KEN KING – AUTHOR OF THE BOOK “PYRAMID SCHEME – HOW SPORT BECAME AN EMPIRE, WHY IT IS COLLAPSING, AND HOW WE REBUILD THE GAME” – EPISODE 1302

Website – https://www.justkenking.com/

Email – [email protected]

Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenboost/

Ken King is the author of the new book, Pyramid Scheme – How sport became an empire, why it is collapsing, and how we rebuild the game. Ken is also the Executive Director of Calgary Minor Basketball, a non-profit of over 7000 athletes, 1500 coaches, and 300 officials. He is also the Principle/Founder of Boost Innovation Inc., a Calgary-based technology company building a portfolio of sport performance and coaching applications. He holds fifteen years of experience in high-performance collegiate basketball coaching and government affairs connected to Canadian sport. King’s work sits at the intersection of sport technology, athlete development, and systems design, and he contributes regularly to national sport development conversations through research, writing, and direct policy engagement.

On this episode Mike and Ken discuss why youth sports increasingly operates as an expensive, restrictive system that funnels money and opportunity toward a small elite group. Ken shares how pay-to-play models, early specialization, overtraining, and limited alternatives contribute to athlete burnout and dropout. The episode also examines why coach effectiveness should be measured by player experience and retention rather than credentials or playing history. King highlights the crisis in referee retention, arguing that organizations must protect officials, hold abusive adults accountable, and provide meaningful administrative support. The conversation concludes with a vision for rebuilding youth sports through more affordable entry points, easier exits, multi-sport opportunities, and accessible ways for every child to keep playing.

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Make sure you have your notebook at your side as you listen to this episode with Ken King, author of the new book, Pyramid Scheme – How sport became an empire, why it is collapsing, and how we rebuild the game.

What We Discuss with Ken King

10 Key Takeaways for Basketball Coaches

1. Measure your effectiveness by whether players want to return

Coaching credentials, playing experience, and certifications do not necessarily predict whether athletes will enjoy the experience or continue playing. Ken explains that the most meaningful measure may be how many athletes return the following season.

Practical example:

Track how many players return to your team or continue playing basketball after the season. A demanding coach can still have strong retention if players feel challenged, respected, and supported.

2. Do not confuse high standards with a poor player experience

Player feedback does not mean coaches must lower expectations or avoid difficult training. Ken emphasizes that a coach can demand effort, provide honest feedback, and make merit-based decisions while still creating an environment athletes value.

Practical example:

Push players during conditioning or skill work, but explain the purpose, coach them respectfully, and give them a sense of progress.

3. Make basketball enjoyable, especially for younger players

Mike points out that children begin playing because basketball is fun, social, and engaging—not because they want to “grind” toward a distant future goal.

Practical example:

Build practices around games, competition, creativity, and relationships. Do not let every session become a series of technical drills with no joy or freedom.

4. Focus athletes on the present instead of constantly selling “what’s next”

The episode highlights how players can become consumed by the next level: making the middle-school team, earning a starting role, reaching high school, or pursuing college basketball.

Practical example:

Set short-term goals such as improving defensive communication, finishing with the left hand, or making better decisions in transition. Help players appreciate their current team rather than treating every season as merely a stepping stone.

5. Create multiple pathways into basketball

Ken argues that competition itself is not the problem; the problem is creating one expensive, all-consuming route to competitive basketball.

Practical example:

Support several entry points, including school teams, recreation leagues, open gyms, developmental groups, pickup games, and affordable clinics. A player should be able to develop without immediately joining a costly travel program.

6. Protect multi-sport participation and avoid unnecessary specialization

The episode notes that playing one sport year-round can increase injury risk and that organizational scheduling often makes multi-sport participation difficult.

Practical example:

Coordinate calendars with other sports when possible, avoid excessive tournament commitments, and encourage athletes to participate in other activities during the year.

7. Give players and families a genuine ability to leave or change environments

Ken describes the “cage” created when families feel they cannot leave because the alternative is no organized basketball, lost opportunities, or social pressure.

Practical example:

Be transparent about your program’s expectations, costs, playing philosophy, and schedule before families commit. Make it clear that athletes can move to another team or level without being shamed or punished.

8. Hold adults accountable for their treatment of officials

The episode makes a strong point: youth sports organizations often identify underage officials with special markers instead of addressing the adults who abuse them.

Practical example:

Establish clear spectator and coach behavior standards before the season. Remove or suspend adults who berate, threaten, follow, or harass officials. A visible consequence communicates that officials matter.

9. Support officials with training, mentoring, and meaningful supervision

Officials are more likely to remain involved when administrators demonstrate that they value and support them. Ken cites research identifying administrative consideration, mentoring, training, and supervision as important retention factors.

Practical example:

Pair inexperienced referees with mentors, provide constructive feedback after games, and ensure someone in leadership is available when conflicts arise.

10. Track participation as well as revenue and wins

Ken recommends looking beyond revenue and competitive success. Organizations should measure how many people participate, revenue per participant, and whether participation is growing or shrinking.

Practical example:

In addition to tracking tournament wins, monitor registration numbers, retention, cost per athlete, volunteer hours, and how many athletes remain involved after the season. A program may be generating more revenue while serving fewer children.

