Episode 3

Transcript

Speaker1: Welcome to the Q Talks podcast from Loyola University's Quinlan School of Business. This season, we'll be exploring issues surrounding the impact of wealth inequality, its ramifications for business, and any ethical arguments or other anomalies that are a result of the inequality that currently permeates American society. Join us as we unpack important issues present in our country and our world. 

Rick Sindt: Welcome to Q Talks. I am host Rick St and our series on the impact of wealth inequality continues today with Zach Binkley, clinical instructor of sports management at Quinlan, to discuss the inequality in youth sports and its long-term effects and consequences for individuals and communities. Thanks for joining us today, Zach. 

Zach Binkley: Thanks for having me. 

Rick Sindt: It's nice to have you back. In a past episode, you spoke about your experience as a youth where your high school needed to rebrand their mascot, and I was wondering if you could tell us more about growing up in central Illinois and how youth sports played out there. 

Zach Binkley: Yeah, thanks. Absolutely. Looking at my upbringing, my father was always a coach in the community, local PE teacher. So we were always involved at the ground roots level to not only start our youth programming but to make sure it kind of expands into our region a little bit more. So looking at Macon County, when we did our youth programming, it was interesting to travel and see other cities, some that were like us, some that were not. But there was a feeling growing up of feeling that there was resources for other schools that we might not have had. So there was this focus of trying to get these resources, to get more opportunities for our athletes, and I saw that through basketball, softball, baseball, even track and field in some areas to where our conference was made up of eight or nine teams and the median household income of each of those cities or those school districts were different or ranged further. Growing up in central Illinois, our closest big metropolitan area was Decatur, Illinois, which I think I just looked up today, had a household median income of 43,000 with 71,000 people total. And part of our district is in Decatur, which a lot of the surrounding schools, kind of like an urban sprawl, they were kind of carving out parts of dictators districts and sending them to the suburbs, sending them to the local farming communities. So our school district, Warrensburg Latham, made up of two towns, one Warrensburg at 1200. I think Latham maybe has 800 people in it. So the majority of our students were coming from the Decatur outskirt suburban area. So kind of looking at that, looking at the successes of different school districts, looking at how, say, maybe one school district has an Astroturf football field and the other school district is having trouble fixing a roof under gym, all kinds of kind of inequalities that I kind of grew up viewing and not really understanding or knowing what was going on as a youth. But I did start to get that feeling, I think it was in high school, I started getting more involved with our youth league and ended up taking over and doing logistics and scheduling for umpires and working with other youth leagues in the area. That was kind of an eye-opener experience for me. At that same time, my first job was working at our local sports park, the alumni park in Warrensburg, and our job was to do maintenance and clean up the trash and empty the garbage cans and do the maintenance type work for the Youth League facility. After that, I then went to become a cart boy at the local golf course. So at the time I was holding kind of both jobs as a high school student playing two sports and then working two jobs. And the two jobs were kind of exposing me to kind of two different economic statuses in our small little Macon County. So that was always kind of an interesting perspective growing up seeing those two differences. But in terms of youth sports, this income inequality does have an impact, both short term and long term. Seeing how some districts or some schools become better at some sports than others, there is some reason behind that. Some sports we kind of consider to be high resource or high time type of sports where you need rake time, you need equipment and teams that usually have better equipment accessibility or more gym time accessibility eventually get more reps or have better reps, and they they can produce a higher quality athlete. That's not always the case, there are obviously some areas that have produced high athletes without that, but looking at certain sports that are predictors to participation, when we do look at income inequality or just total income. And for some sports hockey, baseball, softball, golf where the equipment and the access to the field or the rink or pitch or whatever it might be, where that becomes a little bit more expensive we do see the income inequality impact in those sports. 

Rick Sindt: I was most surprised preparing for this episode to learn that the wealth or income of a family is the leading indicator around whether or not their child will be involved in youth sports and the amount of money that is poured in per child as these kids develop at their young age. This has led to a proliferation of traveling teams and leagues, which were something that weren't really around when even I was in school, and so I'd like to take a moment with you to talk about what this traveling team culture is that has developed and how it is impacting communities as far as resourcing and talent goes. 

