What $115 actually buys
A season of Girls on the Run in Mountain Home costs $115.
That is not an illustration, a rounded figure, or an average across programs. It is what each of twenty awards cost us this year — about $2,300 in total, paid directly to registrations, and nothing else.
It is August, which in Idaho means registration forms. So this seems like the right moment to explain exactly what that number is made of.
The arithmetic of one season
For most youth sports in Idaho, a family faces some version of the same list:
Registration. The fee that gets a child on a roster. It is the one non-negotiable cost and usually the largest single item.
Shoes. Not gear in general — shoes specifically, because most sports need a pair that will not do for anything else, and because feet grow.
The ride. Practice three afternoons a week is a transport problem before it is a money problem, and for a family working shifts it can be the thing that decides it.
Everything after that. Uniforms, league dues, tournament fees, travel. This is where a season quietly doubles.
For the twenty Mountain Home girls, we covered the first item. The grant paid the registration. That is the whole intervention, and for those families it was the difference between doing it and not.
A season is registration, shoes, and a ride three afternoons a week
What the research says about which barrier bites
When women are asked what stopped them participating fully in sport, family finances is the barrier named most often — 27 percent (Women's Sports Foundation, Play to Lead, 2024).
And the participation gap tracks income almost exactly. Among children in families below the federal poverty level, 31.2 percent play sport. Among those above 400 percent of the poverty level, it is 70.2 percent — a gap of thirty-nine percentage points (National Health Interview Survey, CDC/NCHS).
That is the finding the whole program is built on. Participation is not only a gender question. It is an affordability question, and affordability is a question somebody else can answer for you.
Why we fund the specific thing
We could give a family $115 and let them spend it. We do not, and the reason is practical rather than paternal: an iWIN IX Momentum Grant pays the registration directly, which means it cannot be swallowed by a month where the car needed work.
The categories are deliberately unglamorous — registration, league dues, gear, shoes, uniforms, travel. There is no line item for inspiration.
Applications are open year-round rather than in a cycle, because a registration deadline does not wait for a grant round. Camp scholarships work the same way, and organizations can apply for equity grants to build a gear library or fund coach stipends.
Now the number we cannot give you
We do not know what a season actually costs an Idaho family.
Not the registration — we know that. The whole thing: the shoes, the fuel, the tournament weekend, the hours a parent does not work. Nobody has measured it in this state as far as we can find, and until somebody does, we are working from one component of a cost we cannot see the shape of.
We also cannot yet tell you how many of these twenty girls come back next season. We have not tracked a season-over-season return rate, and we will not claim one before we have.
Both of those are on our impact ledger, alongside the things that went well, because a young organization that only publishes its wins is asking to be taken on faith.
So: $115
One girl. One season. For several of these twenty, the first organized sport of their lives.
It is a small enough number to feel unserious, which is exactly why we keep saying it out loud. The barrier is not large. It is just decisive.
$115 funds one season. See what a gift covers → · Applications for iWIN IX Grants are open year-round. Apply →
