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.

Sports offerings are only as good as the ability to market them. Families need to know how and when to register, costs to play, scholarship opportunities, locations of practices and games, and much more. We heard from parents who say they don’t have enough information about available sports programs, including costs.

Hollins believes lack of parental support is the biggest barrier preventing more children in Baton Rouge from playing sports. “The generation of parents we have now are younger, and they’re still trying to find their way in life,” Hollins said. “Youth sports, it’s a commitment, and those commitments are really hard for some younger parents out there.”

Sports providers need to make it easier for parents to become engaged and sign up their children to play. Make the process as simple as possible.

Solution: Create a youth sports online directory of programs

The infrastructure already exists. In 2023, Baton Rouge Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome announced the launch of the MyBR app, making city-parish services and information more readily available to residents. This includes road closures, crime statistics, property information, child care and elderly services, online bill payments and more. The app was honored by Bloomberg for advancing open government.

MyBR is a one-stop-shop to streamline everyday tasks, so residents have a more seamless experience to stay informed about their community. The app includes a sports section, anchored by Visit Baton Rouge to entice sports tourism, with content about recreational opportunities that includes how to join BREC adult and youth sports leagues. It’s a good start. The next step is making it a searchable database and including leagues beyond BREC.

A great example is the City of Boston, which launched the Boston Youth Sports Directory in 2024 to help families locate nearby sports facilities and organizations. Families can search for the sports organizations that make sense to them, using filters by sport, age, neighborhood, season, gender, competitive level of the activity, language and cost.

Clicking on organization names reveals additional information about the entities. Do they conduct safety training for coaches? Do they offer transportation support? Do they carry insurance? Do they provide equipment for athletes? Do they conduct background checks on coaches? Do they make accommodations for differently abled youth? Organizations can also describe who they are, their costs, registration timeline and process, extra enrichment opportunities provided (such as academic tutoring), and who to contact.

If Baton Rouge follows our recommendation to create an athletic council, one of the council’s first tasks could be building the online youth sports directory. Not only would a directory help families know what programming exists, it would offer a positive way for sports providers on the council to share knowledge and build trust.

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