautionary Case Study

Ironman’s recent handling of the World Championship offers a strong cautionary example. In 2022, the event in Kona was held over two days with roughly 5,200 athletes, about double the traditional field, which highlighted both the scale opportunity and the logistical strain of trying to grow the championship in its historic home.

From 2023 through 2025, Ironman separated the men’s and women’s World Championships across Kona and Nice, alternating venues by gender. The move was framed around practical and principled goals: reduce operational pressure in Kona, give women a dedicated race day and venue, and preserve championship prestige while expanding opportunity.

In theory, that was a thoughtful solution. In practice, it revealed how fragile the meaning of an iconic event can be when format changes disrupt the core story. Kona was not just valuable because it was difficult to reach. It was valuable because it was the shared center of gravity for the sport: one place, one mythology, one collective annual pilgrimage.

Once that unity was broken, part of the symbolic power weakened. Athletes and observers increasingly argued that the split diluted tradition and fractured the communal feeling that had made Kona singular. The men’s and women’s races may each have retained elite sporting importance, but the championship no longer carried the same concentrated cultural energy when the experience was divided across places and years.

Just as importantly, the experiment did not deliver its hoped-for growth outcome. Ironman’s own leadership later acknowledged that the split did not produce the expected increase in women’s participation. That matters because it turns a controversial format change into an even sharper lesson: if an organizer asks the market to give up tradition, shared identity, and emotional continuity, the upside has to be both real and visible.

Instead, the market response suggested a mismatch. The format solved some operational issues, but it also weakened the very narrative architecture that made the World Championship special. That is why Ironman announced that, beginning in 2026, the World Championship would return to Kona as the exclusive location, with men and women competing for world titles on the same day.

That reversal is significant. It amounts to a recognition that iconic events derive value not only from access restrictions or field composition, but from ritual, concentration, and shared meaning. In other words, scarcity alone is not enough. The event has to feel whole.

The Strategic Lesson

The lesson for endurance properties is not that growth is bad. It is that growth has to create new value rather than simply spreading existing value thinner.

There are two smarter ways to do that:

• Create deliberate tiers of exclusivity inside a broader footprint, such as heritage waves, limited-capacity premium experiences, or distinct competitive categories.

• Reimagine the product so that expansion adds a new story, such as a destination strategy or a format innovation that creates fresh cultural relevance rather than just additional capacity.

Without one of those moves, an organizer risks trading long-term brand heat for short-term revenue. That is the larger issue at stake in the current debate around split days and expanded fields. The question is not whether there is enough demand to fill more slots once. The question is whether the event will still command premium identity value after the market learns that access is no longer rare.

London Changes the Stakes

This debate is no longer hypothetical. London Marathon Events has confirmed that the 2027 TCS London Marathon will become a two-day event, allowing a record 100,000 participants to run the traditional 26.2-mile course across Saturday, April 24 and Sunday, April 25, 2027.

Many in the running industry are calling it a “massive game-changer.” They are correct. A move of that scale has the potential to reshape expectations across the endurance industry and force every major organizer to rethink capacity, format, and brand value.

The open question is whether London becomes the blueprint others follow or the cautionary tale they study. If the two-day format creates fresh layers of meaning, differentiated experiences, and new forms of social currency, it could redefine what a major city marathon can be without losing its halo. But if it simply doubles the inventory, it risks falling into the same trap that iconic events often face when growth outpaces narrative design.

That is why the implications reach beyond London. With record ballot demand and a one-off two-day format now confirmed, the 2027 race becomes a live market test not only for London Marathon Events, but for the broader Abbott World Marathon Majors ecosystem.

The next few years may answer a bigger strategic question for the category: in an era of extraordinary participation demand, do the world’s most storied races want to be bigger, or more iconic?

After publishing that piece, one of the most pointed responses came from an independent event operator. The question was direct and worth digging into:

“So if marathons are up 3 to 6%, but it appears to be all in the majors, where does that leave small business event promoters? Focus on the frontier? Isn’t that what the majors want us to do so they can continue to grab more market share? If you were me, what would you focus on?”

I spent a long morning run working through it in my head and talking it out to myself into my notes app. Here’s what I’ve landed on, and it’s more strategically interesting than either the question or the headline numbers suggest.

The Concentration Problem Is Real, But It’s Not the Whole Story

Let’s acknowledge what the data actually shows, because the optimistic read requires an honest look at the challenging one first.