Zach Binkley: Yeah. To start on the predictor of sport participation tied to parents income, the Aspen Institute put out a statistic, I believe it was early last year that said only 27 and a half percent of children from homes with incomes under 25,000 a year played sports, compared to 45.5% of kids from homes with incomes of greater than 100,000. So it's not just being able and having money to pay for equipment and the sign up fees. It's also in our culture today where we're always moving and we have less time than we feel like we did ten years ago. The higher the income you can afford to pay for convenient services which saves you time, and then that time can get back on to extracurricular activities regardless if it's sports, arts, whatever. So the sport participation has been tied. We have seen that tied to parents income. It's not necessarily in certain sports coming down to the equipment. In some sports it is right hockey equipment, football equipment. There are some some high costs associated with it. The travel leagues is where we're really starting to see the divide that's being caused by income. The travel seasons, I think when I was a youth athlete, it was probably maybe in middle school where we started to try to travel. And the travel teams, you had to be good. I remember once one summer we tried to create our own baseball travel team and it was a win-less summer. It was not much fun traveling central Illinois to play against Peoria when we're a town of 1200. And it was just not a fun experience. So this travel team experience, this travel team phenomenons is coming from the idea of sport specialization where we want, or the industry--I'm putting this kind of in quotations here-- they want you to specialize earlier. You don't necessarily need to specialize earlier. There is a movement, a long term athlete, athletic development to where you want athletes to take a holistic approach to their sport and to their overall health. And we want people to be playing sports into their fifties and sixties. It'd be nice to have former athletes be able to run and play with their kids without having four or five ACL tears and reconstructive surgery. So this idea of long term athletic development kind of goes against the sports specialization. Now, sports specialization, there's this thought that you need to pick one sport and say from ages seven on, that's all you do. And you specialize in that one sport and that's supposed to magically create a pro athlete. That's not happening. There's data out there that suggests actually the opposite, that you want to play more sports and more movement patterns that you have, the more literate--we call it movement literacy: your ability to run, jump, stop, cut different angles, play with different pieces of equipment. We call them implements. Being able to use different implements to do our sports. That does have an impact. You're going to be able to work in multiple planes of motion, your skill level is higher if you're playing more sports. It's kind of it's been funny the last five years with LTAD (long term athletic development) kind of taking off. And it's kind of came out of the National Strength Training Condition Association, and I serve on the special interest group for basketball trainers with that organization. And for basketball, we're we were wanting basketball athletes to get more reps in other sports. We want those sports to have similar movement patterns to maybe work within the same physiological system. It's been funny the last five years, seeing a bunch of football coaches come out in support of track and field because they're seeing an understanding that, oh, they're athletes leave to go play track in the off season and they come back faster in the fall. Like, Wow, that's pretty like, why have we been doing this for a while? So this idea of sport specialization, it has came out of this fear that if you don't specialize early, you're not going to go pro. But I'm telling you right now, it is a money grab. The sports specialization this is where ten year olds are paying extra to work with a trainer to break down their mechanics on their swing when they're not even done growing. Yet you're paying for exclusive time on the rink because it's supply and demand and the teams or the clubs that have the most money that can afford the ice rink time will get it. So this this pressure for sports by specialization is really what's pushing the youth sport industry in terms of dollars. I think let me see my stat here, last year, yes, before the pandemic hit, youth sports globally was a $22 Billion industry and three fourths of that $22 Billion was coming out of the US. $22 billion is not coming from your local YMCA Youth Sports League in the winter. Right? No one is making that much money off of a YMCA localized Youth Sport League. If I look at Warrensburg, the Warrensburg youth softball over the summer might even be free to play, right, because we get sponsors from the community. So this $22 billion is not coming from that. It's coming from the specialized sports team, the ten year old who shows up to their four doubleheaders in a weekend that cost the team, say, 12,000 to get into the tournament. And that ten year old athletes showing up with four brand new Easton baseball bats and they don't know which one they want to use today for the game. So that's really where that push and the money's coming from, which does show you where if a parent has more income, they're going to be able to buy more baseball bats. We've been kind of tricked mentally into thinking, say, new and more baseball bats give you an advantage. It does. I'm not going to be I'm not going to lie to you. There are good advantages to having new equipment, but that is definitely not the best indicator for athletic performance, especially in youth athletes. There's so much more to sports than just the overall performance. There's teamwork, there's collaboration efforts, there's communication skills. And you might not have an athlete who develops physically until after 18 years old and this person kind of doesn't get the opportunity anymore because they weren't specialized in at age level. So there is a middle ground of reach here between sports specialization and developing the athlete long term. At some point the athlete does need to specialize and go full into their sport, or if they're able to specialize in two sports, that's something that could be done but doing that at eight, nine, ten years old is problematic. 

