By Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt
The number that matters this week did not come from a dojo. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported record team-sport participation in the United States and, in the same release, a third consecutive annual decline in the number of youth coaches — 8.4 million in 2022 down to 6.9 million in 2025. Demand is at an all-time high and the supply of adults willing and qualified to stand in front of children is shrinking.
Then Australia spent nine days teaching the rest of us what our instructors and our contracts actually cost. A Perth boxing gym lost an unfair-dismissal case because its “independent contractor” wore a uniform and had the keys. A Sydney tribunal found a national chain’s “use any gym” promise misleading — not because the clause was unfair, but because the disclosure was four days short. And Britain quietly kept turning safeguarding into a credential you can market.
Record Participation, and 1.5 Million Fewer Youth Coaches Than in 2022
SFIA released its 2026 U.S. Trends in Team Sports Report — Participation Foundational Data on September 24. Team-sport participation reached a record 92.3 million Americans ages 6 and older in 2025, up 7.6% and a fifth consecutive year of growth; seventeen of the 24 sports SFIA tracks grew year over year, and basketball, already the largest, rose 13.5%. For the first time SFIA asked participants why they play: fun led at 58.4%, staying active at 51%, time with friends at 39.1%, being part of a team at 36% — and competition came in below all of them at 26.1%. Meanwhile the number of current youth team-sport coaches fell for a third straight year, from 8.4 million in 2022 to 6.9 million in 2025, while participation among 6-to-14-year-olds rose from 21.1 million to 22.1 million. Participants per coach went from 2.5 to 3.2. The data comes from 18,000 online interviews conducted during 2025 as part of the Physical Activity Council study.
Source: Sports & Fitness Industry Association, September 24, 2026
Oliver’s take: Read those two facts together, because they are the whole business. Demand is not your problem and has not been your problem for five years. Your constraint is the number of qualified adults on your floor at 4:30 on a Tuesday — and the national pool of them just dropped by 1.5 million. Also notice that competition finished dead last at 26.1% while fun finished first at 58.4%, and then go look at your home page. If the first thing a mother of a seven-year-old sees is a trophy table, you are advertising the thing 26% of the market wants and burying the thing 58% wants.
A Perth Boxing Gym Found Out What Its “Independent Contractor” Really Was
On September 18 the Fair Work Commission ordered Stay In The Fight Boxing Australia, in Wanneroo, Perth, to pay former boxing instructor Thomas Robertson $9,100 gross plus superannuation, in two instalments. Commissioner Paul Schneider rejected the gym’s position that Robertson was an independent contractor, finding an employment relationship on the plain facts of the arrangement: he wore a uniform, taught classes on schedules the gym set, opened and closed the premises, cleaned, and signed members up and checked them in. Robertson was dismissed by a message posted in a workplace WhatsApp group, the day after a heated exchange. The Commission calculated $1,000 a week over 13 weeks of likely remaining employment, then discounted the award 30% because he had not taken reasonable steps to mitigate his loss.
Source: Australasian Leisure Management, September 26, 2026
Oliver’s take: Uniform, plus your schedule, plus your keys, equals your employee. That is not an Australian rule. That is the same test a U.S. state labor board, a Canadian provincial tribunal and an Irish WRC adjudicator will apply to the black belt you pay $200 cash on Fridays and call a contractor. The $9,100 is not the cost. The cost is the back superannuation, the payroll tax, the workers’ comp premium you never paid, and the day you spend in a hearing instead of on your floor.
“Use Any Gym in Australia” Was Misleading — By Four Days
The New South Wales Civil and Administrative Tribunal found misleading and deceptive conduct in how Anytime Fitness promoted access to “any gym in Australia” without adequately disclosing the financial consequences of its automatic home-club transfer. Sydney member Reginald Yakob joined at Campbelltown on $19.95 a week; after regularly training at Parramatta, his membership was moved to Parramatta South at $25.95 a week — roughly 30% more — with a cancellation fee of about $400 if he walked. Tribunal member Michael Terceiro held the transfer clause itself was not inherently unfair, and awarded $129.75 on the narrow ground that Yakob was given 31 days’ notice where the policy required 35. The policy triggers a transfer when a member uses another club for more than 50% of visits in a month for two consecutive months, or visits another club at least once a month for three consecutive months.
Source: Australasian Leisure Management, September 18, 2026
Oliver’s take: The clause survived. The disclosure did not. Four days of notice cost a national chain a finding of misleading and deceptive conduct, which is a much more expensive sentence to have written about you than $129.75. If you run family transfers, multi-location access, a rate that steps up after twelve months, or a “freeze” that quietly restarts the term — the term is not the risk. Whether you said it out loud, in writing, before they signed, is the risk.