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THANKS, KEN KING

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TRANSCRIPT FOR KEN KING – AUTHOR OF THE BOOK “PYRAMID SCHEME – HOW SPORT BECAME AN EMPIRE, WHY IT IS COLLAPSING, AND HOW WE REBUILD THE GAME” – EPISODE 1302

[00:00:00] Narrator: The Hoop Heads Podcast is brought to you by Head Start Basketball.

[00:00:20] Ken King: Volunteers aren’t just unpaid labor. They’re the strongest predictor of whether the next cohort will play at all. If you lose your volunteers, you don’t just lose the work, you lose the children and the children of the families that watch them.

[00:00:35] Mike Klinzing: Ken King is the author of the new book Pyramid Scheme, How Sport Became an Empire, Why It Is Collapsing, and How We Rebuild the Game.

Ken is also the executive director of Calgary Minor Basketball, a nonprofit of over seven thousand athletes, fifteen hundred coaches, and three hundred officials. He’s also the principal and founder of Boost Innovation Incorporated, a Calgary-based technology company building a portfolio of sport performance and coaching applications.

He holds fifteen years of experience in high-performance collegiate basketball coaching and government affairs connected to Canadian sport. King’s work sits at the intersection of sport technology, athlete development, and systems design, and he contributes regularly to national sport development conversations through research, writing, and direct policy engagement.

Ever since I founded Head Start Basketball in nineteen ninety-three, we’ve helped young players develop their skills, confidence, and love for the game. Now we’re partnering with coaches and athletic programs to bring the Head Start Basketball camp experience to new communities. Our camps run for five days, three hours per day, and serve boys and girls in grades one through six.

You or someone on your staff directs the on-court portion of the camp while Head Start Basketball manages registration, promotion, parent communication, T-shirts, trophies, website setup, and administration. There are no upfront camp planning headaches, and the profits are divided fifty-fifty between your program and Head Start Basketball.

If you want to reach more families or strengthen your youth basketball pipeline or just create additional revenue for your program, visit headstartbasketball.com to explore hosting a camp.

[00:02:32] Mike Jagacki: Hi, this is Mike Jagacki from Lockdown Defense and men’s basketball assistant coach at SUNY New Paltz, and you’re listening to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

Make sure you have your notebook at your side as you listen to this episode with Ken King, author of the new book, Pyramid Scheme: How Sport Became an Empire, Why It is Collapsing, and How We Rebuild the Game.

Hello, and welcome to the Hoop Heads podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here tonight without my co-host, Jason Sunkel, but I am pleased to be joined by Ken King, author of the new book, Pyramid Scheme.

Ken, welcome to the Hoop Heads pod.

[00:02:48] Ken King: Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for staying up late.

[00:02:51] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Excited to have you on. Got a chance to read Pyramid Scheme here over the last couple of days, and I can’t wait to dive into the conversation which surrounds youth sports and a lot of the topics that we have talked about here on the Hoop Heads podcast in various forms with lots of people all across the basketball spectrum.

Your book hits on a ton of things that I think will touch a nerve for coaches, for parents, for players who are listening. I just think that there’s a ton of things in here that we could talk about that make us think about the s- the setup for what we have in terms of youth sports. So we’re going to start out by just giving you an opportunity to give us the one-minute elevator pitch on the book.

What’s it all about? If somebody picks up a copy, what are they going to read? What are they going to find out? What are they going to learn?

[00:03:46] Ken King: Yeah, appreciate that. And at the crux of it, the book comes from the idea that a kid can play a sport in their school, and it costs them about 70 bucks a year. At least here in Canada, for many of the sports, that’s about the going rate.

And then the same sport through a private club, for-profit entity is usually easily over $1,000 and sometimes getting into the five, $6,000 for the same kid, the same game, and oftentimes in the same gym. It’s just during the day as opposed to rented at night. And that’s not the only thing that I was kinda looking at.

One of the other aspects was officials are quitting everywhere. Cities are saying no to the Olympic Games, which is mind-blowing to many people. And kids are dropping out of sport, and a lot of us talk about that as early as 13 or sometimes even younger. And over the last 20 years or so, I’ve explained all those things separately and justified them in different ways.

And then when I went looking for numbers to actually support the way that I was approaching things, what I thought was true about them, none of my assumptions really held up. The– what kinda did hold up the most was that when we look outside sport completely at research and how full societies like ancient Rome and even before that exist and fall apart, it became pretty clear to me that organized sport is actually more of a society than an industry, and it’s about 160-ish years old and still younger than the telephone, not just cell phones, but the actual telephone.

And it’s showing every symptom that historical records of societies collapsing show before the end. And so the– about two-thirds bo- of the book is a diagnosis of that s- that concept of sport as a society. And then the last third, I really dive into rebuilding the society of sport and how we can all take control of that rebuild.

[00:05:37] Mike Klinzing: And I think that rebuild is an important part of it because, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this too, that there are lots of people that will complain and not be happy with the current system. But then when the conversation turns around to what can we do? I think at that point a lot of people just throw up their hands and everybody’s like I don’t know.

I don’t know what we do.” And one of the things that I liked about what you did throughout the book is try to provide some solutions for, hey, if you’re a parent or hey, if you’re a club director or hey, you’re a governing body, there are some things that you can do to try to improve the experience. And then ultimately, as you said, if this thing collapses, then how do we rebuild it?