The marathon recovery has been led by a handful of events at the top. The world’s largest marathons are setting all-time records simultaneously. One major broke the global finisher record in the spring, another reclaimed it in the fall of the same year. One event received over 200,000 applications for a field that accepts roughly 1 in 3 applicants. The power at the top of the market is real and intensifying.

Gran fondo cycling is following the same pattern. The UCI’s flagship mass-participation series now spans 36 events across five continents, with its world championship moving to Asia for the first time. The platforms with established brand equity, lottery systems, and international marketing infrastructure are growing faster than the overall market.

Meanwhile, RunSignup’s annual Race Trends data tells an honest story: 87% of all races have fewer than 500 participants, and small local events account for nearly 40% of all runners in America. The base of the pyramid is enormous. But the growth headlines belong to the peak.

So the question stands: what does a small operator actually do with this?

The Majors Are Great at the Harvest. They Don’t Do the Planting.

Here is the reframe that changes the strategic picture entirely.

The large destination marathon is almost never someone’s first endurance event.

Think about the actual consumer journey. A person decides to try running. They sign up for a local 5K, or a fun themed event with family or friends, a relay with a charity group, or a short trail race someone at the office is doing. They finish. They feel something. They sign up again. Over months and years, they go longer. They go faster. They try a new discipline. And eventually, years into that journey, they put a major on their bucket list.

By the time that runner crosses the finish line of a major, a dozen operators shaped who they became as an athlete. The major sees them at peak identity. It harvests the investment that others made.

This is not a criticism of the majors. They have built extraordinary products. But the harvest model has a structural dependency: it requires a continuous supply of athletes who already identify as serious participants or have set a “bucket list” goal. Someone has to create those athletes. Someone has to introduce them to the sport, give them their first finish line, nurture their confidence across distances and disciplines, and build the community that keeps them coming back.

That is the independent operator’s business. And it is not a lesser version of the major’s business. It is a categorically different one, and in several important ways, a structurally stronger one.

The Upstream Advantage

You are upstream of the majors. Not behind them. Upstream of them.

The first-time participant who does a fun, accessible, occasion-driven event is not yet on the major’s radar. They haven’t created the bucket list or self-identified as a serious athlete. They are simply having a good time and feeling something they want to feel again.

Whoever holds that first relationship has something the majors cannot buy retroactively: trust. The operator who introduces a participant to endurance sport, keeps them engaged across distances, and meets them where they are across a progression of events earns a kind of loyalty that no marketing spend can manufacture. The participant doesn’t just remember the race. They remember who made it accessible. Who made it fun. Who made them feel like they belonged.

That is the upstream advantage. It compounds quietly over time, and it is genuinely defensible in ways that road race market share is not.

The Frontier Question, Answered Honestly

Now to the pointed part of the question: isn’t focusing on the frontier exactly what the majors want independent operators to do, so they can consolidate road racing at the top?

It’s a smart and legitimate concern. The pattern exists. Scaled operators are already in gravel and trail. The discipline pioneers did the cultural work; the big platforms arrived with capital. It will happen again.

But here’s what the concern misses: the independent operator’s advantage in frontier disciplines is not primarily about being early to a format. It’s about being deeply rooted in a community and place in a way that scaled operators structurally cannot replicate.

The data from the fastest-growing trail and gravel events is instructive. More than 70% of participants at the world’s largest trail running series come from the host country or a neighboring region. Repeat attendance rates in trail and gravel significantly outpace road racing. The events winning in these disciplines are not winning on scale. They are winning on belonging. On the sense that this event, in this place, was built by people who live here and care about this community.

That is not a competitive position a major can buy. They can acquire the event. They cannot acquire the legitimacy.

Two Lanes. One Portfolio.

The most durable answer to the question, “what should an independent operator actually build?” is not a single lane. It’s two, and they hedge each other in ways that make the portfolio genuinely resilient.

Lane One: Occasion-Driven and Branded Events

Fun, themed, accessible events built around identity and experience rather than sport performance are a powerful tool for reaching first-time participants. These events don’t compete with majors. They compete with other leisure occasions: a weekend trip, a concert, a group activity. The participant is buying a social experience that happens to involve physical activity.

