Travel Ball Just Priced Out 77% of Parents. Don’t Answer With a Discount.

There is a conversation happening this month in the parking lot outside a travel baseball complex, and it is the most important conversation in your business. Two mothers are standing between the minivans doing arithmetic out loud. The season fee. The uniform. The bat. The hotel in Kansas City in July. The four Saturdays she did not see her other child. One of them says the sentence that ends it: I don’t think we can do this again next year.

She is not broke. She is not lazy. She is not a bad sports parent. She has simply reached the point where the price stopped matching the value, and she is looking for somewhere else to put her child and her money. And here is what most of our industry is going to do with that opportunity: run a “$99 for two months plus a free uniform” ad and wonder why the phone doesn’t ring with the family it was meant for.

What actually got published this week

The 2026 Good Sports Cost of Play Index, conducted by The Harris Poll among 574 U.S. parents in late June, reported that 26% of sports parents name unsustainable cost as the top reason they would pull a child out. Injury came second at 24%. The child not enjoying it came third at 23%. In 2024 the cost figure was 21%. It has moved five points in two years, and it has now passed the two reasons everybody in youth sport has spent a decade worrying about.

The rest of the index is worse, or better, depending on which side of the counter you are standing on. Sixty-eight percent of parents have seriously considered taking a child out of sport. Seventy-seven percent believe private clubs and travel teams are pricing families out. And this is not a low-income story being told by people who have never met a payroll: in households earning more than $100,000 a year, 58% called equipment costs a source of financial stress and half said they were worried about affording sport next year.

Put that next to the two other numbers from the same seven days. Circana reported on 14 September that American August retail dollars rose 0.8% while units fell 1.7% — people are buying fewer things and paying more for the ones they keep — and that nearly 60% of shoppers are cutting or getting more cautious with discretionary spending while about 30% stay willing to spend in the categories that matter to them. And the Federal Reserve raised rates on 16 September, the first increase since 2023, after which the major banks took prime to 7%.

Read those three together and you get the shape of the next two years. Families are not going to spend less on their children. They are going to spend on fewer things and demand that each one be worth it. Everything that is merely expensive gets cut. Everything that is expensive and obviously worth it survives and gets a bigger share of the household.

The dumbest possible response

I can tell you what the seminar circuit will say about this by Christmas: “Times are tight, make it easy to say yes, offer a lower-price entry option, go month-to-month, meet the market where it is.” That is a dumb statement on the face of it, and it is the exact advice that has bankrupted more schools than every recession in my fifty years in this business combined.

Think about what you are actually saying to that mother in the parking lot. She has just told a researcher she is leaving an activity because she paid a great deal of money and did not feel it was worth it. Your answer is to be the cheap thing? You are volunteering to be the next item on her list when the cutting starts. Nobody ever cried leaving a $99 punch card.

Price is a value problem, not a market problem. I have said it in every seminar I have ever given and the evidence this week says it again in plain English: 30% of consumers are still spending freely in the categories that matter to them. Your job is not to get cheaper. Your job is to be a category that matters.

The quick list: why the school that should win this won’t

I look at a lot of schools. When one of them sits in the middle of a market full of families abandoning club sport and still enrolls eight students a month, it is almost always the same seven things:

1. Nobody answers the phone when the mother calls. She calls between nine and eleven in the morning, Monday to Thursday, on the day she decides. Your school opens at four. Every other item on this list is irrelevant if you lose here, and most schools lose here.
2. The website talks about you. Lineage, style, the founder’s competition record, a history of the art. She does not care. She has one child, one calendar and one question: will this be good for him, and will it fit my Tuesday?
3. No organised Info Call. The call is answered by whoever is nearest, who quotes a price, says “come and try a class,” and hangs up. That is not a conversion process, that is an accident.
4. No first-lesson process. The new student gets a uniform and the back row. Five weeks later he quits and the owner blames the economy.
5. One lead source. Meta ads, or a sign, or word of mouth. One pillar is not a Parthenon, it is a stick. Build many pillars and run them all the time, in good weather and bad.
6. No short-term goals. A belt three years away is not a goal, it is a rumour. The travel-sport family is leaving a world of seasons, dates, standings and trophies. If you cannot tell that child what he is testing for and roughly when, you are asking him to downgrade.
7. Average student value around $100 a month in a school that could be at $250 to $300 — because the owner priced against the cheapest school in town instead of against the value he actually delivers.

Not one of those is fixed by a discount. Every one of them is fixed in a week by an owner who decides to.