What are some of the parts of that we can take and make the experience better? And it also is interesting to me, and maybe I’ll start here, that one of the themes that runs throughout the book is the difference between the very top of that athletic pyramid, right? Where you’re in a club system, you might have your elite team, right?

And again, I’m going to frame it through a basketball perspective. You framed it in the book more through a hockey perspective just with the Canadian side of it. But again, I know you’re a basketball guy too. So the… If I have a team of 10, whatever elite basketball players that were traveling around the country and playing in all these AAU teams and do- and tournaments and doing all this stuff, and then you have this whole other group of kids that maybe doesn’t want/need that experience, but we want them to participate and play and get that physical activity and those kinds of things, then how do we juxtapose those two different sort of systems that are oftentimes under the same umbrella?

And the goals are often different, right? That what those 10 elite kids need versus what we want in terms of larger participation is different. And so I just the way that you framed the society piece of it and thinking about it in terms of it’s a society, it could collapse, all of that. So how did you kinda come up with the framework for organizing the book around the idea that sports is a society and not maybe some of the typical ways that we look at it?

[00:08:01] Ken King: Yeah, it actually, I think imitation and/or, or referencing is one of the best forms of flattery, and there’s an author by the name of Luke Kemp who wrote a book called Goliath talking about societ-societal collapse with societies throughout history and including where we’re at currently as a society.

I’ve read that a couple times, and as I started to think about it, that was really where that concept of sport as a society as opposed to an industry really became clear to me because we have hierarchies. We have, like many societies throughout history have had, we have godlike people which would be our pro athletes and the ones that just seem beyond human that we look up to and revere.

We have people who control in our national sport organizations and our administrative positions which I also occupy one of that in a grassroots nonprofit. And then we have resources that need to be funneled upwards sometimes, but more and more are getting funneled upward. And one of the things that really pushed me over the edge was actually betting and gambling in sport and the rise of that recently, seeing how not only are we directly taking families’ funds to fund the top point two percent or so, but we’re actually now– we’re actually building youth and building people to take their resources, their literal resources, their hard-earned money from other areas, and funneling it directly to the top of our sport society through sports betting and how much that’s spreading now.

And when resources move to the top, it looks and feels really good for a short amount of time. Luke Kemp does a great job of framing this in his book. And what then inevitably ends up happening is fracture and collapse of that society. And I should be clear that, that societal collapse, and again I’m borrowing the general concept from Luke Kemp here.

Societal collapse isn’t necessarily like net bad. It, it– Throughout history, like a bunch of societies in human history have collapsed, and we’re still here. But– and then sometimes those societal collapse, kinda like after a forest fire, things come back quite a bit better because all the bad things went by the wayside with the collapse.

So yeah that’s really where it came from, was sports betting kinda triggered it and co- and then r- in looking back at his writing it became clear that this is much more similar to the co- the pending collapse of society, a society, than it is an industry that is struggling with different problems.

[00:10:32] Mike Klinzing: As you went looking for these answers and pondering this question and looking at youth sports as a entire landscape, was there a light bulb moment for you when you were like, “Oh, I have to write a book”? Was it more of a slow burn of you just saw all these things kinda happening and somebody’s have to kinda put this together and organize it in such a way that we can have a conversation about it?

How did the idea for y- for the book come to pass? And d- when was the moment when you knew, “Hey, I have to write this book”?

[00:11:04] Ken King: I think probably that real, “Oh my gosh, this this needs to be, this needs to be shared.” And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of “Who am I to write this?” Yes, I coached college at one point in university basketball.

Yes, I, yes, I run a non-profit grassroots league that’s over 7,000 kids and 2,500 coaches and 300 refs r-right now. And so I’ve seen the whole gamut. But when some… i’ve actually had somebody ask me directly, a friend, “Who are you to write? What do you think you’re doing here?” And I said I’m really nobody, and that’s kind of the point.”

I’m not an academic researcher. I’ve spent years seeing the different crises that we see in sport in different ways, but the way that many s- coaches and administrators and parents and athletes do. And like I said, I kinda started to write, like jot ideas down and be like here’s how I’m going to explain the problems with officials retention, and here I’m, here’s how I’m going to s- explain how horrible this is for long-term h- wellness and athlete development of our youth.”

And I couldn’t find the research to back it up, and that’s when I started to realize that I c- I couldn’t support my own assumptions with research. And so re-really it was, the light bulb moment was me finding out I was wrong and didn’t really know what I was talking about. And because of my background, I realized that probably means there’s at least a couple other people out there who are just as wrong as I was.

[00:12:35] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think what there’s– Sports runs on a lot of assumptions, right? And I think anybody who reads the book can go through and find what those assumptions are and probably ask themselves, “Hey, how many times have I said this?” I think about, and we’ll get to, I think, to the coaching piece of it in a little bit, but the coaching of, “Hey, we have to coach the kids hard, and if we don’t, then we’re soft, and they’re not getting what they need.”

And obviously, you go through and talk about that throughout the book, and we’ll get to the coaching part of it in a minute. Start with the fuels. There are four of them that you mention in the book that set this whole thing in motion, and then we can dive further into it

[00:13:20] Ken King: Yeah. So I think one of the underlying pieces to the fuels was really driven by the concept and whether there’s a specific example, like I couldn’t tell you a kid’s name, but it’s that concept that I have in my head of a boy exhausted, asleep against the window of the car on a four-hour drive as it goes to another tournament.

