LAX FREE OR DIE - YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY NO
THE COST OF PLAYING
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY NO
New York Magazine put private equity and youth sports on its cover this month. I make part of my living in youth sports. Here is what the article gets right, what it misses about lacrosse, and the five questions I would ask before writing the next check.
BY ERIN CHASE SEPTEMBER 1, 2026 12 MINUTE READ
The most common text I get is not about technique. It is not about recruiting rules or highlight reels either. It is five words long, and some version of it lands on my phone almost every week.
“Is this one worth it?”
A parent is looking at a tournament three states away. Team fee, hotel block, gas, two days of meals, a Friday off work. Their daughter is 13. They are not asking me to scout the competition. They are asking me for permission to say no.
I have come to think that answering that question honestly is the most valuable thing I do.
And I am writing this the week of September 1, which in this sport is the single loudest day on the calendar. Phones start going off. Group chats light up. Somebody’s daughter got a call and yours did not, and by that night half the parents I know will be quietly recalculating the fall.
So this is a good week to talk about what all of it is actually costing us.
THE ARTICLE
New York Magazine ran a cover story this month by Caitlin Moscatello called “The Pay-to-Play Childhood.” The cover line does not hedge: private leagues have made youth sports more expensive, hypercompetitive, and all-consuming for families, and investors are making a killing.
One line has been rattling around my head since I read it. Travel sports used to be for the genuinely exceptional athlete. Now they are for anyone willing to pay.
The reporting follows the money. Varsity Brands, the team apparel and competitive cheer company, sold to private equity for $1.5 billion in 2014, then to Bain Capital for $2.5 billion in 2018, then to KKR for roughly $4.5 billion in 2024. That is not a company growing. That is an asset being handed between owners who each found a way to get more out of the same families.
The strategy is a roll-up. Buy the teams. Then the facility. Then the tournament. Then the registration software, the apparel, the streaming. Once you own the whole chain, you charge at every link in it. The piece describes “stay-to-play” arrangements where entering an event means booking inside the approved hotel block, paying for the parking, paying for the video package, and being told you may not film your own kid.
Read that last part twice. Families are told not to record their own daughter so the footage can be sold back to them.
But the part that actually stayed with me was quieter than any dollar figure. In one town, about a third of the kids had left the rec league for travel teams by age 9. The ones who stayed were suddenly in a thinner league, which made it feel second rate, so more of them left too. Nobody voted to shut the town program down. It emptied out, one completely reasonable individual decision at a time.
THAT IS THE REAL STORY HERE. NOT VILLAINS. INCENTIVES.
THE NUMBERS ARE NOT SUBTLE
$1,016 Average spent on one child’s primary sport in 2024, up 46% in five years, about double inflation. Aspen Institute | $3k–$10k Typical yearly cost of club lacrosse for one player, once you count fees, travel, hotels, and gear. Per season | 70% Share of kids who quit organized sports by age 13, right as family spending peaks. Aspen Institute |
A single recruiting showcase can be $500 to $1,500 by the time you have paid the event and gotten there. And the participation gap between the lowest and highest income households has widened from about 13.6 points in 2012 to 20.2 points in 2024. The sport is not just getting more expensive. It is getting narrower.
Put those numbers next to each other. We are spending more than we ever have on children who are, in large numbers, walking away right around the age the spending peaks.
Something in that equation is broken, and it is not the kids.
SOMEBODY IS DOING IT DIFFERENTLY
Robert Pasin, who runs Radio Flyer, shared the article on LinkedIn with something more useful than outrage. He pointed at Minnesota.
Minnesota has roughly 250 public ice rinks. More than 60,000 kids play hockey there, and most families pay somewhere between $200 and $400 for an entire season. Minnesota also produces more Division I hockey players than any other state in the country.
He paired it with Norway, where youth soccer holds off on national rankings and championships until kids are around 11 or 12.
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CHARGE A FAMILY $8,000 TO FIND OUT WHO IS GOOD.
The comments under his post pushed back, fairly. Minnesota families on elite teams still pay thousands. Accessible is not the same as free. But the pushback sharpens the point instead of breaking it. When a real public option exists underneath the private one, the private one has to be worth the difference. When the public option disappears, the private one gets to name its price.
Girls’ lacrosse never had much of a public floor to begin with.
WHERE I AM STANDING
FULL DISCLOSUREI coach. I run clinics. I take on a small number of recruiting families each year and they pay me to do it. I am not writing this from outside the industry. I am one of the line items. |
Which is exactly why I pay attention to the numbers.
