If you want the real reason boys quit sports, it's not what you'd guess. It's not cost. It's not injuries.
A 2026 report from the Aspen Institute’s Project Play and the American Institute for Boys and Men looked at why boys are leaving sports. It’s built on a 2025 youth athlete survey, a 2022 coach survey, and focus groups with young athletes. Among boys still playing, the #1 complaint is bad coaching (22%) — ahead of cost (17%).
Put those two numbers together and the picture gets really uncomfortable: boys aren't leaving sports mostly because sports got too expensive. A lot of them are leaving because somewhere along the way, a coach made them feel like they didn't belong in competition — and that feeling usually comes down to one thing: feeling like they don't measure up to their teammates.
In a recent podcast, I talked about the damage comparison causes, and this report backs that up. Social media has quietly become the scoreboard a lot of kids measure themselves against — and the problem with that scoreboard is it's not even real. Social media doesn't show the full picture of a person's story. It's a reel or a post, never the whole thing.
Here is the caveat to the survey- it's survey and focus-group data, not a controlled study, and the researchers call out that they cannot confirm that this feeling from athletes is 100% caused by coaching. "I'm not good enough" is probably being driven by coaching, by comparison culture, and by social media all at once — not by one clean cause. That doesn't make the finding less useful. It just means I'm not going to oversell it as the athlete’s feeling is based on one factor.
Here's what I am sure of: there's one thing coaches fully control, and that's the training experience. We decide whether a kid's first season playing sports builds belief or kills it. When we're not intentional about that experience, we feed right into the comparison problem social media is already creating.
How Do We Build Belief?
Encourage curiosity. During training, let athletes feel safe asking, respectfully, "I don't get this — how do I improve at this drill?"
Focus on small, incremental wins built around self-improvement — not how one teammate stacks up against another.
Ask your athletes to reflect on what they've gotten better at, not just the final score.
We can all recall both good and bad experiences with a past teacher or coach — and that alone tells you how much power we hold in a kid's life. If we have that much power, let's make sure we're never the reason a kid walks away from sports for good.
Read this next: What to say to your child after a tough competition
Lorraine Eloms | Top Speed Athletics & Mental Performance and Life Coaching — helping young athletes develop the mental and emotional tools to compete, grow, and thrive.