And so i- does that kid really want to be there? Maybe not. And that kinda gave me the the connection back to Luke Kemp’s fuels of what’s the… How do we get, how do we get here? How do we get to the point where maybe kids aren’t even enjoying? So one of, one of the fuels I talk about is the grain, and obviously I’m referencing back to f- fuels that exist in societal collapse here.

And so in sport, the grain when you have grain in surplus, or when you have food supply in surplus in a human society, it actually causes problems. In sport, the grain is actually a parent’s hope. It ripens on schedule when registration comes every year. You can track it. There’s databases for it.

It stores and it compounds, so you can tell over time that your- that year six is easier to sell to a family than year one was because nobody wants year one to j- and two and three and four and five to have been wasted in their mind. It, and it regenerates annually because every year there’s more five-year-olds coming in, or whatever the age of joining is, and more parents of them who have no idea what it should cost or what it should feel like.

And unlike wheat, there’s actually no ceiling on it. W- wheat we measure in calories and there’s only so many calories that people can consume, that societies can consume. But hope is essentially immeasurable, and love has no budget line, so it becomes impossible to cap the fuel of that supply.

The other one is a lot shorter to explain, and that’s weaponizing or the weapons component. And in sport it’s monopolizing and profiteering and put- putting money ahead of development and wellness. And then the other fuel is a cage or, and I don’t mean a literal cage. We should probably assume that in 2026 nobody’s caging athletes.

Though the Clippers might. I feel like I, I don’t know if I can say that on here, but I c- I wouldn’t put anything past Steve Ballmer. But when a population can’t leave, or it feels like it can’t leave because it’s going to be, it, they’re going to be, they’re going to be shamed, or they need to be a part of it ’cause this is the only place to get this experience, and it feels like they’re trapped or…

and whether they actually recognize that feeling or it’s just we’ve always been here, so we’ll always be here.” The argument is that when all three of these fuels are present, unhealthy hierarchies assemble regardless of anyone’s intentions sometimes. And sport has these in a pretty rare, pure form because it’s all been assembled fairly recently.

A lot of it was, a lot of it was catalyzed by the pandemic. And because of that, that there, the f- the grain, the f- the first fuel I talked about is incredibly abundant because everybody was trapped for a while at home, and now everybody wants their kids to be the opposite of that and get experiences.

So the fuel is more abundant than ever. The weaponization is easier than ever with the social media aspect and the swag and the turn pay-to-play tournament structures and that kind of thing. And then the caging, because of those first two, is that much easier. W- we’re the only ones that can offer you this.

If you go somewhere else, you probably won’t be able to get that scholarship. You probably will never change your own life

[00:17:13] Mike Klinzing: So as I was reading this, Ken, what leaped out to me amongst these three probably the most vividly was the cage analogy. And I’ll give you a backstory from my experience, and this is me talking as a parent, but also as a basketball coach.

And I remember when my kids were very little, before they even got to youth sports, and having conversations with people about the system. And again, the system has evolved from, we’re talking this is 15, 20 years ago when I’m having these conversations, and me saying to other people, “I don’t know if this travel basketball scenario or travel soccer in our community,” which is big, “I don’t know that there’s a lot of kids that want to practice basketball three or four nights a week and then go on play, go and play in tournaments every weekend.

Or I don’t know if there’s a bunch of kids that want to play soccer three or four nights a week and then go play and travel to these soccer tournaments.” And as somebody who had not experienced that, ’cause when I was a kid, those things didn’t exist, and then me as a parent had not been through any of that, and I looked at it and I’m like I was a kid maybe who that system might have been good for me ’cause I loved playing, but that gets to another point which we’ll talk about, which is free play and unstructured play, and we’ll get to we’ll get to that.

But the idea of playing all the time and being a kid who couldn’t get enough of it and wasn’t driven by what my parents were telling me to do, it was just me wanting that. I might have been a good candidate for that, but as I looked around thinking about my own experience, players that I played with in elementary school, in junior high, in high school, even in college, I’m not sure that the majority of those players would have wanted the same experience that I did.

And then the cage part of that is I used to say, “I don’t know if my kids will do that. Maybe we’ll just do something else.” And then they got to the age where it was time to make a decision about what were we going to do, and you look at it and you’re like now we have a situation where when I was a kid, the community recreation program was pretty good ’cause that’s where all the good players in the city were playing, and so you could play and have competitive games.”

Now, by the time my kids were ready to do this, all those kids had been siphoned off into the, quote, “travel program.” And so then if you’re left in the recreation program with players who, again, weren’t as good, and so then you’re like, “Okay, if I want my kid to have success, then I’ve have to go into this system.

And then if I don’t like it, what do I do? I– there’s nowhere else for me to go to create this positive experience that I’m looking for.” And I just remember being like… I just felt like there was going to be another, like there was another way to do it, and then I got to the point where even for me, who has some knowledge and understanding of the way it all kinda works, I got to the point where that if my kids want to do soccer or they want to do basketball or whatever, I kinda have to be in this system.

