The following article comes from the Aspen Institute’s State of Play Baton Rouge report. The report assesses the opportunities and barriers for more children to access sports and physical activity in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana.

Many youth sports providers in the public and private sectors don’t communicate much with each other, in part due to distrust of each other. There is a belief by some that no intersection exists between people who strive to use sports as an economic engine and people who focus on providing affordable, quality access for all children. The divide between the haves and have-nots in youth sports within East Baton Rouge Parish resembles that in the educational environment. Baton Rouge students attend private schools at much higher rates (27%) than comparable urban counties in the U.S. (11%–22%), according to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

“Pay-for-play sports is the new private school for parents here,” said Chris Meyer, Baton Rouge Area Foundation CEO. “Families will do whatever they can to give their child the best experience, and they’re willing to pay lots of money for it. If you’re super talented from a low-income background, you’re typically found and supported. But for the average kid, if you’re not in the right cohort early, you better be super talented or super wealthy to be brought into that team or league, or your options are very limited.

Several private sports-complex owners said they branched out on their own because the Recreation and Park Commission for East Baton Rouge Parish, commonly known as BREC, lacks organized structure for children to play sports. In focus group conversations with travel-sports parents from several sports, we heard a common theme: there is a need for Baton Rouge to have rec leagues so all children can play sports. But the travel-sports parents said their child didn’t have fun in BREC’s rec leagues or they heard BREC lacked structure around sports, so they turned to private teams before trying BREC. More children moving to travel teams leaves significant gaps in resources, volunteers and advocacy to maintain quality, affordable rec leagues.

“People are taking it in their own hands to provide sports for communities with their own money,” said a travel sports program director. “Government is so disappointing. Every successful rec league is privately run in this organization — soccer, basketball, baseball. Our organization wouldn’t exist if the city did a great job providing sports. I wish the government would decide to work with the people who do have good programming instead of trying to fund their own things that won’t be structured or organized.”

Created in 1946 by a state legislative act, BREC is a political subdivision of the State of Louisiana and does not operate under the Baton Rouge city-parish government. In November 2024, residents approved two BREC tax renewals: a 20-year tax that funds BREC’s strategic plan and a 10-year tax that covers operations and capital improvements. The taxes account for the continued funding of 65% of BREC's operating budget.

BREC, one of the few agencies in the U.S. to be honored twice by the National Recreation and Park Association with the prestigious Gold Medal Award (1975 and 1991), largely outsources youth sports programming to local partners who operate on BREC fields. A rare sport BREC independently runs for children is basketball, which had 864 participants in 2023, up from 732 in 2019.

BREC programming is improving after its quality suffered for many years, said Brandon Smith, who departed in 2024 as BREC assistant superintendent for recreation programs and facilities. As an example, Smith said BREC’s baseball program started in 2021 with eight teams and approximately tripled that number in three years, thanks in part to replacing grass fields with turf to avoid muddy infields and rained-out activities. The total number of children who used BREC fields for baseball offered by any provider increased from 1,224 in 2019 to 1,440 in 2023.

There are still challenges at BREC, largely due to staff shortages. Before leaving, Smith estimated that staff capacity in the rec department was about 70% of what’s needed. BREC staffs its basketball program and smaller portions of its baseball, softball and football leagues. “In order for us to grow, we have to find partners we’re comfortable with and who meet our mission,” Smith said. “It’s becoming harder and harder to organize these with staff shortages. The biggest way to have quality programming is to be consistent.”

Many years ago, rec leagues fielded all-star teams at the end of the season — one community’s all-star team played the other’s. Parents figured out their child could develop better skills if these all-star teams played each other all the time. Now, in many sports, age 8 or 9 is about when a Baton Rouge child with resources transitions to travel ball. “There’s a stigma with rec ball,” said a high-level soccer coach. “For parents, it’s keeping up with the Joneses.

In a focus group with travel-sports parents, some estimated spending $10,000 to $20,000 per year on their child’s activities. Why invest so much money? They expressed a desire for sports to help their child learn how to treat people well when success doesn’t happen, build relationships and self-confidence, and develop discipline and time-management skills.

“It’s necessary to have our kids be put in that adversity-failure environment,” said a dad. “You have to put them against the best, so they understand they’re not the best and how to beat the best. If you don’t play the best, it’s false hope. Our kids are so good at their schools, they’re the all-stars. Without this humbling experience (through travel sports) every once in a while, where they realize their place in life, how would they learn?”

Some children told us that they enjoy the amount of time and energy spent in travel sports, especially to build friendships. In some cases, travel-sports children said they have more friends in Shreveport and Houston than they have in Baton Rouge. Yet several young people described tremendous pressure they feel in travel sports and unhealthy behavior from their coaches or parents. Several female soccer players said their parents “bribe” them with money and gifts to succeed and punish them for athletic failures.

