Are High School Sports Failing Lower-Income Students?

In its heyday, high school sports could be a great equalizer: a place where students from diverse backgrounds could come together and learn to work as a team. Sports has long been a factor in social mobility: there are countless stories of athletes who used their talents to emerge from poverty.

At The Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that those days may be at an end. The cause, he writes, is a case of class stratification impacting youth sports on a local level. As Thompson puts it:

The deeper story is that the weed of American-style meritocracy is strangling the roots of youth sports. As parents have recognized that athletic success can burnish college applications, sports have come to resemble just another pre-professional program, with rising costs, hyper-specialization, and massive opportunity-hoarding among the privileged.

Thompson cites a few elements for this: the rise of traveling teams, which pull students away from their local leagues and starve those teams of resources; the increase in student-athletes specializing in one sport, which can lead to burnout; and, in the case of football, concerns over head trauma incurred while playing the sport. And while this last one doesn’t have much to do with class, the others absolutely do.

Criticisms of the role of pay-to-play in youth sports is something that American soccer fans have grappled with for a while. The careers of players like Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey suggest that there may be countless more talented athletes who never got their due because of economic reasons. And more recently, Alex Morgan used her post-World Cup platform to attack pay-to-play.

Thompson’s article at The Atlantic is a sobering look at how class is transforming high school sports—and it’s even more sobering in its implications for both athletics and society as a whole.

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