The strategic strength is differentiated acquisition. You are reaching net-new entrants to endurance, and you are their first introduction to it. The strategic risk is dependency. Branded and licensed events rely on IP that belongs to someone else. If this is the only lane, the operator is a contractor with a great client, not a brand with owned equity.

Lane Two: Community-Rooted Events in Emerging Disciplines

Trail running, gravel cycling, mountain biking, and adventure formats are the fastest-growing segments in endurance sports, and they are dramatically underserved at the regional level in most markets. These events derive their value not from a licensed property but from terrain, community, and the sense of place that a well-run regional event builds over time. That equity is owned. It compounds. It cannot be taken away.

Together, these two lanes form a portfolio that makes structural sense. Lane One drives volume, cash flow, and top-of-funnel reach with first-time participants. Lane Two builds owned equity, loyalty, and long-term defensibility. And the participant who enters through a fun branded event today is a candidate for your trail series or gravel event next year, if you build both lanes and connect them deliberately.

The Flywheel the Majors Are Ignoring

There is a consumer flywheel operating in endurance sports that almost no one is talking about explicitly. It works like this:

1. A first-time participant enters through an accessible, low-intimidation event

2. They finish. They feel something. They return.

3. The operator who guided that experience introduces them to longer distances, new disciplines, and deeper community

4. The participant’s identity as an athlete develops, and so does their lifetime event spend

5. Eventually, some percentage of them puts a bucket list major on their calendar

Step five gets all the press. Steps one through four create the athlete who gets there.

The independent operator who builds and nurtures this journey deliberately is not a feeder system for the majors. They are the architect of the participant’s athletic identity. They hold the first, most trusted, and longest relationship in that athlete’s event career.

The majors only see the runner at the finish line. You can see them at the starting line, the very first one, when they weren’t even sure they were a runner yet.

But only if you remember them.

The Data Layer: Turning the Flywheel Into a Business Asset

The upstream advantage is only as durable as your ability to remember the participant.

This is where most independent operators leave the most value on the table. A first-time participant crosses your finish line, feels something, collects their medal, and then disappears into a registration platform’s database that you may or may not own, a timing file that lives in a spreadsheet, and a social media follower count that an algorithm controls. The relationship existed. The data didn’t go anywhere useful.

The majors have solved this problem with scale: dedicated CRM teams, loyalty programs, and marketing technology stacks that would embarrass most mid-size companies. What most independent operators don’t realize is that the tools to build a functionally equivalent zero and first-party data infrastructure are now accessible at a fraction of that cost. The gap is not money. It is intentionality.

Registration is a data collection event, not just a transaction. Every registration is an opportunity to learn who your participant is, where they came from, what they’ve done before, and where they want to go. A well-designed registration flow asks a few questions beyond the basics: Is this your first endurance event? What other disciplines are you curious about? How did you hear about us? What’s on your bucket list? That data, collected consistently over time, builds a participant profile that tells you exactly where each person sits in the journey and what the right next offer is.

Own your email list like the business asset it is. Social media reach is rented. Email is owned. An engaged list of participants who have crossed one of your finish lines is worth more than a multiple of social followers, because you control the channel, the timing, and the message. The operators winning on retention send communications that feel like they come from someone who knows the participant, because they do. Segmentation by distance history, discipline, and event tenure turns a broadcast list into a personalized conversation.

Use post-event data to map movement through the flywheel. Which participants who did your entry-level event came back for something longer? Which road runners tried your trail event? Which first-timers became annual attendees? This movement data is the most valuable intelligence an independent operator can possess. It tells you which events are feeding which other events, where participants are dropping off the flywheel, and where a well-timed communication could re-engage someone who hasn’t returned. Most operators have this data in fragmented form across registration systems and timing files. Consolidating it into even a basic CRM creates a participant journey map that fundamentally changes how you market and program.

Build a loyalty structure that rewards the journey, not just the event. The participant who has attended five of your events across three disciplines over four years is your most valuable asset: as an attendee, a referral source, and a brand ambassador. Most operators treat every registration as a discrete transaction. The operators building durable businesses treat multi-event, multi-year participants as members of something. A simple loyalty program, including priority registration, recognition at events, and earned discounts, costs relatively little to operate and dramatically increases the data signal you receive about your most engaged participants.

Respect the data and the relationship in equal measure. Zero and First-party data is only a competitive advantage if participants trust you with it. The operator who uses participant data to send relevant, timely, genuinely useful communications builds something the majors struggle to replicate at scale: the feeling that someone is paying attention. Use it to tell participants about events that fit where they are in their journey. Use it to celebrate milestones. Use it to ask what they want next.