Rick Sindt: A large motivation, it seems, for parents to have their children get on to these traveling team, specialize at a young age, develop their skill set as much as possible is scholarship dollars. Scholarship dollars in college are a huge way to gain social mobility because you can get an education that will give you what you need to be successful in the future through these talents that you've developed growing up. So that kind of brings me to this notion of opportunity hoarding, which I was surprised, to be honest, to find in this research around this, because I'm used to hearing it in conversations around race and privilege, but it is here in youth sports. So let's take a moment to talk about opportunity, hoarding, how it manifests itself and what it means for communities. 

Zach Binkley: Yeah, I think the good example to use here was what you mentioned in terms of scholarships. Not every sport has the endgame of becoming a professional athlete. If I look at the sport of volleyball outside of beach volleyball, Olympic volleyball, there really hasn't been that developed--and there should be--that pro level. It's on ESPN every Tuesday night, right? There isn't that top volleyball, mainstream, professional sport. There should be. There isn't, so because of that, the real top of that industry is college volleyball. And that ties to a scholarship. And there is a finite amount of scholarships. So that this does become then why we have, say, travel volleyball teams in high school and that culture behind there and how aggressive it is and how competitive it is, and I sit back and I'm thinking, what are they competing for? Right? Are they doing this off season in terms of the scholastic season? Right? They're doing this away from the high school, the travel, volleyball. Are they doing this for their high school team? Are they doing this to become the best possible player so they can go back? No. The majority of these club teams and I see it in a basketball is to showcase talents for a recruiter to get access to a potential scholarship, which is now worth thousands of dollars, and could push a player in one direction where a scholarship or lack of scholarship could not. So if we look at scholarships and tie it to athletics, that does become a kind of resource hoarding because you are trying to take opportunities away from other athletes in your area at a younger age in hopes that that volleyball coach gives you the scholarship. And there are certain sports--hockey's like that as well, basketball with AAU is a big thing. A lot of the AAU athletes that I've seen in high school, they're not playing that summer for the actual high school team. They're not traveling with their AAU team to become a better player for their actual high school team. They're doing it to showcase for the next level. To go up and play against better competition. That was one thing growing up that was an issue for us is that we did have to travel out of our county to go out and find and play against elite talent and that cost money. So to get better, you do have to play against better competition. And sometimes geography wise, you just don't have that access. But in terms of hoarding resources, you know, there's a finite amount of scholarships, there's a finite amount of roster spots. And these travel teams, really their return on investment is that scholarship. But I'm crunching the numbers here and I'm like, you know, a scholarship to a division one public school versus the amount of money you spend in a ten year period on these travel tournaments and the equipment like is it really an investment here? You know, it's more about the education I think at that point than the actual dollars and cents of a scholarship. And I will say there is this elite or status that I think parents are more concerned with now than the actual athlete. They want their child to be a division one athlete. That is to them, that is what success is, that phrase right there. So I'm not saying that's not how we deem success. Division one athletes are success stories, but how you get there, everyone has a little different pathway and we're seeing certain sports, certain pathways might be cut off due to income inequality. 

Rick Sindt: Yeah. What I find most interesting about opportunity hoarding is when we look at it from a macro level, it's very easy to call it bad. Even the word hoarding sounds bad in our culture because it takes opportunities away from other people. It takes money out of communities that could use it because you're playing for a traveling team, not your local sports team. It makes more scarce scholarship dollars. But when you come when you look at it at a micro level, when you look at it at like just one family and two set of parents trying to help their kids, like they're just really trying to do what's best for their child at that moment, which is admirable and is not a nefarious motivation. 

