The U.S. youth sports problem that connects soccer and baseball

PHILADELPHIA — Ali Curtis is the vice president of Major League Soccer sporting development. Kenneth Wood is the father of James Wood, an outfielder for the Washington Nationals and a two-time MLB All-Star.

Curtis and Wood are involved in different sports but share the same passion: casting a wider net and removing cost as a major barrier to participation. I spoke with them earlier this week during the perfect confluence of baseball and soccer: MLB All-Star Week and the World Cup semifinals.

While basketball and football reign supreme in the United States, baseball and soccer have come to epitomize the excesses of a billion-dollar youth sports industry that excludes as many as it attracts because of the spectacular cost of participation. In their own way, for their own reasons, Curtis and Wood are trying to widen the entry to their respective sports.

For Curtis, there is an ocean of untapped talent in this country that could make the United States a soccer mega power if gathered, identified and developed.

“When it comes to addressing how we develop players in the U.S., it is a really complicated topic. It’s an issue that has been growing for decades,” Curtis said during a recent interview. “You have people that have worked in the sport for 30, 40, 50 years and you have leagues and clubs that have been around. So, the institution of youth soccer has evolved every year. With that, the topic has become very complex.”

A suburban soccer culture has developed in the United States over the past five decades. Many of the players in the United States who reach the highest level of the sport often come from middle- and upper-class economic backgrounds.

The talent pool in the rest of the world is far more diverse, consisting of children from poor, middle-class and wealthy backgrounds. How to diversify the United States talent pool is a solvable but complex challenge that starts with acknowledging that there is a problem.

“In order to address a really complex problem, it’s really important that you have some collective alignment,” Curtis said. “One of the challenges that we have within the sport — the industry — is that there’s a lot of fragmentation and there’s a lot of division.”

The presence of the World Cup in the United States, the mostly solid performance of the U.S. Men’s National Team and the team’s dismal 4-1 loss to Belgium in the round of 16 have put soccer’s youth development system at the center of a debate. There are those who clamor for greater inclusion and those who embrace the status quo and don’t feel the doors need to be opened wider.

Rather than focus on those arguments, Curtis, a three-time All-America soccer player at Duke, is fixated on solutions. The greatest challenge in his view is how to widen the pathways to soccer in this country.

“Where we are today is more advanced than where we were 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but we still have some of the same challenges that need to really be addressed,” he said.

For all of the talk about youth soccer’s pay-to-play system, Curtis said access is a greater challenge.

“Even if player registration fees are reduced, we still have other key challenges that we have to address in a very serious, deliberate and intentional way: where the clubs are located and where the sport is played,” he said. “Players from all communities and all neighborhoods need to have access and the ability to play soccer, which is the greatest challenge. It’s really a complicated topic. It’s easy to say pay to play is bad, but that is really just scratching the surface.”

The reality is that participation in all youth sports is expensive. The professionalization of the youth sports industry has dramatically increased the cost of participation.

Kenneth Wood found that out when his son decided that his passion was baseball. Each of James’ older sisters played basketball. His middle sister played college basketball for Northwestern.

Kenny Wood, who played college basketball at the University of Richmond, discovered that the youth baseball system was an entirely different animal.

“The baseball world was a completely different thing,” he said. “The better you get in basketball, the cheaper it becomes because you have the sponsors. My daughter played on a travel team that was Nike-sponsored. We didn’t pay for a flight, not for uniforms, not for tournaments, none of that. But with baseball, the better you are, the more expensive it gets. From our area, it’s $5,000 to pay for travel team now.

“James was 11, his team was 12, and they were going to Florida. We were like, ‘He’s too young to go to Florida without us,’ and we couldn’t afford to go, so we’re not sending him to Florida to play in this tournament. It was fine. We trusted the parents, but we were just like, ‘We think it’s too early for him to do that,’ so we kind of kept him close.”

James Wood was not immersed in the travel baseball circuit. He played for his local organization, the Olney Boys & Girls Club, where he had the same coach from 7 years old until he was 13.

“He made it fun for the kids,” James Wood said of the Boys & Girls Club coach. “I think now they’re getting too serious too early. I mean, there’s no need for a 10-year-old who lives in New York and Maryland to have to go to Florida or Georgia to play. Get good local, be the best team around your area, and then go somewhere else to play. I mean, I just think it’s just gotten too far on that end.”

For Wood, the big move was leaving his high school team in the middle of his junior year and transferring to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida.

“When he went to IMG, I knew nothing about the draft or anything. We just wanted him to get a great opportunity to go play, learn and develop,” Kenneth Wood said. “It wasn’t like when he was 9, 10, 11, 12 and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, he’s going to be an MLB player.’ We just wanted him to be the best that he could be.”

James Wood was drafted by the San Diego Padres in the second round in 2021, but the memory of the cost associated with the journey stuck with his father. Kenneth Wood said his son’s experience at age 11 and the expense of supporting his daughter’s basketball activities — meaning they couldn’t afford softball, which she also wanted to play — made him begin thinking of ways to reduce the cost of youth sports.

Kenneth Wood joined two experienced technology executives to create KeoApp, a platform designed to simplify how youth coaches connect and schedule games. The platform is launching with baseball, softball and basketball teams in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

“For years, coaches have relied on scattered Facebook groups, text messages, emails and word of mouth to find opponents, arrange scrimmages and learn about tournaments,” Kenneth Wood said. “We offer a way for teams to connect with each other and organize scrimmages or games where there are no fees. Old school, just two teams connecting to play. This is our way of providing an opportunity to make competition more affordable.

“This is something I’ve had a passion for because we went through it. We couldn’t afford to send our son to Florida and our daughters to all this stuff when they were at that age. You just can’t do it, so there has to be a better way for kids just to play.”

Curtis and Kenneth Wood are pushing back in their own way against the extraordinary expense of youth sports and its impact on access and inclusion. For Kenneth Wood, the mission is to give more youth who look like his son the opportunity to be like James.

For Curtis, the World Cup will pay dividends in the ongoing effort to expand soccer’s reach in the United States. The United States’ World Cup performance, which ended with a dismal elimination, may have opened eyes to the need to cast a wider net.

“I think the cultural impact that it will have will be amazing,” Curtis said. “You’re talking about soccer and it being a real unifier and people being exposed to the game. I think culturally that will really have a significant impact in ways that we aren’t even thinking about right now.”

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