The majors have the marketing budgets. Independent operators have the intimacy. Technology makes intimacy scalable, but only if you build the system intentionally, starting at the first finish line.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Map the participant journey, not just the event. What does your participant look like at year one, year three, year five? Build a portfolio of events and experiences that serves the whole arc, not just the entry point.

Connect the lanes deliberately. If you run branded occasion events and frontier discipline events, make sure participants in one know about the other. The crossover rate will surprise you. The person who ran your themed 5K is more open to trying a trail 10K than you think, especially if the invitation comes from an operator they already trust.

Build community between events, not just at them. The operators winning on retention are building engagement year-round through training groups, local partnerships, social runs, and online communities. Community is what converts a one-time participant into a multi-year follower. It is also the thing that scaled operators, with their global infrastructure, are worst at.

Own a discipline before you scale it. The fastest-growing independent operators in trail and gravel right now are the ones who planted a flag early in a specific region and built the culture before the discipline went mainstream. First-mover advantage in frontier formats is real. It is also closing.

Tell the upstream story. The participant who did your entry-level event in year one and is now training for their first trail race or century ride is a story worth telling: to your community, to potential sponsors, and to the industry. That narrative is your competitive moat made visible.

Build the data infrastructure before you need it. Registration, email, post-event survey, CRM. These are not marketing tools. They are the memory of your business. Every participant who passes through your corrals without a meaningful data touchpoint is a relationship you held briefly and let go.

The flywheel only compounds if you remember who is on it.

The Bigger Picture

The endurance sports paradox described in the previous article; that the more crowded the mainstream becomes, the more valuable the frontier gets is not just a cultural observation. It is a business structure.

The majors win by harvesting. Independent operators win by cultivating. These are not competing strategies in the same market. They are complementary roles within the same ecosystem, with different time horizons, competitive dynamics, and sources of durable advantage.

The question for the independent operator is not whether to focus on the frontier or defend the mainstream. It is whether to build a portfolio that captures the origin of the participant journey and nurtures it across the full arc of athletic identity development. With the right events in the right lanes, backed by a zero and first-party data infrastructure that remembers every participant at every step, the flywheel doesn’t just turn.

It compounds.

The majors are getting bigger. The base of the pyramid is not getting smaller. And the operator who owns the first, most trusted, and longest relationship in an athlete’s event career is not behind the majors.

They are upstream of them.

That is not a consolation. That is a strategy.

As road marathons return to being bucket-list experiences and status symbols, packed with influencers, medal chasers, and Type-A personalities, a parallel migration is underway to the dirt. Trail running, mountain biking, and gravel cycling are no longer fringe pursuits. They are the fastest-growing sectors in endurance sports, and their growth is not incidental to the mainstreaming of road racing.

It is caused by it.

This is the endurance sports paradox: the more crowded the mainstream becomes, the more valuable the frontier gets.

The Marathon Is Having a Moment, and That Is Dominating the Industry

Let’s address the known: marathons are experiencing a genuine resurgence in participation:

• The U.S. marathon ecosystem grew an additional 3% to 6% over the Running USA report finisher baseline of 432,562 marathon finishers in 2024.

• The 2025 TCS New York City Marathon recorded 59,226 official finishers, the largest field in its history.

• Chicago 2025 drew 54,318 finishers, up 12.2% from 2023, and is expanding to 55,000+ for fall 2026, its largest field ever.

• Boston 2026 recorded 29,033 finishers, a 9% jump from its 2023 post-pandemic high, and the BAA is actively working with crowd scientists to keep expanding the field.

That surge in participation is real, and it’s commercially significant. But something else is happening alongside it. The marathon, once a badge of personal transformation, has become a social media currency. Gen Z is running marathons as their generation’s answer to luxury goods, with Fortune noting that marathon times are replacing designer suits as status symbols on Wall Street. A sport built on solitary suffering has become a performance for an audience.

For a meaningful and growing segment of athletes, that’s exactly the problem.

The Counterculture Counterpart

Enter the frontier disciplines.