“If I do bad, after a game my dad has me run one mile,” said one girl. “He’ll yell at me and say, ‘You all suck,’ and I run until I puke. My dad doesn’t know exactly what I did wrong, but he’ll yell at me because he knows I did something wrong. … I feel like I have to do well to make him happy.”

In lower-resourced neighborhoods, many children who lack exposure to sports, transportation to games and practices, or the financial means to join teams too often quit sports or simply never start. Our youth survey showed that Black children play sports “very often” (45%) at a lower rate than White youth do (64%). Aside from football and basketball, sports participation rates in North Baton Rouge lag those in South Baton Rouge, according to analysis by Kinetica for this report. North Baton Rouge has a significantly lower household income and larger Black population than South Baton Rouge.

“In urban communities, kids are looking for success, and if it’s a sport we don’t have that much success in, we stop playing,” said Leroy Hollins II, director of the Louisiana Youth Sports Network, which programs several sports in Baton Rouge. “It’s not that kids don’t like the sport. It’s that they don’t want to be ridiculed when they’re doing something wrong. They want to avoid being bullied because they’re not successful at sports.”

Solution: Create a Baton Rouge athletic council to develop shared solutions

To be clear, there is no one magic bullet to increase sports access. Every sector that touches the lives of children can and should play a role in helping get more kids into the game, given sports’ power as a crime-prevention tool and the physical, social, emotional and academic benefits that come from positive sports experiences. It’s very clear that Baton Rouge deeply loves sports, which are an important mechanism to build community within neighborhoods and across the parish.

Increasingly, many Baton Rouge leaders view sports as an economic tourism engine for the city — building new facilities and attracting youth tournaments generate revenue through sales and hospitality taxes. Youth tournaments in 2024 will provide an indirect economic impact of $37 million for Baton Rouge, according to an estimate by Visit Baton Rouge.

Given these efforts, we are calling for coordinated investment and strategies that not only benefit Baton Rouge through revenue generated by sporting events but also increase sports access and improve the quality of sports experiences.

“We haven’t aligned on what our goals are for youth sports and what a healthy experience looks like for children,” said Catherine O’Neal, chief medical officer of Our Lady of the Lake, which in 2023 bought a 40% stake in Traction Sports Performance, a Baton Rouge-based athletic training company that stages travel tournaments.

Baton Rouge could use youth sports tourism revenue as one mechanism to invest in underserved children locally so they can access quality experiences and develop as people. “There needs to be more discussion or a council so that we can all have better appreciation for both sports tourism and local sports equity,” said BREC Superintendent Corey Wilson. “Anything that can further promote the importance of youth sports, whether that’s locally or tourism, is a benefit to all of us.”

Local parties need a way to regularly communicate and coordinate mutually reinforcing activities. Starting a Baton Rouge athletic council could assist on other recommendations made in this report. The role of the athletic council over time could include:

Creating an online directory of sports programming in Baton Rouge so children and families know what’s available.
Coordinating transportation opportunities so that more children have options to get to and from games and practices.
Setting standardized climate regulations in youth and school sports as extreme heat and flooding continues to impact safe opportunities to play.
Prioritizing more equitable access to private play spaces, especially those indoors.
Establishing coach-training requirements that ensure youth coaches are developmentally appropriate and helping — not hurting — a child’s mental health.

Across the country, some cities and counties are now paying closer attention to youth sports and how the activities are made available to children. There’s not a one-size, fits-all way to establish an athletic council. Government agencies or local nonprofits can take the lead to coordinate and rationalize the way sports are offered to children. The strength of the athletic council, if it has the right people, is that it forces all members to see beyond the narrow interests of the groups they represent. The council connects representatives who are close to the ground with those who are from essential governing bodies (BREC, schools, local government, etc.). Council members’ knowledge of their residents, programs, facilities and systems can provide legitimacy to the public. If there’s a manageable membership size on the council, it also provides flexibility to act.

New public sports facilities may be built in future years, including at the potential redevelopment of the Memorial Sports Complex in a distressed part of North Baton Rouge. It’s a joint project between BREC and developers that is still seeking funding. Plans could include transforming the aging football stadium into a multiuse facility for football and soccer; creating a STEM facility and charter school focused on sports performance; renovating the existing baseball stadium; building a hockey arena for Baton Rouge’s minor league team; and creating a community track for walkers and joggers.

If the project gets built, questions will arise on how the facilities will get used and by whom.

That’s already happening with existing public facilities, as private entities look for more field and gym space to stage their tournaments. The community will need to determine the right balance so local citizens consistently benefit.

Efforts can begin by bringing key parties to the table and starting to align around two simple questions: How can we collectively help more children play sports? And why do we want them to play sports?

Jon Solomon is Community Impact Director of the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative. Jon can be reached at jon.solomon@aspeninstitute.org.