Club lacrosse is not a scam. Good clubs exist, run by people who genuinely care, and a player who wants to be recruited does need to be somewhere college coaches actually are. Great coaching and real competition are worth paying for. I will not pretend otherwise.
What I believe is that families are buying volume when what they need is accuracy.
We have nine year olds playing nearly year round. Families driving four hours to play a team they could have played twenty minutes from home. A teams, B teams, C teams. Elite, Select, National, and every other word that exists mostly to make the tier above it feel necessary. More tournaments, more showcases, more training, more money.
Somewhere in there we started treating more as the same thing as better.
IT IS NOT. IT NEVER WAS.
ASK BASEBALL HOW THIS ENDS
We are not the first sport to do this. Baseball is about five years ahead of us, and the results are in.
Youth baseball spent two decades building exactly what we are building now. Year round play. Specialization before middle school. Showcase circuits for eleven year olds. What came out the other side was twelve year olds needing elbow surgery named after a major league pitcher.
At some centers, UCL surgeries doubled between 2010 and 2020 and have stayed elevated since. Overuse now accounts for roughly half of all youth baseball injuries, and pitching injuries have climbed more than 30 percent since the pandemic. The kids most at risk are 12 to 16, because that is when growth plates are most vulnerable. And when orthopedists list the causes, the top two are year round play and specializing before age 12.
NOT BAD LUCK. NOT A ROUGH SPORT. A CALENDAR.
Now look at ours.
Between 2007 and 2022, ACL injury rates across twelve high school sports rose about 26 percent. Girls' sports rose 32.3 percent. Boys' sports rose 14.5 percent.
Girls' lacrosse rose 83 percent.
Sit with that one. Our ACL rate is now 10.4 per 100,000 exposures, third among girls' sports behind soccer and basketball, and it nearly doubled in fifteen years while we were busy adding tournaments.
Then there is the mechanism, which is the part that should change how you spend money. Across all girls' sports, 57.5 percent of ACL tears happen with no contact at all. In boys' sports it is 39.7 percent.
In girls' lacrosse it is 82.5 percent.
More than eight in ten. Nobody hit her. She planted, or cut, or decelerated on legs that were not prepared for it, on a body that never got an off-season.
And when they go, they go all the way. About 74 percent of these injuries are complete tears, and among girls it is 80.5 percent, against 68 percent for boys.
WE ARE NOT GETTING HURT BY THE SPORT. WE ARE GETTING HURT BY THE SCHEDULE.
WHAT THE PEDIATRICIANS ACTUALLY RECOMMEND
This part is not controversial, and almost nobody follows it. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends:
One to two days off per week.
Two to three months off per year from sport specific activity.
Wait until roughly 15 or 16 to specialize in a single sport.
And three rules you can check against your own calendar tonight
Do not train more hours per week than her age in years. Eleven years old, eleven hours.
Do not play one primary sport more than eight months a year.
Keep organized sport at less than about twice her free play.
Read that list. Then look at your fall schedule.
If those numbers made your stomach drop, you are not a bad parent. You are a completely normal one operating inside a system built to sell you the precise opposite of medical advice. There is no company on earth whose revenue goes up when your daughter takes three months off.
And the same calendar that wrecks knees ends careers a second way, more quietly. Burnout does not announce itself. It shows up as a 15 year old who is suddenly “just not that into it anymore,” and everyone treats it as a character problem when it is a dosage problem.
That 70 percent who have quit by 13 is not a statistic about kids who hate sports. It is a statistic about kids who got too much of one.
THE FEAR IS THE PRODUCT
Miss this event and she falls behind. Miss this showcase and the coach who would have found her finds somebody else instead. That is what turns a $1,200 weekend from optional into mandatory.
And it is mostly wrong.
Here is one fact that takes the air out of most of it. There are about 520 women’s lacrosse programs in this country. Roughly 123 are Division I. The rest, more than three quarters of the sport, are Division II and Division III, and those coaches are not operating under the September 1 of junior year rules that everyone is panicking about this week. Division III coaches can talk to your daughter at any age.
THE CLOCK THE WHOLE SPORT THINKS IT IS RACING BELONGS TO ABOUT A QUARTER OF IT.
If your phone was quiet on September 1, please hear this clearly. You are almost certainly not behind. You are tired, and you have been sold urgency by people who profit from you feeling it.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
So if not that tournament, then what?
Here is the test I use, and it is not complicated. Follow the dollar.