Trail running is now a $20 billion economy, with participation up 231% over the past decade. Trail run uploads to Strava have doubled over the past three years. UTMB World Series participants surged 2.4x since 2022, with over 800,000 race starts in just the first half of 2025. Strikingly, 42% of those UTMB participants were competing in their first-ever trail event. Trail running is no longer only a sport for grizzled veterans. It’s a sport welcoming newcomers who are making a deliberate choice to go off-road.

Gravel cycling tells a similar story. From 34 participants at the first edition of what is now Unbound Gravel in 2006, the event now draws 5,000 riders across five distances, generated an estimated $21.7 million in economic impact in 2024, and has spawned an entirely new segment of the cycling industry. Gravel bikes are among the few bicycle categories to have gained market share since before the pandemic, with a 55% increase in participation on Strava in 2023 alone.

Mountain biking had over 9.2 million Americans participating in 2023, a 4.1% increase year-over-year, and the global market is projected to grow from $10 billion in 2025 to $14 billion by 2029.

The numbers don’t lie. These are the growth curves that endurance sports hasn’t seen since the marathon boom of the early 2000s.

Same Athlete Profile. Different Values.

Here’s what makes this more than a market trend: the psychographic profile driving growth in trail, gravel, and mountain biking is largely the same as that of the core of road racing and gran fondos.

Affluent, fitness-driven, experience-seeking. Per Fitt Insider, 66% of trail runners earn $100K+. They’re not abandoning endurance sports. They’re graduating from the performative version of it toward something they consider more authentic.

Trail running, as Fitt Insider describes it, trades “external validation for flow states and ego death, the thrill of dissolving into nature.” Gravel riders talk about “authenticity, exploration, and connection to place.” Mountain bikers are building trail networks and communities.

The emotional currency is different. And in a world where social media has colonized every marathon finish line, that difference is increasingly priceless.

The Organizational Parallel: Mass Participation Formats Are Following

What’s fascinating from a sports business perspective is that the event infrastructure in these emerging disciplines is now intentionally replicating, and simultaneously trying not to replicate, the mass participation model that made road racing great.

UTMB World Series ran 55 events in 28 countries across five continents in 2025, bringing together 146,933 runners. Yet 73% came from the host country or a neighboring nation; the growth is deeply rooted in local community, not globalized spectacle tourism. More than 50% of runners arrive with friends or family, turning race weekends into shared adventures.

Gran fondos, the mass-participation cycling equivalent of road marathons, are evolving similarly, with organizers layering in festivals, multi-day experiences, and boutique distances alongside the signature ride. The small-scale event with under 200 participants and a curated experience is now the fastest-growing format in the gravel world.

The parallel to marathon evolution is striking: the sport formats that once felt exclusive are becoming accessible, and the once fringe sports are actively managing the tension between growth and soul.

The Strategic Implication for Sports Business

For those of us working in mass participation sports, this dynamic should force a genuine rethink.

The marathon and gran fondo formats are not dying; the participation numbers prove that. But the meaning that once differentiated them is migrating. The intrinsic motivation, the authentic challenge, the quiet grit, and the community earned through shared suffering are moving from urban settings to more remote destinations.

This creates a genuine opportunity for event operators, brands, and platform builders:

1. Don’t just build bigger. Build deeper. The events winning in trail, gravel, and MTB are not the ones with the largest fields. They’re the ones with the strongest sense of place and culture. Emporia, Kansas. Chamonix. Moab. These are not just race venues; they are pilgrimages.

2. Authenticity is a product feature. The brands growing fastest in trail running: HOKA, Norda, NNormal, SATISFY are not trying to be Nike. They’re building for the psychographic that is actively running away from mainstream. That’s a defensible position if you hold it with integrity.

3. The participation flywheel is just starting. With 42% of UTMB participants running their first-ever trail event and gravel cycling growing at double-digit rates globally, we are not at peak participation in these disciplines. We’re still at the early majority stage. The early adopter culture that makes these sports feel authentic today is the same culture that will power the mainstream wave of the next decade.

Going Deeper to Spot Patterns

Every generation of endurance sport follows the same arc. A difficult, countercultural pursuit is discovered by the mainstream, packaged for mass consumption, and spawns a generation of performative participants, thereby creating the conditions for the next countercultural pursuit to emerge.

Road racing → trail running. Gran fondo → gravel. Cross-country mountain biking → enduro and bikepacking.

The athletes aren’t leaving endurance sports. They’re chasing the next frontier. And the frontier keeps moving.