Zach Binkley: Absolutely. And going back to hockey, I saw two examples really come out of that over the last year. One was, I believe, a story in upstate New York of ten families. And those families all had hockey players, they came together, they pulled their resources, and I can't remember if they specifically rented out an ice rink or they built like a small ice rink in some kind of barn, and they came together ten families and flipped the bill on that. I mean, that's a lot of money. But like you said, they're trying to provide an opportunity for their kids. And the ice rink was closed down, right? Covid shut down a lot of things. I've been seeing a lot of I'm on the sport innovation side, so I love this stuff and I'm seeing a price tag on this I think it's a little too high, but we've seen a lot of backyard ice rinks created during the pandemic because the ice rink is closed down so they still want to skate, they still want to work on their handling skills so they're building out these backyard ice rinks. And me, on the innovation side, I'm like, yeah, we could probably do that for 500 bucks, maybe tops. Right? Get some water, do it, do a thing. I'm looking here and there's kits being sold for $47,000 to build a backyard ice rink in your backyard. And I'm like. First off, not everyone has a yard. Let's start there. And two, not everyone's going to spend $50,000 on an ice rink in your backyard. So they're doing what's best for their family. It is admirable. So, yeah, it's a lot of money, though. 

Rick Sindt: Yeah. Some of those price tags are rather astronomical. You mentioned like not even people have yards and that brought me to a point we wanted to make that like not even everyone has food. And when you're an athlete, you need to nourish your body and provide energy through your to your body, through food. I know you have some thoughts on food, insecurities's impact on youth sports, and so I was hoping you could elaborate on those for us. 

Zach Binkley: Right. So we see the same the same issue with education. Right? Like a hungry child can't focus. They really need to take care of their first need of feeding their bodies before they think about learning a capital of some state. Right? So we do see this creep up into the sports world, too, to where you have 12, 15 people on a team and you might come from diverse economic statuses in your district where not everyone is coming into the game or coming to meet the bus with the right nourishing food. I remember as an athlete, maybe half our team, the big trendy thing when I was in school was Jimmy John's. And seeing certain people who did live closer in to the city center was able to bring Jimmy John's to our bus rides. And some of us consider rural kids that are out in the farming communities, like we're not driving 20 miles into the city to get Jimmy John's and driving 20 miles back to hit the bus. And I'm thinking like, yeah, it might have been my performance, might have been a little bit better had had some Jimmy John's before. I think my dad always cooked us TV dinners before the games like Salisbury steak. In retrospect, that's not probably the best nutritional value for athletes, but here we are. So the food insecurity does show up in athletes. When we talk about long term athletic development, that's part of it, right? The health, the holistic approach to the athlete being able to have a nourished body that performs at a high level and then also replenishing that. We even have food insecurity with NCAA athletes. It was UConn, Shabazz Napier, I think four or five years ago after he won the national title, came out and said that there were nights he went to bed hungry. There was no food even for NCAA athletes to refill their bodies. Now athletes need more fuel. They're burning stuff up, burning calories. Every sport will burn calories at a faster rate and they had to replenish it in a different way. So every sport is a little different. But when we take a long term athletic approach, we do care about the athletes body, we care about their mental state, we care about their nutritional status. It's all connected. And that's, I think, a healthier societal approach for sports to take, rather than trying to get a ten-year-old to max out at 90 miles per hour or so. So. Yeah. 

Rick Sindt: Yeah. We spent some minutes now kind of touching on a bunch of interlocking factors that contribute to inequality, social mobility when it comes to what youth sports are able to offer people, children in particular. And I want to end on a constructive, hopeful note. So I'm wondering if you have, like, advice for the parents out there who are trying to figure out, in light of all of this information, how then should they go about helping their child develop? Or are there other models around the world of sports leagues operating differently but having the same or better outcomes? 

Zach Binkley: Yes. So right now this spring, I'm teaching a globalization of sports class. And we're going to get into looking at different global models for youth sport participation. Some countries will use a co-ed model longer than others. Some will start to specialize their athletes in certain sports quicker than others. We see European soccer kind of being a model that's one of its own right? Hard to kind of mimic that model for other sports. It's obviously working there. Norway is one that on the youth level is doing some innovative stuff. So our class right now, we are investigating this. In the US, one thing that's great about the US in terms of youth sports is we do have the ability to offer more sports than other countries. Some countries are landlocked, some have a climate that's too cold to play outdoor sports, so here we really do have the ability to offer a variety of sports to more people than, say, some other countries can. So I would advise to take advantage of that is to get out there and do multiple sports, find out what sports the child doesn't like, see what their engagement is. Again, not every athlete is going to be going pro with this, they're not going to be turning us into dollars. So think about the other outcomes, the positives that we get out of sports, whether it's teamwork, collaboration, communication, things like that. They're going to work in teams when they're adults. That team might not be going for a Super Bowl and they're making millions of dollars on the field, but it might be a marketing team, it might be a research team. So there are more than just the overall performance and wins and losses that you can focus on. At some point, if sports is the interest of the child and they really want to go forward in it, there is a time to go specialization. There is a time to stay focused on one sport. I think research is ranging that anywhere between, it depends on the maturation of the child too and the sport, but looking at anywhere between 13 and 18 years old for that specialization. So up until then, really trying to diversify their experiences, looking at co-ed experiences, looking at sports that maybe weren't even considered as an option, maybe partnering with a local park district that's maybe offering new sports. Pickleball has been taken off recently in the last couple of years, just trying to get some new movement patterns. There is something I can kind of speak from experience on being burnt out on sports is when you do specialize too early and there's too much of that focus, you begin to not like the sport. So keeping the brain mentally fresh, mixing up your sports, mixing up your teammates, mixing up your movement patterns, there is a mental benefit to doing that as well. 