A PRIVATE SHOWCASEThe money ends up with the event company, the affiliated hotel, and eventually whoever owns them. She is one of six hundred players in a pinnie with a number on it, evaluated by coaches who may or may not have actually shown up. | A CAMP AT A SCHOOL SHE WANTSThe money goes to the athletic department of a school she wants to attend, and the person running the drill is the person who decides whether she gets recruited. She is on campus. She sees the locker room, the dining hall, the walk from the dorm to the field. |
SAME WEEKEND. SIMILAR MONEY. COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DESTINATION.
The same logic is why IWLCA events are worth it. They are run by the coaches association itself, which is exactly why coaches actually attend. When the people running the event are the people you are trying to reach, the exposure is not a marketing claim. It is the structure of the thing.
Get on campus. Go to the clinics of the schools she is actually interested in. That is where I would put the money.
THE LIST NOBODY SELLS YOU
And then there is the part left out of every pitch, because there is no margin in it. Most of what actually makes a player better costs nothing.
STRENGTH TRAINING Cost: a gymThe single biggest separator I see between levels, and the most neglected. A gym membership, or a good program and a garage, costs less than one tournament weekend and does more for her future than that weekend will. It also protects her knees, which in this sport matters enormously. |
GOING OUTSIDE Cost: nothingWall ball. A stick, a wall, twenty minutes. Nobody in the history of this game developed fast hands at a showcase. They developed them alone in a driveway and then showed them at a showcase. |
WATCHING FILM Cost: nothingHer own games, and college games. Coaches notice immediately when a player can talk about what she saw. That is the difference between an athlete who plays lacrosse and a lacrosse player. |
BEING A KID linkeCost: nothingAnother sport. A summer job. A weekend where nothing is scheduled. Rest is not the absence of training, it is part of training, and a burned out 15 year old is not a recruit. |
HER TOWN TEAM Cost: almost nothingPlaying with the kids she goes to school with, in front of people who have known her since she was seven. It is good for her, and it keeps the program alive for the family who cannot afford anything else. |
Add all of that up. It costs a fraction of one travel weekend. And I would bet on that player over the one with the full tournament schedule almost every time.
FIVE QUESTIONS BEFORE THE NEXT CHECK
Not rules. A filter. If you cannot answer the first two, do not send the money yet.
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WHAT I ACTUALLY WANT FOR HER
I want her to play other sports. I want her on a town team at least some of the time. I want weekends where nobody is in a car at 6 a.m. I want her to develop in seasons where every single game is not an evaluation, because players who are always being evaluated stop taking the risks that make them good.
And genuinely, sometimes the best thing you can do for your daughter’s lacrosse is hand her a soccer ball and let her go be an athlete for a season.
I am not trying to professionalize childhood. I am trying to build confident young women who happen to be excellent lacrosse players. Those two goals look similar at 15. They look nothing alike at 10.
THE ONE THING WORTH PROTECTING
Every family that leaves the town program makes it a little weaker for the ones who stay. I am not going to ask anyone to sacrifice their own kid for the commons. That is not a fair thing to ask, and I would not do it either.
But two things are free.
If you are in a program that has held its price down and kept its doors open, say so out loud. Tell the parent standing next to you at the field. Those programs run on reputation, and reputation is the one thing you can hand them at no cost.
And if you are the family staring at a tournament three states away this fall, wondering whether it is worth it, here is your permission, from a coach who does not make a dollar off your answer.
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO SAY NO.
Say no to the right ones and you will have more money, more time, and a daughter who still loves this game at 16.
That is the whole goal. Everything else is a line item.
I want to hear from you Coaches and lacrosse parents: have we gone too far? What is the one event you paid for and wish you had skipped? Send it to me at erin@laxfreeordie.net. I read all of them. |
If this was useful, I keep a free recruiting guide on the site that I update as the rules change. It covers what this post only touched: the new eligibility model, roster limits, transfers, and what each graduating class should actually be doing right now. No cost, and nothing to sign up for.
Sources. Family spending and participation figures: Aspen Institute Project Play parent survey. Youth baseball injury trends: Princeton Sports and Family Medicine, Dr. Peter C. Wenger, "Youth Baseball Injury Trends 2020 to 2025." All ACL and knee figures: Project Play's November 2023 analysis of High School RIO injury surveillance data covering twelve sports, 2007 to 2022. Rest, time off, and specialization age: American Academy of Pediatrics. Training volume rules of thumb: sport specialization injury research.
Erin Chase is the founder of Lax Free or Die. She played Division I at Fairfield University, where she was a four year starter, captain, and holds several program records, and has coached in England, at Skidmore College, at the University of New Hampshire, and currently as an assistant varsity coach with a three time New Hampshire state champion program.
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