The question for our industry isn’t whether to follow them. It’s whether we can build platforms, events, and brands worthy of the journey without paving the dirt road in the process.

Over the last year, going through the recruiting process with my son, I’ve had a front-row seat to a shift I’ve suspected for a while, and it has now become very real.

In too many college programs, “player development” has quietly been replaced by roster management, and the difference between those two things is not small.

Publicly, coaches still say the right things:

They praise multisport athletes. They talk about leadership, resilience, long-term upside, and building the whole person. They warn against early specialization and position themselves as mentors shaping young people for life beyond sport.

That public message also aligns with what sports medicine and athlete-development experts have been saying for years: delayed specialization and broader sport sampling are generally healthier for young athletes and are associated with lower risk of overuse injuries and less burnout.

Privately, though, many recruiting conversations tell a very different story. Behind closed doors, the message often becomes much simpler and much colder: are you specialized enough, polished enough, physically mature enough, and immediately useful enough to help win now? If not, many coaching staffs move on.

As a sports business professional and a dad who has actively encouraged my son to stay the course as a four-year three-sport high school varsity athlete and leader, I find that disconnect hard to stomach. It is even harder when you see it register on my son’s face and in his voice, and realize he is silently asking the question so many kids (and their parents) must be asking now: “Why didn’t I just specialize?”

The cruel irony is that the very path that I have stayed unapologetically and resolute in, and following along with health experts and development frameworks that recommend delayed specialization, diversified movement, broader athleticism, can still be treated as a recruiting disadvantage in the wrong room.

The Public Message & The Private Market

This is what makes the current environment so frustrating for many families. The public-facing story and the private decision-making criteria are no longer aligned.

Consensus recommendations from groups such as the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) and National Athletic Trainers Association (NATA) explicitly support delaying specialization, participating in a variety of sports, and limiting year-round single-sport exposure because specialization is associated with overuse injury and burnout. Reviews of the literature continue to reach the same conclusion: diversification is protective, while intensive specialization carries meaningful physical and psychological costs.

Yet once recruiting decisions get real, many college coaches narrow their lens to a tiny set of immediate performance signals. The broader athletic profile, leadership background, and developmental runway that are praised in public can become secondary the second a stopwatch, ranking list, or position-specific needs takes over.

That does not mean every coach is being dishonest. It means the incentive structure has changed. A philosophy of development may still be sincere, but sincerity gets sidelined when roster spots, budgets, retention, and wins are all under pressure simultaneously.

Why Coaches Have Changed

The coaching profession has not changed because every coach suddenly stopped caring about teaching. It has changed because the job has changed. The portal and NIL era has turned college sports into a far more fluid, transactional labor market, and coaches are increasingly forced to act like general managers, cap managers, and personnel directors all at once.

The transfer portal has created a marketplace of known quantities. A staff can evaluate a 20-year-old with college film, proven production, and a more mature body, then compare that athlete against a 17-year-old who may have tremendous upside but still needs time and coaching. In an environment built around urgency, the known quantity often wins.

NIL adds another layer. Once money, donor expectations, and competitive resource gaps intensify, the tolerance for developmental uncertainty shrinks further. A miss on a high school recruit is no longer just a missed evaluation; it can also feel like a wasted roster asset in a system that increasingly rewards immediate output.

And now there is another competitive lever available to programs that want to win right away: the international recruiting market. In a growing number of NCAA sports, especially in Olympic and individual sports, coaches are looking globally for older, more fully developed, and highly specialized athletes who can step in and score immediately. International athletes now make up a meaningful share of Division I participation overall, and in some sports they represent an even larger competitive force; in men’s NCAA swimming, top programs have drawn an outsized share of championship points from athletes developed outside the United States.

To be clear, this is not an argument against international athletes. They are talented, deserving, and often come from outstanding development systems. It is, however, another example of how the incentives now favor finished products over developmental bets. If a coach can add a proven transfer, a more mature international athlete, or a highly specialized recruit who is already close to scoring level, the appetite for taking a broad-based, late-blooming high school athlete and developing him over time naturally shrinks.

Even outside revenue sports, this logic spreads. Coaches are judged on results, roster stability, retention, and their ability to put competitive lineups on the field, court, track, or in the pool quickly. That pushes them toward athletes who require less imagination and less runway. It also helps explain why so many families now experience recruiting as a process driven less by projection and development and more by risk minimization.