Australia: Average Membership Up 24%, Participation Down 15.6%
IBISWorld’s Gym & Fitness Centre Operation in Australia report puts sector revenue at $3.66 billion in 2025/26, rising 1.4% to $3.71 billion in 2026/27 and reaching $3.87 billion by 2030/31 — growth of 1.1% a year, after an annualised 2.1% decline over the five years to 2025/26. Memberships account for $2.17 billion, or 59.3% of revenue, with personal training at 12.9%, classes at 11.4% and casual entry at 8.3%. The sector employs 34,328 people across 10,481 establishments and 8,078 enterprises, on a $1.15 billion wage bill. The figure to sit with: average monthly membership rose from $62 in 2023 to $77 in 2025, while participation fell 15.6% comparing 2024/25 with 2022/23. The 15-to-34 bracket generates 45% of revenue; women hold 54% of memberships.
Source: Australasian Leisure Management, September 25, 2026
Oliver’s take: A 24% price increase and a 15.6% participation collapse in the same window is not a pricing success story. It is an industry raising the price without raising the value and then calling the result inflation. I have argued for forty years that price is a value problem, not a market problem — and the corollary nobody wants is that if you raise the price and the value stays where it was, you do not get a better business, you get a smaller one. Raise tuition and be worth it. Those are one sentence, not two.
U.S. Consumer Sentiment Falls to 48.1, a Four-Month Low
The University of Michigan’s final September reading, released September 25, put the Index of Consumer Sentiment at 48.1, down from 51.7 in August and 55.1 a year earlier. Current Economic Conditions came in at 50.9 and the Index of Consumer Expectations at 46.3, down from 51.5. Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped from 4.0% to 4.6%, the highest since June, with long-run expectations at 3.4%. Survey director Joanne Hsu noted sentiment is down 15% from January 2026. A week earlier, The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index fell 0.1% in August to 99.5 — its first monthly decline since March — with the board citing consumer expectations as “a significant strain on the Index,” and trimming its 2027 real GDP forecast from 1.9% to 1.8%.
Sources: University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, September 25, 2026 · The Conference Board, September 18, 2026
Oliver’s take: Here’s reality: a household at 48.1 with 4.6% expected inflation does not cancel the thing their kid loves. They cancel around it. The seminar, the second sparring set, the tournament entry, the summer camp, the little brother’s trial. Which means your October revenue risk is not in your tuition line, it is in every line under it. Go count what percentage of your monthly income is not on autopay, because that is the number that is exposed.
In Britain, Safeguarding Is Now a Marketing Asset
Endurance Martial Arts Academy in Northampton had its recognition under the Safeguarding Code in Martial Arts renewed for the period 18 September 2026 to 17 September 2027. The Code, launched in 2018, is run by Sport England with National Lottery funding and was developed with martial arts governing bodies and safeguarding specialists including NSPCC Sport, the Ann Craft Trust and the NWG Network. Assessment covers safeguarding policies, procedures for reporting concerns, recruitment and DBS requirements, codes of conduct, staff and volunteer training, insurance, risk assessments and ongoing monitoring. Chief instructor Sensei Shak Ahmed is quoted saying that parents look at classes, instructor experience, qualifications, facilities and achievements, “But there’s another question that should be just as important: what safeguarding standards can they actually demonstrate?”
Source: Northampton Chronicle & Echo, September 24, 2026
Oliver’s take: Note what actually happened here. A local school got a twelve-month accreditation renewed and turned it into press coverage in its own market, with the chief instructor handing parents a question to ask his competitors. That is the play. I have said for years that in the kids’ market you can never be too conservative, and that you build your community standing before you need it. This is what “before you need it” looks like when it is done on purpose.
British Judo Is Giving Coach Revalidation Away Free — and Changing Its Development Leadership
British Judo announced a free licensed coach revalidation event for Saturday 24 October 2026, 9:30am to 3:00pm, at the British Judo National Training Centre, University of Wolverhampton Walsall Campus, Gorway Road, Walsall WS1 3BD. Attendance satisfies revalidation requirements for licensed British Judo coaches at no cost, with content delivered alongside Play Their Way covering child-first coaching, children’s rights, coaching observation and applying the approach in club sessions. Separately, the day after, British Judo announced that Craig Anthony — currently Chief Executive of British Wrestling — becomes its Development Director from 16 November 2026, with a brief covering development strategy and club-level growth.
Sources: British Judo Association, September 23, 2026 · British Judo Association, September 24, 2026
Oliver’s take: When the national body offers to pay for your instructors’ credential, you do not send your best coach. You send everybody who is anywhere near the leadership track, you pay their petrol, and you buy lunch. Credentialing your own people is the cheapest competitive advantage in this industry, and this one costs a Saturday.
£155 Million Is Now Chasing After-School Activity in England
In a Sport England piece published 23 September, Andrew Liney, Head of Children and Young People, pointed to two named funding streams: the Enrichment Expansion Programme, backed by £22.5 million and supporting around 400 secondary schools, and Every Child Can, funded with £132.5 million from dormant assets. He drew on the Youth Matters: State of the Nation survey of more than 14,000 young people aged 11 to 25, and cited the National Youth Strategy ambition of halving the enrichment participation gap between disadvantaged young people and their peers by 2035.
