Sports Management Commons^™

Pay-To-Play: A Quantitative Analysis Of Opportunity, Achievement, And Parental Motivation In Youth Club Soccer, Alec Joseph Golini

Masters Theses

In the last twenty years, the youth sport experience in the United States has been shaped by a family’s ability to pay. Under the pay-to-play model in American youth sports, advancing to the highest levels of the game not only requires the standard expenditures, but significant investment which accounts for coaching, equipment, travel, training, and other resources. Previous research on the topic has analyzed the impact of income, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity on access to elite-level sports opportunities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the pay-to-play model and factors associated with athletic outcomes at three youth …