The Timeline Problem

There is another part of this that is not talked about enough:

Student-athletes are being judged heavily in their junior years, before they have completed critical summer competition and before they have had a full senior year to mature physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Recruiting timelines and outreach windows in many sports now become meaningful by the end of sophomore year or during junior year, which means some of the biggest evaluations occur before an athlete’s development is nearly finished.

That matters because so much real growth happens late:

• Strength catches up.

• Confidence catches up.

• Bodies change.

• Competitive maturity changes.

• Senior-year performance can look very different from junior-year performance, especially for multisport athletes and later bloomers who may not have spent every month of the year building one sport-specific stat sheet.

But the process keeps moving younger. The pressure to identify, rank, contact, and secure athletes earlier means that later-developing kids can be left fighting for fewer spots just as they are beginning to make their biggest jumps. They are often competing against peers who may already have one or two more full years of high school development built into the way they were evaluated, marketed, and slotted. That dynamic can heavily favor early physical bloomers and early specializers, while leaving high-ceiling late developers trying to prove themselves on a compressed timeline.

In other words, the system is not just biased toward specialization. It is also biased toward early visibility. And when early visibility is mistaken for long-term superiority, many future contributors and leaders are screened out before they can fully become who they are.

What Families Experience

For families, the translation is painful but clear.

You hear:

• “We love multisport athletes.”

• “We care about the whole person.”

• “Leadership matters.”

• “Specialization too early can be harmful.”

Then, in the actual recruiting meeting, the subtext becomes:

• You may be a terrific young man, but are you ready right now?

• You may have leadership and range, but are you sport-specific enough?

• You may have upside, but are you developed enough to help immediately?

That gap between what is said in public and what is rewarded in private is where trust starts to erode.

And for teenagers, it can be brutal. A 17-year-old who has done exactly what adults said was healthy and valuable can suddenly be made to feel as though he misplayed the whole thing. That emotional collision is not theoretical. It is real, and it happens in recruiting conversations every day.

The Moment It Crystallized

One recent conversation brought all of this into focus for me.

Recently, a coach looked my son in the eye and said, in so many words, that being a three-sport varsity athlete for all four years of high school might help him get into the school, but he was not fast enough to be recruited for the team.

That moment landed hard not simply because of the evaluation itself, but because of the contrast. This is the kind of coach who, like many others in college athletics, I have listened to on podcasts and read interviews with who has publicly emphasized leadership, whole-person development, and building future leaders rather than simply chasing athletic output. Yet in the private meeting, the full-athlete narrative disappeared the second the program-specific performance threshold took over.

Publicly, the philosophy sounded expansive. Privately, the filter was singular.

That is the disconnect in one sentence. The same qualities that institutions often celebrate in admissions language and development rhetoric promoting leadership, breadth, resilience, and long-term potential take a back seat when a coach is filling a performance slot on a roster. The athlete is viewed and judged more narrowly than the person. The metric overtakes the mission.

I’m not blind to the fact, and to be fair, I am fully aware that elite programs do have real standards. In swimming and many other sports, there are hard performance thresholds because coaches are trying to score points, win meets, and remain competitive against peer institutions and conference rivals. But that is also exactly why the broader recruiting messaging matters so much.

If the real standard is “help us now, or you are not for us,” then families deserve radical honesty, not generalized praise for multisport development that does not survive first contact with a roster decision.

The Death of Player Development

When people talk about the death of player development, this is what they mean.

They do not mean coaching has vanished. They mean that the system increasingly rewards acquisition over cultivation. They mean fewer coaching staffs are willing or able to take a raw but compelling prospect and spend two or three years turning upside into production. They mean the market now prioritizes ready-made contributors over diamonds in the rough.

This shift shows up in several ways:

• Fewer true developmental bets coming out of high school.

• Greater preference for specialized athletes with cleaner, earlier sport-specific stat sheets.

• Increased reliance on transfers who have already been “finished” somewhere else.

• Less patience for freshman growth curves and more pressure for immediate return.

There are still programs and coaches who believe deeply in development. Some have to out-develop because they cannot outspend or outbid. Some still see their real edge in teaching, culture, and long-term investment. But the gravitational pull of the system is moving in the other direction. Transaction is replacing transformation.

What This Means for My Son

So what does this mean for my son and my family?