And that’s where, again, the cage thing really got to me in terms of there’s really not a good alternative. Or you think about the Ball brothers, right? And what Lamar Ball did with them, right? What LaVar Ball did with them, and they weren’t maybe necessarily traditional, and he was doing things and sent LaMelo to Australia and whatever.

Went a different path, but the vast majority of us have to kinda go into that path and so that cage analogy really rung true for me

[00:21:16] Ken King: Yeah, and it brings to mind… I appreciate hearing that, ’cause it’s always nice to hear that I’m not just making things up. It’s though, though like I said before, the, the research was really guiding me in a lot of ways.

But it brings up two or three concepts from the book that I get asked about and I’ve… It’s– I’m actually shocked at the uptick on the book. I– when you put your ideas out there and you’re not a professional author like this, it’s surprising when there’s a lot of attention all of a sudden.

One of, one of the aspects that I get asked about a lot is “Is– aren’t these organizations just giving people, parents what they want?” And that, that is partly true, but the reality is that they’re creating this environment that isn’t a choice between two things. It’s paying or not playing in a s- well-structured environment.

And for any market to work effectively, there needs to be an exit, and exiting many sport environments right now is financially expensive or socially and emotionally expensive, or all three. And so it is a bit about what parents want, for better or for worse, but it’s also really taken away the entire structure of any other way but finan- but costly.

Another, another piece is kids make it. Kids, There are people lying, but there’s also people who aren’t lying when they say, “These athletes came through my program and made the NFL, made the NBA, made the MLB, m- made the NHL,” whatever the sport is, MLS. Th-they, th-there are examples, but it’s .2%.

And any system that works for two out of 1,000 and then charges the other 998 just for the privilege of funding everybo- that top 2% and maybe the person who runs it, there’s a name for that, and it’s the title of the book. And then the other thought that I have is that not, I guess not a thought.

People have said to me like, “So you’re just saying get rid of competitive sport. Get rid of intense competition, get like less elite.” And it’s like, no I coached at competitive levels for a long time. And when– in spending more than a decade at, in competitive sport and high performance sport I can say that competition alone isn’t the problem.

The problem is that we built one way to get to high competitive levels, or at least perceptively get to highly competitive levels, and removed all the other ways in. What I’m really arguing in the book is we need more ways to entry that aren’t always through pay-to-play, high-cost, over-training, all-encompassing non-multi-sport avenues.

Because right now, the average family thinks that the only way to get to high competition or quote unquote elite levels is through that one narrow, expensive, all-consuming path

[00:24:10] Mike Klinzing: And I think that speaks to something else that you talk about in the book when you discuss how rural clubs, and again, you’re talking about rural Canada and Canadian clubs that are closing, right?

Because they just don’t have the numbers ’cause people can’t afford to be able to do that. You think about urban centers here in the US, I think about basketball and the NBA, and if you look back over the history, basketball’s always been kind of a city game, right? It had that type of reputation that the best basketball is play- best basketball is played in inner city New York, it’s played in inner city Chicago, it’s played in inner city LA.

And now we’ve gotten to the point where socioeconomically, kids who live in those areas oftentimes are completely priced out of the opportunity to participate in the youth sports machine. They just can’t do it, and clubs who try to support them, obviously then if you’re talking about finding the financing to be able to do that when the individual families and parents can’t foot the bill for that.

And so you’re just, again, excluding this whole group of people in the pursuit of, again, funneling that money, as you said, funneling it to the very top of that elite, and we’re using everybody else to kinda get there. And it’s funny, when you talk to people in the basketball space here, and you look at a, an AAU tournament, or you look at an AAU club, or you look at travel basketball, there was a time where AAU basketball or travel basketball might have had one team and again, I’m old, 56 years old, and when I was playing in high school, there were two, quote, “AAU teams” in the whole city of Cleveland.

There was one from the west side of Cleveland. There was one from the east side of Cleveland, and those were the two teams. And so that’s probably the, whatever, 20 to 25 best players in the city, and those were kids who maybe were traveling not really very far at the time to find other teams to be able to play against.

And now every single kid who plays basketball in Northeast Ohio is playing on an AAU team, and there are 25 different AAU clubs that all offer all these things. And so you just, again, to your point, you’ve put everybody into this one pathway, and people don’t see how there can be another path to get to where they want to go.

And I think the point that you keep bringing up is we have to have an alternative so that if a kid wants to step out of that ultra-competitive situation, how can we still provide them with something so that they can continue to play? And again, it doesn’t matter if it’s basketball or it’s tennis or it’s hockey or it’s soccer.

Whatever it is, when you only create one pathway, that pathway is not going to be correct for every kid and every family, especially when you factor in then the costs on top of the situation with the actual participation in coaching, which we’ll get to.

[00:27:26] Ken King: Yeah. And I think that multi-entry point piece comes up when people ask me “Aren’t you just being nostalgic?”

Are, like, aren’t you even when you talk about it there’ll be people who listen to this and just say “Oh, like these guys just wish it was 1985 again.” They just don’t like that things have changed. And that’s not what we’re talking about here.

I’m not arguing that 1985 was better than now necessarily. I think a lot of people could argue 1985 was better in other ways, but not for sport. And I’m more arguing that the specific structure that got built between when I was younger, when you were younger, and now has a cost, and we can measure it, and it’s not just financial.