Do the arithmetic she is doing

Here is the exercise I want you to do before you read another word of business advice from anybody, me included. Take your own market. Find out — actually find out, by asking three parents in your lobby tonight — what a season of club soccer, travel baseball or competitive cheer costs their family all in: fees, kit, travel, hotels, tournament entries, petrol. Write that annual number on a piece of paper.

Now write your own annual number next to it. Twelve months of tuition, plus testing, plus whatever else a typical family actually pays you in a year. For a great many schools, the second number is smaller than the first — for a programme that runs fifty weeks a year instead of one season, four hundred yards from her house instead of four hours down the interstate, with an adult who knows the child’s name and will tell her the truth about his behaviour.

If your number is smaller and you are still worried you cost too much, you do not have a pricing problem. You have a communication problem, and you have been solving it by cutting your own throat.

And if you want to know what that costs you: a school with 180 students at an average of $120 a month bills $21,600. The same 180 families at $250 bills $45,000. Same building, same rent, same insurance, same hours on the mat. The difference is not volume and it is not the market. It is what you decided you were worth, and — this is the part the people selling you “easy yes” pricing always skip — whether you then went and became worth it.

Positioning, not discounting

Ries and Trout taught the whole business world one idea in Positioning: you do not win by being better, you win by owning a space in the prospect’s head. For the next two years there is a space opening in every suburb on earth, and it reads: the serious activity for my child that does not eat my weekends or my savings.

Nobody is claiming it. Not the gyms — the research ukactive published on 16 September shows the big operators only now discovering that people join to belong, with 31% of non-joiners saying they stayed away because they had nobody to go with. Not the roll-ups: while you read this, Providence Equity is bidding about €600 million for a 400-club French budget chain (Health Club Management), which is a business about equipment access and volume, not about a nine-year-old’s character.

You have what none of that money can buy. Jhoon Rhee was not successful because he had the best facility in Washington; he was successful because parents believed their children would come out of his school different people, and he delivered that so reliably that the price stopped being the subject. When Jeff Smith and I wrote Extraordinary Teaching, the whole argument was that the class itself — the way a room is run, the way a child is corrected, the way a lesson is closed — is the marketing. It is the only marketing a competitor cannot copy by outspending you.

We have been here before, several times

Every few years the industry decides an outside force is about to decide its fate. Enter the Dragon was going to make us all rich. So was The Karate Kid, then the Ninja Turtles, then Tae Bo, then the MMA boom. Then the internet was going to kill us, then big-box gyms, then the pandemic, then the streaming platforms, then artificial intelligence.

Here’s reality, and I have watched it through five decades: the trend never made anybody and the trend never killed anybody. In 2009 I watched schools with contracts, a real enrollment process and an owner willing to raise price and be worth it grow through the worst economy since the war, while schools down the road with month-to-month punch cards and a “we’ll get through this” attitude closed. The outside event only decides when you find out which one you were running.

This one is no different, except that this time the outside event is unusually friendly to us. A generation of parents is being pushed out of the most expensive children’s activity ever invented, in the same month borrowing got dearer for the capital groups that have been opening near you at will. That combination does not come around often.

What to do in the next seven days

1. Build the comparison page. One page, on your website and printed for the lobby: the real annual cost of club sport in your town against the real annual cost of your programme, plus nights per week, weeks per year, travel required, and what the child actually gets. No adjectives you cannot prove.
2. Write the Info Call script for this specific family. When a parent says “he just finished with travel soccer,” that is not small talk, that is the buying signal of the decade. The script asks what worked, what stopped working, what she wants for him now, and books an appointment — it does not quote a price.
3. Answer the phone from 9 a.m. Today. Somebody, anybody, a human being, Monday to Thursday. If you do nothing else on this list, do this one.
4. Put a date on the next milestone for every student in the building, and make sure the parent knows the date too. The family leaving club sport is leaving structure. Give them better structure.
5. Set your price for next year now, in writing, and diarise the increase. Then spend the rest of the year earning it: a first-week conversation with every new family, a call to every student who misses two classes, and a room worth driving past two other schools to reach.

Do not wait for January. She is deciding about next season in the next sixty days, at the kitchen table, with a calculator. Be the alternative she has already heard of by then.

P.S. If your instinct while reading this was “my town is different, my families really cannot afford more” — go and check. Ask five parents what they spent on their child’s sport last year. Not what you assume. What they spent. I have had that conversation with hundreds of owners over the years and I can count on one hand the number of times the real number was lower than the owner’s excuse.

Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt