Sports Facilities: The Key Access Issue in Youth Recreation Sports

The primary cost (which is effectively access) in U.S. youth recreation sports is facility cost mostly paid to cities and school districts that control those facilities.

The cost to rent these facilities, although relatively low, is the largest cost driver for youth recreation sport league fees which average about $300-$400 per player for 3 months of league play.

To put these league fees in context, for a family of 4, the monthly food budget is $300 in California and if two kids are playing youth sports -that reduces the food budget by roughly 25% each month.

In June 2019, myself and two other parent coaches formed GamePlay to build a solution that, in part, drives that cost down to improve recreation sports league affordability and access.

Are There Enough Fields

If you ask any coach in California if he or she thinks there are enough athletic facilities to support league play -almost uniformly, I think the answer would be no-there were not enough fields in their 5 mile range to support play and due to the limited supply and the cost to rent these facilities on field on single use basis starts at $100 per hour and can be as $500 per hour

So, the first question, we asked is “Are there enough fields to support recreational sports play in California?” We performed a facility study in California and found that there were thousands of athletic facilities within 5 miles of every major California city -and primarily unused (less than 30% utilized).

However, when we talked to cities and school districts (the entities that controlled most athletic facilities in California) --most cities and school districts believed that their utilization was closer to 75%-100%. One city between Palo Alto and San Francisco claimed to be over 100% utilized and they were turning away teams or leagues requesting more facility time.

The next weekend-we went to that city’s facilities and did an actual hour by hour count of the number of times that their facilities were occupied ---and the result was that they were only 23% utilized (in separate study-we found gyms for most school districts are about 10% utilized).

Rented Not Used (The City Issue)

The primary reason that most cities have this disconnect is that cities assume that facilities rented means used and the teams using those facilities were primarily soccer, baseball and basketball leagues.

Based on our review of the outdoor facility schedules, the local soccer leagues and baseball leagues that rented the facilities were not using the facilities for the majority of the time they had rented -which meant there was a disconnect between the value or pricing charged by the city for those facilities and their actual use.

Based on our outdoor field use research, because the facility pricing was so low for local soccer leagues and baseball leagues -----they rented the facilities in 3-5 month intervals for every hour of every day and there was no real marginal cost to overbook facilities-to the point that the facilities were being used only 20-50% of the time.

The leagues justified the overbooking due to inflexibility and nontransparency of the tools and methods to reserve these fields (frequently booked in time windows every three months and require a highly manual negotiation process with the city) -so the inclination, according to one popular San Jose soccer league manager is that you book (despite need) all you can -or risk being shut out for the current and future years as your league needs grow.

In general, the pricing for the legacy leagues for cities (and not so much for the school districts-see why below) is relatively low since the league parents were residents and voters already paying property taxes and the city could not justify charging market rates for these facilities to residents who are already paying thousands of dollars in property taxes, in part, for parks and recreation services-------- which encourages overconsumption by leagues because there is no significant financial penalty for leagues to overconsume.

In addition, the pricing for non-legacy teams or leagues for just in time reservations with the Cities is generally $100-$300 per hour-which is expensive and takes 2-4 weeks to obtain and reserve - and most youth sport coaches don’t have the time or patience to wait out an understaffed facility reservation process for a city to make that happen--which is significant barrier to new leagues or teams creating play for kids.

Not Used (School Districts)

To address a California state mandate to provide public access to California public schools, the schools facilities managers have generally adopted cloud based tools to make reservations -which in form are excellent products but the facility pricing is so high that even the most rudimentary athletic facilities start at $125-$150 hour and can be as high as $500 per hour (field cost, cleanup, insurance janitorial service) and the pricing prevents any significant use of their any school facilities which effectively defeating the purpose of the mandate.

When asked why the school districts have taken this pricing approach - most school district facility managers (and some parks and recreation managers for the more in -demand facilities) -see the athletic facility as a valuable asset (primarily gym, turf, football, soccer and baseball fields) that may not have the funding in the near term to be replaced and since public use would significantly shorten the facility life and it’s their job to preserve use of the athletic facility as long as possible --- they use price to take this into account. The facility cost includes insurance, janitor costs and minimum rental hours. (frequently a minimum of up to four hours).