And it– I make that argument throughout the book. And if the numbers at any point in the research said I was wrong, then I wouldn’t have written the book, but they never did. And that those costs are very real, and that’s why the visual on the cover of the book is what it is, ’cause things look kinda nice in sport and on Instagram, and the best of the best are really making sport look great, and people are making money and that sort of thing.

But there’s a whole fracture happening underneath that is representative of problems throughout sport that is just simply not sustainable

[00:28:43] Mike Klinzing: Let’s talk a little bit about coach training and education, which is another thread that goes throughout the book. And one of the things that struck me, because it was always something that I felt like was important whenever I was coaching a team, and primarily at the beginning of my career, I was an assistant high school varsity basketball coach here at the community where I taught.

And then eventually, as my kids started playing sports, I stepped away from that and then started coaching their teams. And one of the things that you talk about in terms of evaluating a coach is how many of the kids that play on that coach’s team want to come back and participate and play again, whether it’s for that coach or just continue to play the sport.

And that’s really a great way to be able to evaluate a coach, right? It’s not taking that computer course, getting the certification, and, “Hey, I showed up, and I took the 10-question quiz at the end, and now I’m certified, and that means I’m going to do a great job.” How do we actually measure what kind of job you’re doing?

And I think the metric of how many of the kids that you coached this year are coming back to play again next year, there’s not a really much better way to evaluate how effective that coach is than that. So just talk a little bit about that coaching piece of it and why providing the kind of experience that makes a kid want to come back, why that’s so important, and why we get it wrong in the coach education business.

[00:30:29] Ken King: Yeah, and I think on this side, it’s important to understand that we certify coaches on what they know and hire them on w-what and how they played oftentimes, and neither one predicts whether or not kids will come back. And the reality is, if we’re just asking, “Were you good at the sport?” and then, “Did you attend the modules?”

we’re not actually bringing in coaches, whether we’re paying them or they’re volunteers by accident. We’re getting exactly what we put in the job description. I would challenge and America does this far better than Canada in terms of paying coaches at m-more levels. I’m not saying, I’m not saying they’re necessarily paid enough.

I’m just saying they’re getting paid. We have a lot more volunteer coaching in Canada than the States doesn’t, in basketball at least. And so when you– if you go look at a job description, the, the job description is very clearly assessing experience in those things, the, your education in coaching, your experience as a player, your experience as a coach, and very much not assessing the experience of your athletes when they played for you.

I’ve got s- I’ve got some athletes that absolutely hated playing for me, and in hindsight, they’re probably right to feel that way as I was trying to figure s-myself out as a coach. And so it comes to… there’s a section in the book where I talk about researchers comparing coaching assessments of their own effectiveness versus the athlete’s assessments of their effectiveness.

And the coaches the, the finding in that research is essentially that coaches consistently rate themselves significantly higher than their own athletes on pretty much every dimension which tells us a lot. If, and if those assessments mean anything, then the system will be fine. But the current system is, allows us to assess ourselves and tell other people by what we put on our resume, and it’s just not reliable.

And then people who are best placed to judge the environment that was created by that person are rarely asked whether or, and and their insight is rarely shared. And I’ll s- I’ll say one more thing on this front. I mentioned that we have twenty-five hundred coaches in, in the nonprofit I run here, and we have some coaches that played at high levels, elite levels.

I organize all the coach or education for all of these coaches. And we have some coaches that are Sally’s mom, and they’re coaching… we have some divisions that are seventy-five teams in a U-eleven division, and team seventy-four might just be Sally’s mom coaching it, and she never even played the game.

I can tell you right now there is zero correlation between whether or not the guy that played college for his entire career coaching U11 boys and Sally’s mom coaching U11 boys is going to produce that, that he’s necessarily going to produce happier athletes that return to play better than she is. In fact, anecdotally, a- as well as with the research I just referenced, It’s it’s a lot more time kids in particular enjoy sport more when the person doesn’t think they know everything, because then they’re so focused on making it joyful.

And you mentioned play, and we’ll probably talk about it again, but they actually get to play and have fun and laugh, and then they come back.

[00:33:54] Mike Klinzing: It’s so true, and I think it’s something that we forget. A lot of times we forget, especially at the younger ages, that the reason why any of us pick up a ball in any sport is because it’s fun, right?

We don’t pick up a ball when we’re six, say, “Man, I can’t wait to get to work and just grind away at this day after day so someday I can be great.” That’s not why anybody starts playing, right? You pick up a ball because it’s fun, and you’re with your friends, and you’re having a good time and that’s what it’s all about to start.

And I think that very quickly, adults and sort of the system, it’s pretty easy to suck all of that fun out of the game and just have it become something where you have to work to get better, you have to do this, you have to do that, and it’s all on this… I always say that there’s this eye on the prize of everybody’s always worried about the next thing.

When I’m in elementary school, I’m worried about what am I going to do when I get to middle school, and what AAU team am I going to be on? And then I’m in middle school, I’m worried about what’s going to happen in high school. Am I going to make the team? And then if I’m on the team, am I going to be a starter?

And then what’s going to happen by the time I’m a senior? And then while I’m a senior, I’m not worried about my senior year, I’m worried about what am I going to… Am I going to get an opportunity in college? And there’s always this idea of what’s next, as opposed to, hey, let me just focus on and enjoy where I’m at.