Source: Sport England, September 23, 2026
Oliver’s take: £132.5 million and £22.5 million are not grant lotteries you enter and hope. They are commissioning budgets, which means somebody in a local authority or a multi-academy trust has to buy a delivery partner, and the partners who get picked are the ones with the safeguarding paperwork already done and a named contact already in the building. Every one of those pupils is a prospect who never has to find you, because you are already on site. This is the Parthenon — one more pillar, running at the same time as the others.
Google Gives You Four Days to Stop a Stranger Editing Your Listing
Google updated its Business Profile help documentation to formalise a response window on user-suggested edits: “Once notified, you have 4 days to accept or reject the suggestion.” If the owner does not respond, Google may publish the change where it is supported by publicly available information such as the business website — and Google also reserves the right to skip notification entirely, stating it “may apply suggested user edits to your business information without prior review” in cases where edits must meet policy guidelines. In the same week, owners began receiving emails headed “Protecting your Business Profile from spam reviews,” telling them Google “has detected a spike in spam reviews on your Business Profile and removed them so they do not affect your Google rating,” and that “new ratings, reviews, and other user contributions have been temporarily paused… typically within a few days.”
Sources: Search Engine Roundtable, September 23, 2026 · Search Engine Roundtable, September 22, 2026
Oliver’s take: In one week: a stranger can change your hours and you have four days to notice, and the review push you ran after belt graduation can be deleted as spam with new reviews frozen for days. Both of those are somebody’s job, and in most schools that job belongs to nobody. Put the Business Profile notification email on a person’s name — an actual person, this week — and stop harvesting forty reviews in one afternoon. Ask two or three a week, every week, forever. Repetition beats novelty.
A New Zealand Chain Made Parent-Attended Induction Compulsory for 14- and 15-Year-Olds
CityFitness has made a supervised small-group induction compulsory for members aged 14 and 15, who must attend with a parent or guardian before receiving full club access. The operator reports that 15-to-17-year-olds have gone from 22% of its membership in 2021 to 30%. Sessions cover exercise selection, safe spotting, appropriate training volume and progression, equipment maintenance and gym etiquette. Chief operating officer Doug Hatten said “simply providing access to a gym isn’t enough,” framing the programme as a response to safety risk and to unrealistic fitness content online.
Source: Ministry of Sport, September 28, 2026
Oliver’s take: A commercial chain just set a duty-of-care standard in public, which means it is now the standard your insurer and any plaintiff’s lawyer will hold you to. And here is the part most owners will miss: a mandatory session where the parent has to be in the room with their fourteen-year-old is not a compliance cost. It is a scheduled parent conference you get to bill your own credibility to. We have known since the Jhoon Rhee days that the parent in the room is the retention event. Somebody just made it mandatory and called it safety.
The HFA Show Is Letting Consumers Onto the Trade Floor — and Still Has an Interim CEO
The Health & Fitness Association announced that HYROX and Centr will be integrated into The HFA Show 2027, which runs March 10–12, 2027 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, alongside HYROX Las Vegas on March 12–14 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. For the first time, the trade show floor opens on Friday, March 12 to select HYROX athletes and spectators with valid event passes, plus HYROX-affiliated gym owners and coaches. HFA members receive 100 participant registrations and 100 member-exclusive spectator tickets. The announcement quotes Greta Wagner as “HFA interim president and CEO.”
Source: Health & Fitness Association, September 24, 2026
Oliver’s take: Two things worth writing down. First, the largest trade show in this industry is deliberately blurring the line between trade-only and consumer, which changes what a booth is for and who walks past it. Second, read the title: interim. The main association representing commercial fitness operators is going into its 2027 show cycle without a permanent chief executive. That is not gossip, it is planning information — if you were counting on HFA advocacy on auto-renewal legislation over the next twelve months, count again.
What I’d Do About It This Week
- Audit how you pay every instructor, tonight. Take the Perth test literally: uniform, your schedule, your keys, your opening and closing, your member sign-ups. Any one person who ticks three of those and gets a 1099, a cash envelope or an “ABN invoice” is an employee waiting to be reclassified. Talk to your accountant this week, not after the letter arrives.
- Count the percentage of monthly revenue that is not on automated billing. With sentiment at 48.1 and inflation expectations at 4.6%, that percentage is your exposure. Contracts and EFT are not a convenience, they are the reason your November looks like your September.
- Put one named person on your Google Business Profile inbox and switch from batch review requests to two or three a week, permanently. Four days is not long enough to catch an edit nobody is watching for.
- Move one person up your leadership ladder this week. Not “when I find someone.” The national coaching pool fell by 1.5 million in three years; nobody is coming. Name the green belt, tell them they are on the track, and give them a two-minute job at the next class.
- Rewrite the first screen of your website around fun, activity and friends — 58.4%, 51%, 39.1% — and move the trophies below the fold. Competition is a 26.1% motivation. Stop leading with it.
P.S. If you only act on one of those five, make it the first one. Every other item on this list costs you money you choose to spend. That one costs you money a tribunal chooses for you.
Stephen Oliver, MBA, 10th Degree Black Belt, is the founder of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery. Disclosure: Martial Arts Professional is published by Stephen Oliver, who also operates Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a paid coaching program for martial arts school owners.
