The failure to provide “fun” reduces recreational sports participation
- David Verso
- Mar 2
- 7 min read
When I started coaching in AYSO as a young parent in the late 1990s, the organization promoted itself as a place where players could have fun. You ordered their materials by calling 1 (800) AYSO FUN. Today, in 2026, the organization markets itself as “AYSO brings together community members to coach, referee, and support their local Regions with the ultimate goal of creating a fun, family-friendly environment.”
There is a good reason why AYSO pivoted away from focusing on player “fun.” Children often don’t find them very fun. When I was a coach in the program, many parents on other teams reported that their children were miserable. When I met with the All-Star coaches twenty-five years later, they told me that some kids cried when they learned they had to return to AYSO's “core” program the following fall. These were the most successful kids in the program, not the “daisy pickers” or the kids who served as human cones.
We’ll use the same clip in the critical thinking post to highlight what it looks like for two children to become human cones.
When the ball somehow managed to get to the first player in green at the start of the video, his better teammate doesn’t move to get open, but instead lurks next to him waiting for him to lose the ball. He disappears after the first few seconds.
When number 4 in yellow easily steals the ball, his teammate number 5 tries to steal the ball from him. After number 4 easily dribbles by him, the last few seconds of the video show number 5 standing with his hands on his head (a common gesture indicating a person is processing a difficult situation). He can only watch as number 4 in yellow passes to another teammate down the field after he outmaneuvered the lurking number 7 in green, who then races after the ball.
In contrast, my children had a wonderful time in AYSO. Furthermore, so did many other players I coached, including “Rocky”, the lowest-rated player among over 300 players in the division. Rocky struggled in formal games, but I made practices enjoyable enough that his father told me his season with me was the best of any sport. The reason is that the way I organized play had almost nothing in common with the way AYSO and other recreational programs organize play.
This post will explain, at a very high level, the key to fun and why AYSO and other recreational programs have been in decline. To be clear, AYSO’s issues are no different from those of other recreational youth soccer organizations. Alan Blinzler (he contributed significantly to the book), the former National Secretary of the larger USYS, told me that similar problems plagued the recreation group that controlled his organization. You could even argue that AYSO is a model national youth organization that has not succumbed to the pay-for-play mentality that plagues youth sports in the United States.
To understand where AYSO, in particular, and youth sports in general, went wrong requires a small bit of background. The volunteer in charge of the local communities’ AYSO program is called the Regional Commissioner, who is responsible for ensuring everything needed to run the program is done, while justifying the bureaucratic rules to a thousand or more parents who mostly care only about their own children.
Regional Commissioners are put in leadership positions because they are the saints among us who get up at six AM on weekends to line the fields and show up at 6 PM to put away all the flags and nets. They do not need any prior experience with soccer or sports in general. Since people who want their children to play at a high level are forced to move to other programs, you end up with many people who never played soccer in senior positions. Yet they determine the policy for their region and elect the people who control the organization's policy.
A second thing you need to understand is the basics of enjoyment. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi literally wrote the book on enjoyment. His book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” became a bestseller and remains one of the most widely cited works on Google Scholar. In his book and TED Talk, Csikszentmihalyi uses different versions of the background in the chart below, comparing the challenge to the ability to meet the challenge to help people understand “Flow.”
The ideal Flow state occurs in the upper right-hand corner, where the challenge meets the upper limits of the person's skills. The sad human cones and the bored stars are my addition to help you understand the fatal flaw of AYSO’s “Core” program and every other “recreational” program in the county. In these wide-ability programs, where everyone who signs up can play, the small number of children who dominate play are evenly distributed across teams, creating within-team distributions that are the exact opposite of what is ideal for optimal enjoyment.
The third factor of AYSO’s downfall involves the societal conditions. During the 1980s and early 1990s, AYSO exploded in growth. The country was in the midst of a transition in which children played sports among themselves, to today, when children's games are largely limited to organized teams.
Instead of children taking turns being the pitcher or quarterback in small games among themselves, they were herded onto adult-sized teams, where the coach allowed only a couple of the best players to pitch or play quarterback. Baking in the sun or shivering in a cold rain, being ordered by adults to watch other children play is no child’s idea of fun. For too many, the only fun comes from post-game snacks.
Soccer at that time was largely limited to tiny pockets in immigrant communities, and few adults knew how to play. Kids who were sitting on the bench all game in other sports, hoping to get a couple of plays in football or their single at-bat in baseball, were suddenly allowed to play a game where every child got a chance to meaningfully participate. The more a child ran in a soccer game, the more chances they got to play with the ball. All a child had to do was kick the ball hard in the right direction, and everyone cheered. For many, play became fun again.
Furthermore, US soccer in general and AYSO in particular adopted the concept of modified games for Spain, pioneered by Horst Wein. Instead of playing adult versions of the game, such as Little League baseball or Pop Warner football, younger children played games with fewer players that more closely mimicked natural play. AYSO was also an early adopter of girls' participation and passed a rule requiring everyone to play at least half the game. These things combined to help make it the fastest-growing youth soccer organization in the fastest-growing sport.
AYSO’s decline was due to a combination of societal changes affecting all recreational programs and to classic organizational failure in transitioning beyond a strong leader. As play in children’s sports became increasingly organized, people with athletic backgrounds became increasingly frustrated with the poor development inherent in the existing recreational play model. In youth baseball, parents began extending all-star play by creating tournaments beyond the LLWS.
The clamor for better youth soccer programs was even more pronounced. Soccer is built around players working together, not the best player as a pitcher or quarterback controlling play. As a result, the existing small pockets of ethnic communities completely rejected the wide-ability recreational model because fathers in these communities wanted their children to learn to play the game. As former players like my wife and me began having children, “soccer moms” also began joining ethnic fathers in abandoning recreational programs such as AYSO for teams selected by ability.
Internally, Dick Wilson, who ran the organization for a decade of record growth, had just retired. Player registration growth, which had been slowing, suddenly started to decline. A culture war within AYSO broke out between those who believed the solution to the decline was to return to the basics. A second group felt AYSO needed to offer tryout-based programs that parents were demanding.
My highly successful Development Model-based programs offered an alternative that caught the attention of Burt Haimes, the Chairman of the Board. I gave a presentation to the executive director and members of the national board of directors (NBOD) and met leaders from across the country in both camps.
But ultimately, the group that wanted AYSO to return to its roots became very insular. I was among the many who left. A few members of the NBOD went so far as to proclaim on the ASYO List Server that AYSO was the greatest child development organization in the world, even though the recreational model is the antithesis of a great development environment, as it is detailed in the chapters of section one of the book.
I don’t recall Wilson posting on the AYSO List Server. But I do know he wrote me a note expressing his opinion that I was a poor parent for requesting that my older son, Eric, be allowed to play with older players so he would be challenged. Eric was number 4 in yellow in the video. If he played as Wilson demanded, Eric would have dribbled the length of the field each time he got the ball, only to be told by adults to stand in goal because his team was winning by too much, “making the game no longer fun.” Interestingly, in 2017, my request would have been completely unnecessary, as the arbitrary date US soccer mandated would have placed Eric in the older cohort, where I felt he belonged based on his development.
Any group with a strong culture is susceptible to members believing what they want to believe. The youth sports academic community has long been biased against select, ability-based programs. For years, parents were told that children play for “fun,” yet researchers did not adequately examine their own biases regarding “fun.” Many in the academic community have blamed parents for all the woes in youth sports, when in reality, many parents are simply trying to help their children escape a poor developmental environment that, for most children, is no fun.