And I think coaches and the system contribute to those problems, and just in terms of the way that we go about handling all of those things. And I think that makes it difficult for, again, kids to have the kind of experience that we want them to have. And then another thing that you talk about to piggyback off this whole idea of the kids’ experience, oftentimes if you don’t have a good experience and you want to complain about the experience that you’re having to, again, if you’re part of a club you’re going to go and you’re going to complain, and the people who are involved in the complaint are the people who are controlling your playing time.

They’re a part of the organization that you’re complaining about. And so It never really works the way that it should in terms of making improvement. So talk a little bit about that piece of it, what you learned i- in the research about just the process of allowing somebody to have the ability to voice a concern and have that concern actually met and addressed.

[00:36:26] Ken King: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a great point because What people assume is okay, so we’re going to, we’re going to listen to all these concerns, we’re going to survey athletes, and then all our athletes all our athletes will talk about wanting more s- things that aren’t going to produce better performance.

Coaches will become pushovers. And I think it’s important to point out that the satisfaction-type survey thing that I was just talking about, whether they enjoyed themselves in the previous season, people will say that just awards likability and punishes high demands and high expectations.

But the, the reality is that when we use proper instruments, which I have a whole company that, that challenges survey data in many ways. When we use proper instruments, difficulty is not actually something that’s considered, or high standards or hard conditioning or honest feedback or losing your spot based on merit.

Because a very demanding coach can score well, and a coach that pushes can score well, and the best ones do. The best ones can push limits of athletes in a healthy way and produce results and still get athletes who really enjoy the experience, which is why it’s useful. I would argue that if you don’t want to talk to get-getting feedback from athletes, you don’t want to actually get that directly, you can just look at return rates.

How many athletes are back from that team? Just count. Just count the number. And so when you talk about the concept of sharing concerns, obviously, there are certain concerns that need to be shared immediately, but maybe we don’t even need as many open door policies, and we don’t need as many survey tools.

We don’t need as much of that stuff as just look at the return rate and the re-retention rate. We look at it all the time for apps people sell, the churn of the users of the apps. Why are we not looking at churn on s- in sport as at least a pretty solid indicator without needing to put them into these positions to approach the owner who’s also the best friend of the coach and built this whole culture?

‘Cause really what you just described is that really stable-looking top of the pyramid while people are trying to climb up the broken bottom pieces.

[00:38:37] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. It’s very true, right? And everybody has a different experience. I- it’s funny because, and you could probably relate to this, I have people come to me all the time and ask for my advice about, “Hey, what AAU program should I play with?”

Or I’ll have kids who are parents of a, a kid who’s eight years old or seven years old, and, “Hey, I’m just trying to get into this for the first time and trying to figure it out, and what should I do? And I’ve heard this, and I’ve heard about that, and this and the other thing.” And I always come back to that the most important thing that you can look at with an AAU program is not How many championships they’ve won or what their social media says or this or that.

It all comes down to who’s the coach? Do you feel comfortable with the coach? And is the coach going to be the best coach for your child? And again, a lot of people don’t even know what that looks like. And then to compound matters, oftentimes here in the US, you go to a tryout, you don’t even know who the coach is ’cause there might be six teams in your kid’s grade.

You don’t know who’s coaching them. You have to– Everybody wants to collect your money. So when you quote, “Make a team,” you have to put your $100 deposit down or your $150 deposit down before you even know who the coach is. And talk about walking into a situation blindly where things could go horribly wrong very quickly when you don’t know who it is that is going to be standing in front of your child for three or four hours a week coaching them in whatever sport it is.

And so I just always try to give people the advice like, “Hey, you have to try to find out who that coach is.” The organization is always to me a distant second in terms of some of the concerns that parents have, ’cause I just think that, again, you want that experience where the kid wants to come back.

And I thought you did a really good job in the book of just continuing to make the point of you want to create an experience where kids want to come back, ’cause so many kids are dropping out. And that goes to something else that you talked about, which I want to ask you a little bit about, is the specialization piece, which is something that we hear all the time, right?

And clubs want to push specialization because then instead of splitting their money for six months on basketball and six months on soccer, one or the other of those two sports can now capture that entire set of revenue if you’re going to us 12 months of the year instead of splitting six months here, six months there.

But your point in the book is when one of those experiences Doesn’t progress to the point where the kid, “Hey, I want to walk away from basketball at age 13,” or, “I want to walk away from soccer at age 13.” If I’ve started specializing since the time I’m seven or eight years old, now I don’t have anything else to fall back on because I’ve put everything…

I put all my eggs in this one sport basket, and now, again, it goes to that exit idea of if I’m exiting, I’m not exiting to another sport, I’m basically exiting sports altogether. So talk a little bit about what you found out in, in, in terms of your research there.

[00:42:01] Ken King: Yeah. One thing, one quick thought on the perception of clubs and teams.

You have something in the US that is I really appreciate as a Canadian when I visit, though I’m visiting less lately. Because you letter grade restaurants, and we do this weird thing in Canada where everybody’s just held to the A standard, but you guys will actually tell me if it’s a C- there you go … and let it exist. And we just don’t allow Cs to be open, but whatever. Ima- imagine for a second if we had the data and so- you, I, whoever, just ranked every AAU organization in the US based on retention Imagine how scary that would be for many of the organizations in youth sport if retention was the measure.