Rick Sindt: When you mentioned movement literacy earlier, you talked about how playing a variety of sports can enhance that. Are there like sports that go together? Are there combinations that you would recommend, like football and track, for example? 

Zach Binkley: Football and track is definitely one. Basketball and volleyball or jumping sports. You really got to look at the physiological tolls on the athletes, what energy systems they are using. Baseball and softball? It depends on the position. Right? You got power positions where you do want to get stronger, but if you're up the middle, you want to be quicker and more dynamic with your movements. Pitchers, developing pitchers, man, this is like we could have a four week long podcast on how to develop youth pitchers. Should we throw curveballs in third grade? Things like that. So baseball, I've always viewed baseball--I was baseball, basketball so my strongest skill set was accuracy based, being able to shoot, being able to throw so sports that do rely on accuracy having that skill set couple each other, that's one approach. Jumping sports is one approach. But you also don't want to overload into too many jumps in one calendar year. Looking at the lateral versus frontal movements, that's something else that you can look into, trying to either offset those or seeing how the body uses those two skills in different ways. I talk about basketball. Everyone's so focused in basketball about trying to jump high and run fast and be quick. And I think to this day, the best skill set you can have is the ability to stop and to be able to decelerate your body, and not every sport you do that. I'm thinking like volleyball you don't run up and really necessarily decelerate unless you're faking a spike. So the ability to decelerate is something that we do in football. So someone who plays football running back could have that ability to decelerate as well as accelerate. And in the sport of basketball, that would be advantageous. James Harden is the example there with the acceleration, everyone's like, you know, he's out of shape or he's too slow and I'm like, he's stopping on a dime and the other team just can't backpedal faster than he can stop. So all kinds of different movement patterns do provide new ways of doing sports. So having that variety, having your body kind of learn that. And the issue, too, is we've gotten rid of P.E. classes, right? A lot of states don't value P.E. anymore. So being able to teach that physical literacy is a challenge. I've had coaches say high school coaches have had junior and senior athletes that can't skip. They literally cannot do a skip and they don't have that movement pattern down. So they've been kind of focused on one sport, one movement direction, and that's it. So that can be not very good. 

Rick Sindt: Zach, it's been very nice to talk to you about this. When the topic of income or wealth inequality comes up, I don't think youth sports is something that comes to the front of everyone's mind, so it's been nice to delve into it. Do you have any final closing thoughts, or things you'd like our listeners to know before we go? 

Zach Binkley: Yeah, I think we can do better here, especially in the US, and there are definitely good models around the world for a variety of sports. I recently said that here in the US we have more opportunities than everywhere else, we look different than other countries, but there are some models out there that we could be taking and expanding upon or improving from. So keep on doing what we're doing here. Try to cut back on the specialization at the earliest age and then look at what what we're doing globally in sport as well to find better models. 

Rick Sindt: Great. Thank you for joining us today. 

Zach Binkley: Thank you. 

Speaker1: This has been an episode of the Q Talks podcast where we seek to marry the wisdom of the Quinlan community with the issues of today. Special thanks to our guests as well as Dean Kevin Stevens for his generous support of this podcast. Mat Shiley, our student producer for editing this episode, as well as Loyola School of Communication and UW for their continued collaboration. Before you leave, take a minute to support us by sharing with friends or rating and reviewing our episodes to help expand our reach. Thanks for listening. I hope you join us next time.