Stories That LEAD
The margin is two seasons
Most youth sport funding is aimed at getting a girl in the door. The best available evidence says the difference is made after she is already inside.
In 2024 the Women's Sports Foundation surveyed 2,886 women who had played sport and asked, among many other things, what they went on to do with their lives. The women who held formal leadership roles as adults had played sport for an average of eight years. The women who did not averaged six.
I want to be precise about what that is and what it is not. It is a correlation in a survey, not a controlled trial. It does not establish that two more seasons produce a leader, and anyone who tells you it does is selling you something. What it establishes is where the difference sits, and that is the useful part, because the difference does not sit at the front door.
Count what gets funded in youth sport and most of it is aimed at the first season. Registration subsidies. Equipment drives. Free introductory clinics. All of that is good and most of it is necessary, and nearly all of it gets measured the same way: how many girls signed up.
Sign-ups are the easy number to collect, which is why it is the number everybody collects. It is also the number that tells you least about the finding above.
The second fee is the one nobody budgets for
In that same 2024 study, family finances were the most reported barrier, named by 26.7 percent of respondents, and the barrier was sharper among women in their twenties through forties than in any older group. Roughly three in ten women aged 20 to 49 report financial barriers, against about two in ten among women aged 50 to 80.
Read that the right way round. This is not a historical problem the sector has been quietly solving. It is more common among the women who played most recently.
Federal data makes the same point from the other direction. In the CDC's 2020 National Health Interview Survey, 54.1 percent of American children aged 6 to 17 played organized sport. Among families in the highest income bracket, 70.2 percent did. Among families below the poverty line, 31.2 percent. A 39-point spread.
Two things about that figure we insist on saying out loud, because a number is only as useful as the caveats attached to it. First, the difference between boys and girls in the same survey, 56.1 percent against 52.0 percent, was not statistically significant. So this is not a gender gap. It is a price tag. Second, the data is from 2020, and the report itself cautions that its twelve-month lookback straddles the start of the pandemic. We use it because it is federal, primary, and internally consistent, and we will say so plainly when we move to newer figures.
Now put the two together. A season costs money at the door, and it keeps costing money after that: league dues in the spring, a growth spurt that makes last year's shoes useless, a tournament three hours away on a Saturday. A family that cleared the first fee with help can meet the fourth one alone and quietly stop. Nobody fills in a form to explain why. She simply does not come back, and the only place it shows up is in a number most programs do not keep.
The question I would put to anyone funding this
You almost certainly know how many girls registered with you this year. It is on your slide. It is in your grant report.
Do you know how many of last year's girls came back?
That number is harder to produce than enrollment, which is the only reason enrollment is the one on the slide. It requires matching two rosters, caring about the names on them, and being willing to find out something uncomfortable. It is also the number that sits directly on top of the two-season margin, and it is the only one that tells you whether the money you spent last year is still working.
I am not asking anyone to stop funding first seasons. Access is the first word in this Foundation's framework for a reason: a girl who never gets in the door has no second season to lose. I am asking for one more line in the same report.
Play. Stay. Lead.
Access, retention, and what sport hands back. The order is the argument, and the middle word is the one with almost no money and almost no measurement behind it.
What we are doing about the money
iWIN™ IX Momentum Grants cover registration fees, league dues, gear, shoes, uniforms, and travel. That list is deliberately long. The fee at the door is rarely the only thing that ends a season, and a grant that covers only the fee solves the part of the problem that was already visible.
Applications are open year round through Submittable and reviewed quarterly, in March, June, September, and December. The first grants put twenty girls from Mountain Home into Girls on the Run. For many of them it was a first organized sports experience.
If you run a program, a league, or a district and you have families in this position, send them to us. That referral costs you nothing and it is worth more than a donation, because you can see which families need it and we cannot.
One more thing, starting November 18
On November 18 we start publishing The Long Game, a letter that comes out twice a month for the adults who decide whether a girl stays in sport: parents and caregivers, coaches, officials, athletic directors, club and parks directors, trainers, teachers and counselors, and the people who fund all of it. One story worth your time, one number worth knowing, and something you can use this week. Every figure is checked against its primary source before it runs, and we name the source in the issue.
The first issue is about one girl and one ledger. This piece is the other half of it: the same evidence, for the people who decide at the level of a budget rather than at the level of a car ride.
If that is you, the number to go find before your next budget cycle is your own return rate. Nobody else can get it for you.
Free, twice a month. First issue November 18.
Where these numbers come from
Sharrow E, Staurowsky EJ, Davis C. Play to Lead: The Generational Impact of Sports on Women's Leadership. Women's Sports Foundation, September 2024. N=2,886, fielded by YouGov February 9 to 19, 2024.
Black LI, Terlizzi EP, Vahratian A. Organized Sports Participation Among Children Aged 6–17 Years: United States, 2020. NCHS Data Brief No. 441. National Center for Health Statistics, August 2022.
