For most of the past decade, a sports academy has been judged on one question: how well can you develop athletes? That question has been joined by a second one, asked by parents, legislators, investors, and governing bodies: Can you show that each child in your program is protected, supported, and better off for having been there?
This question of whether every child is protected, supported, and better off is known as “duty of care.” Here is where it currently stands, and what sports academy leaders and management should be tracking over the next twelve months.
On December 16, 2025, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, through its Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education, held a hearing titled "Benched: The Crisis in American Youth Sports and Its Cost to Our Future." Witnesses included Tom Farrey of the Aspen Institute, Steve Boyle of 2-4-1 Sports, and John O'Sullivan of the Changing the Game Project. The committee's own recap of the hearing cites the finding that 70 percent of U.S. children stop playing organized sports by age 13.
What matters for sports academy operators is the framing around this subject. The hearing treated youth sports as public infrastructure with public consequences, and it put commercialization, early specialization, cost, and access on the record as problems Congress considers its business.
On May 13, 2026, the Let Kids Play Act was introduced in both chambers. Senator Chris Murphy filed S. 4522, which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and now carries co-sponsorships from Senators Booker, Sanders, and Merkley. Representative Chris Deluzio filed the companion bill, H.R. 8788.
The bill would require covered firms, meaning private equity funds and companies owned or controlled by them, to file sworn certifications with the Federal Trade Commission on two points: that they have never engaged in what the bill defines as vulture practices, and that no more than one acquired entity has become insolvent within five years. The listed practices include imposing debt on an acquired entity, transferring its assets or intellectual property rights to the firm, shielding the firm from liability, employing roll-up strategies through serial acquisitions, adding junk fees while reducing quality, and imposing one-sided terms that lock in customers.
The reach is broad. The bill defines youth sports as any organization, asset, service, or activity associated with organized athletic participation, instruction, or competition for individuals under 18, spanning recreational through elite-level leagues, physical facilities, training camps and tournaments, and associated technologies such as registration and scoring platforms. A false certification carries a civil penalty of at least one million dollars, imposed jointly and severally on the firm and the individuals who signed it. Any individual or class adversely affected may sue, with treble damages available and more for willful violations.
Two points of precision are relevant here. The bill has not advanced beyond committee referral, and its path is uncertain. It also establishes nothing about curriculum, instruction, or academic standards. It restricts private equity ownership of youth sports organizations and gives families consumer-protection remedies enforced by the FTC, the Department of Justice, and state attorneys general. Operators who describe it to parents as an education law are misstating it.
The U.S. Center for SafeSport's Minor Athlete Abuse Prevention Policies, known as MAAPP, are required across the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Movement, meaning the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, National Governing Bodies, and their Local Affiliated Organizations. The 2025 version had an adoption deadline of January 1, 2025. It covers education and training, organizational requirements, and prevention policies, with much of the substance devoted to limiting one-on-one interactions between adults and minors and setting standards for training and travel settings.
Programs outside that structure are encouraged to adopt MAAPP voluntarily rather than required to. Many parents will not know the difference, and many will assume that any serious academy follows it. That gap between obligation and expectation is worth understanding before a parent asks.
The Aspen Institute's National Youth Sports Parent Survey, conducted with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech University and fielded with 1,848 parents in November and December 2024, found that families spent an average of $1,016 on a child's primary sport, a 46 percent rise since 2019. Across all of one child's sports, the average reached about $1,500. The survey placed the total U.S. youth sports economy at roughly $40 billion.
When a family's spending rises that quickly, the questions change, parents move from asking what a program costs to asking what it returns. For an academy charging well above those averages, the return has to be described in terms the family can verify.
In August 2026, the Massachusetts Special Working Group on Youth Sports, chaired by Josh Zakim of the Massachusetts State Athletic Commission, released eleven recommendations, including centralized licensure and background checks for coaches and officials, a code of conduct, health and safety protocols, and standardized season lengths. State Senator Barry Finegold has said he plans to file legislation in January. If enacted, it would be the first statewide umbrella agency for elementary and middle school sports in the country.
What this signals is that state governments are willing to treat youth sports as a licensed activity rather than a private market.
Nothing on this list requires an academy to change its academic program. Taken together, though, these developments point in one direction. The standard of proof is rising, and rising fastest around the parts of a program outside athletics.
Four things are worth doing now, none of which depend on how any bill turns out.
Supervision, travel, communication with minors, background checks, injury response, and academic progress. Adopted policies you can hand to a parent are worth more than practices everyone follows informally.
If MAAPP does not apply to your program, decide whether to adopt it voluntarily and be able to say clearly what you follow and why.
Where students go to school, who teaches them, what accreditation stands behind it, what the transcript looks like, and what happens to a student who arrives behind grade level and needs to catch up.
Investors, partners, and governing bodies increasingly ask for the same documentation parents ask for. Building it once serves every audience. The academies that thrive will be the ones that treated the whole-child question as an operating question rather than a marketing one.
Understanding where academic infrastructure fits into all of this is a longer conversation.
Our guide, The Academic Edge, helps academies build a credible academic standard around athlete training and development.
Learn more about Columbia Schools' flexible, accredited K-12 programs at ColumbiaSchool.org