It means trying to help a 17-year-old process a recruiting world that says one thing on podcasts, in marketing materials, in recruiting emails, and on stage, and another thing in the room face-to-face. It means seeing and hearing the disappointment after a meeting and understanding that he is trying to reconcile his lived experience with everything he was told to value. It means hearing the unspoken question in his eyes:

Did I do this wrong by not specializing?

My answer to him is no.

I tell him to use it as fuel. I tell him to keep chasing his dreams and build toward faster. I tell him someday some of these coaches will see him beat their top recruits. I tell him this is not the end of the road; this is only a hurdle to jump. I tell him we are not going to chase every program that only sees him as a transactional roster piece. We are going to prove to this coach and talk to other coaches and programs who see what he actually is: a four-year high school three-sport varsity athlete, a leader, a competitor, a young man with range, resilience, and room to grow.

That is the line in the sand for us.

We are not looking for a coach who values leadership only in podcasts, emails, and marketing materials but abandons it when lineup decisions begin. We are looking for the coach who believes a broad athletic background is not an inconvenience but an asset. We are looking for an environment where upside is cultivated rather than discarded because it requires patience.

My son may still be admitted to some of these schools. He may still be a walk-on to some of these teams, for these same coaches. He may still become a great teammate and contributor if that path opens. Shit, he may develop into something greater, like an All-American or, dare I say it, an Olympian (one can dream). And if it does, he will throw himself into that opportunity the way he always has.

But that is not our only goal.

We are committed to finding a school where he can achieve more than being a great athlete. We are looking for a place where he can develop into a great leader in society. We are not here because we believe college athletics is a guaranteed runway to the Olympics, professional sport, or some financial windfall. We are here because we believe athletics can be a vehicle for becoming a leader and a teammate, a leader and teammate on the field, a leader and teammate in the classroom, and eventually a better person in the business world and in life.

That can be hard for a teenager to hear. At 17, all he wants is the chance to compete at the highest level, especially for programs he admires and coaches for whom he has the utmost respect.

So yes, there is a pit in my stomach sometimes. Yes, there is sadness in my son’s eyes and voice after certain conversations. But we move on. To become better. To the next practice. To the next race. To the next opportunity.

And we will come out stronger on the other side - We have a few sayings in our family:

Make It Happen

Tough To Beat Pool

Win The Day, One At A Time

Because somewhere in this process there are still coaches who believe their job is not just to manage a roster but to build people. There are still schools that understand athletics as a crucible for character, leadership, and long-term development. There are still places where being a four-year tri-varsity high school athlete and a broad-based competitor is seen as a marker of substance, not a mark against you.

That is where we are headed.

The Road Forward

The challenge for families in similar situations is not just finding a program. It is finding an honest one. The challenge for coaches is not just winning. It is about deciding whether they still want to be in the development business or are comfortable becoming full-time asset managers in team-issued gear. And the challenge for the rest of the sports ecosystem is deciding whether it truly believes what it says about multisport participation, whole-person growth, and long-term athlete development.

Until those things align, more families will keep discovering the same hard truth:

The public message celebrates the whole athlete, but too often the private market rewards only the finished product.

Every once in a while, something on social media stops the 'doomscroll' and makes you rethink an entire sport (not the AI slop or crazy wipeout videos, although those are a fun diversion from the real world).

The Instagram series “Run This Town” by Vik Singh has my head spinning, and I keep coming back to watch it, probably 100 times by now.

The seven-part series is nominally about the professionalization of skiing, and is right on point and continues to draw me in with how sharply it captures the lived reality of elite athletes trying to build a career in a system that was never really designed for them or included them in the conversations (hint, hint, NCAA).
💰 The prize money vs. cost to compete.
🏅 The dependence on the Olympics.
🏛️ The governance conflicts.
💃 The private equity dance.

It all feels uncomfortably familiar if you spend any time around the U.S. Olympic movement.

As a parent, a fan, and someone who’s spent a lot of time in and around Olympic pathways, a lot of this aligns with what I have written in the past and hits close to home.

You see the same pattern: world‑class athletes operating on thin margins, federations and committees juggling “democracy” and commercial survival, and a constant question of whom the machine is actually built to serve.

It’s rare to see that whole story told this clearly, in this format. The delivery, the visuals, and the Sopranos references are all so spot-on.

This is too good not to watch, and too important not to think about and share.

This is an Instagram rabbit hole absolutely worth going down, FULL STOP!