The Real Cost of Not Properly Allocating Use of the Facilities

While city or school district residents who could use the facilities may be frustrated by the facility reservation process, most just accept it since they assume this is the best possible performance at a pretty low standard set for most government services.

While we see some leagues elevating complaints to the School Board or City Council-that it not often since the leagues through a significant investment of scheduling time seem to manage through it.

Parents don’t seem to complain since we are now into the 2nd-going on 3rd generation of this trend and, it's my belief, they have lost the generational memory of open access to public financed sports fields and don’t really understand the costs or impact of this trend.

However, in my opinion the costs are significant in terms of the impact to a child's development by

• limited play opportunities for kids which has significant impact on a child's development Low prices and lack of transparency in the reservation process encourage leagues to buy up all the city facility access for months on end, even if they don’t have a use for all the facility time that they commit to which prevents other sport leagues or teams informally organizing and offering additional play opportunities. With respect to the school districts, they just block use in general in the name of protecting the facilities (from the taxpayer families that have paid for the facilities)
• the costs to families to participate in the current play to model which can be as high as hundreds or thousands of dollarsFor the kids who want to play more -there is only a very high-cost alternative of travel ball (which costs families hundreds or thousands of dollars per month just to create more play). Considering that the excess California field capacity and that there are thousands of baseball, basketball and soccer teams within a 30 mile range of anyone living in California that would be happy to play another team near their local community, this is particularly frustrating to observe.In addition, most leagues spend about 40-80 hours of league time devoted to scheduling fields -which are hours that could be more productively invested in supervising actual play for the kids.Most importantly, for the players that can’t afford travel sports-the only other play alternative is the digital world.Almost all the facilities require insurance coverage before they can be used —which is best managed centrally (at a significantly lower cost) as compared to forcing individual leagues and teams to bear that cost -which further raises the cost to create play opportunities for kids-which can range as little $2k for leagues like Little League to as high as $10k per season

• the cost to communities through millions of dollars in lost revenue through underutilized sports facilities which could fund a higher facility use modelSince most facilities in California can be used 12 months a year -we estimate most communities facilities have approximately 2800 hours of availability (Weekends & Summer averages about 8 hour per day with the rest of the year 4 hours per day). Based on our review of most California cities -the actual utilization rate (and this is generous) is about 30-50% of the year -which means about 1400 hours per are unused -which, as described below, could generate up to about $1.8 million and $4 million in funding over a 60-month period for cities and midsize school districts, respectively, to defray costs or reinvest back into the facilities maintenance or replacement. (school districts would be 2-3 times than the city municipalities they serve).While the field quality varies significantly, we estimate that out of our 40,000 facilities in California, at least 7500-10,000 of those facilities could generate that kind of funding.

It's Too Hard (or Too Risky) to Be More Efficient

In general, when we have discussed improving the sports athletic facility process, we have encountered the follow resistance like:

• Despite the significant decline in youth sports participation, the legacy leagues are very protective of their access and affordability and don’t see a strong value proposition to modifying their facility management approach.
• In general, the nontransparent clunky city reservation approach is a hassle but the result is they are rewarded with an abundant supply of fields at relatively low cost. This breeds a culture of mine vs theirs-and silos local leagues rather than cooperating and cultivating more sports play in communities.
• Even with decent cloud scheduling tools used by most school districts and some cities, the process in general still requires a highly manual effort for facilities managers -partly because the local leagues override the automated systems and request that the cities or school districts facility managers arbitrate the process so the leagues field requests (demands) the field time
• Most city parks and recreation facility managers will argue that they are already asking the leagues to not overbook -but based on our facilities studies -the legacy leagues are clearly overstating need but the political risk of 300-600 voter parents complaining and with limited parks and recreation staffing to manage this process-generally means there is little or no regulation of the legacy league overbooking issue.
• Despite most child development studies indicating the importance of play in child development -after hours play does not appear to be a priority for the California Board of Education because they don’t support it with policy (and not to mention funding) which means the school districts don’t view it as a priority.

Solutions:

• The first solution is that taxpayer/ parents need to communicate to their state representative, city council and school boards that easy and affordable access for all children is a critical child development need just as important as good streets for cities or math or reading skills for school districts.
• Keeping in mind that meeting this goal does not mean more cost and risk or less access for the legacy leagues but better use of process, technology and pricing to set the right incentives to get better utilization of billions of dollars invested in sports facilities in California ----and get the kids in their communities playing in the parks and schools after school and the weekends (vs the digital world).
• The effective rate for the baseball league that I coached in was less than $10 per hour but even that low average rate spread over 300 players was about $150 of a total charge of $300 per player. That’s about $45k in total for field fees compared to a total city budget of $70 million. Which is .6% of the city budget-so what is really the point of field fees considering the positive impact to the community families and especially to those on the margin where a couple hundred dollars a month is a significant hit to their monthly food budget.
• The national and local leadership in most of the recreation leagues (i.e. Little League, AYSO etc.) need to encourage local adoption of better estimating models of sports facility use. For example, leagues could be better at estimating the actual hours by using a simple equation ----like if we have 700 players with a 20 week season and there are two practices and one game a week that works out to be about 5600 hours for practice and play and reservations for the league should be limited to the projected hours plus 10% cushion for estimate errors or about 6200 hours for that season
• Cities and school districts need to provide an easy to use affordable Airbnb like tool that allows leagues, youth coaches and families to quickly and easily reserve facilities leagues at reasonable price and those tool exist like GamePlay-which can bolt on to any internal civic or facility management software management tool and meet any quality control standards required to approve a rental requirement and most frequently that insurance -which can be provided as part of that tool.
• There is a general negative perception of travel team sports -but these teams are willing to pay premiums for field time that can help fund annual maintenance and field replacement cost and support low cost or no cost pricing for local community league-but the pricing needs to be based in reality-nobody can afford a facility -no matter how nice if it costs $300 plus per hour. With the right pricing, as discussed above, we estimate these teams can generate significant facility funding plus increase travel youth sports play-but with none of the travel-due to abundant local facility supply-which less cost and more access for the travel team participants.

GamePlay Facility Management Features

We built a tool that addresses specifically the access issue while providing significant time and financial incentives to increase access and play.

• We provide people, process and tools for leagues to better estimate that actual hours that they need each year like the hour formula described above.
• Our no-cost software provides a priority system to ensure local leagues have priority but only based on the actual projected hours that they need
• If a league overcommits on hours-we make it easy to give hours back to the city or school district
• We help cities and school districts set pricing to cover maintenance and replacement cost for the facilities while encouraging new league play-keeping in mind the highest prices mean leagues or local communities won’t use your facilities. In general, with more accessible pricing and our easy-to-use reservation tool, additional facility revenue will exceed maintenance costs and fund the eventual replacement of the facilities.
• Insurance is provided at no additional cost to the teams that use GamePlay -so insurance is no longer the barrier to playing other leagues or teams in your area.

Beyond Facility Management to Help Encourage Play

• For coaches, leagues and parents, we provide them a tool that helps them find and play games locally by including them in a large regional digital community to help teams find other teams to play on locally in minutes—versus days weeks or months-and at a very low cost-avoiding the high cost travel model.
• We offer team scheduling tools for local teams at no cost.

Conclusion

Playing catch in your backyard with your friends is the sports image that our media has cultivated, and one that many like to think exists today. Many factors such as parental concerns, digital distractions, and increasingly cautious legal practices mean that the youth sports scene is now vastly different.

Maintaining and increasing participation in youth sports is vital for the health of this country. Sadly, changing the overall culture that impedes participation is a monumental task has seemed too big for community minded parents, leagues or municipalities to tackle -but in reality, the same digital world that is decimating youth sports -may actually hold the solution.

Thankfully, this is not an unfixable problem and if parents, leagues and municipalities using better facility use estimates augmented with digital solutions, like GamePlay, they can better navigate a complex interconnected system of cities, school districts, leagues, teams, coaches and parents -more than anyone parent, league or municipality to reconnect users and sellers with thousands of athletic facilities and teams within a 5-10 mile radius of each household in California and drive out cost while handsomely rewarding all of the stakeholders in play time or funding---and we would be well on our way to a future where youth sports is once again ensures that kids get the play time they need to become happier and healthy adults.