You get an A if eighty percent or more return every year. You also might get a C. And imagine if you took Canada’s approach to the restaurant side and only let As exist,

[00:42:56] Mike Klinzing: right?

[00:42:57] Ken King: The, In, in terms of the specialization piece, Canada and Sport for Life and we– in our country, we really lean on something called the LTAD model or Long-Term Athlete Development model.

If anybody’s hasn’t heard of it I suggest looking it up. It’s– there’s a lot of free resources on, on this front, and I can, I could talk, like this could be a whole episode alone, just sports specialization being a problem when we specialize too early in s- in many sports. Not all sports, but many.

Like there’s facts, like not disputed opinions, but facts like you are more likely to get hurt if you only play one sport year-round. Full stop, right? But I th- I think there’s systematic pieces to sports specialization that we also need to address. Like we can bang the drum all day about we need to let kids be multi-sport athlete.

And again, to come back to the nostalgia piece, like, “Oh, I played four or five different sports every year. I was never just playing basketball year-round.” Yeah, I guess we can have families make individual choices and individual change, but that doesn’t work, and it’s proven to not work in many aspects of a society.

And I can actually give an example that just happened in my organization. We just ran a development program trial this past Sunday for the top female athletes in Calgary. Female athlete retention in sport is obviously a huge focus for us, as it is many organizations. Being able to provide them opportunities is really important.

And so we run a program that’s specifically for, for female athletes to be able to develop in basketball here in the city. Our provincial body, with province being the equivalent of a state for everybody who’s not totally familiar with our structure, our provincial body ran a combine the exact two hours leading up to our tryout knowingly So what if those kids wanted to, I don’t know, rest, go for a walk with their dog?

Maybe they wanted to go paddle out on a lake. Maybe they wanted– maybe they were looking at trying out for volleyball for their school, and now because they did four or five straight hours of basketball on Sunday, they were too gassed to go to their volleyball tryout Monday.

Like there’s… When we talk about specialization, there’s a ton of layers, but man like the system and the organizations and the compartmentalization of organizations, everybody really needs to get on the same page of are you actually trying to help athletes maintain multi-sport lives longer?

Because I say we do that We work hard to do that systematically, but why is our own basketball provincial body forcing these athletes or creating a system or a situation where these athletes feel that they need to be on court for four or five hours in a tryout setting, which is exhausting when it could have just been another day, or we could have built something together.

There’s… So I guess without going deep down the specialization side, ’cause it, it truly is a, a huge topic that I would encourage everybody to look up the Long-Term Athlete Development Model and Sport for Life’s resources that they have. That’s not just because I’m going to France in a couple weeks to speak at their international conference either.

But it’s… if we really want multi-sport, it’s yes, there’ll be some education and individual change, and individual opportunities to keep kids as multi-sport. But w- systematically we really have to commit and we’re pretty far from that right now.

[00:46:30] Mike Klinzing: I would agree there. I think one of the difficulties that we experience here in the United States is you just have so many different people that have an organization that is a business that is trying to maximize their revenue, and so they’re offering this on this weekend, and this organization’s offering this on the same weekend, and this, and then you have kids that are trying to participate in one thing and another thing, and then you start factoring in when do we ever rest?”

And every single weekend, there’s multiple tournaments that teams could be playing in. There’s tryouts are on the same day. There’s all these different things, and I always use the word of everybody has their own little fiefdom that they have a hold of, and they don’t want to let it go, even when cooperating with another organization might work better, certainly for the kids, but it might even work better for the two organizations to instead of s- fight and squabble over the kids who are participating, instead if we work together, maybe we could service more kids, which might be better for our business, and we could also do it better in a way that would be more beneficial for the kids who are participating.

But it just doesn’t, it just doesn’t happen ’cause everybody is trying so hard to hold onto that little piece of business that they have. And look, don’t get me wrong, like I have a basketball camp business that makes money from running basketball camps. So I’m not opposed to people making money doing things in youth sports.

But I think ultimately what you have to do, and I think this is one of the things that your book does a good job of laying out, is you have to figure out what does that look and in the best interest of the kids and not just the very tippy top. How do we give lots of kids the ways to get into, how do we give them those pathways to get into sports?

And then you talk about the business models and how are they sustainable, right? And I know you talked a little bit about a few minutes ago in terms of the volunteer hours that coaches put in Canada, and obviously we have that in the US, but when I read that section of the book in terms of adding up the value of all those volunteer hours, if you actually had to pay someone even minimum wage to do all the things that they do as part of your organization, is that organization sustainable at all with that cost actually being a monetary cost instead of just someone who’s a volunteer their time?

And what I thought about is here in the US, one of the things that has always I don’t know if angered me, but that I’ve just never wrapped my head around is you show up for a tournament, and you have to pull a mom or a dad out of the stands to run the scoreboard and to run the score book. And so you have two people that if you were paying someone, whatever, each of those people would probably be making 15 bucks an hour.

So every game, that’s $30 that you’re basically, again, extracting from the families who have probably already paid to get into the game, to drive to the game, and then they don’t really know what they’re doing a lot of times, so then it’s– the job isn’t being done very well ’cause no one’s trained them except for the official coming over and saying, “Hey, do you know how to run the clock and this and whatever.”

That was always one of the things that whenever I would go to an AAU tournament, I would always sarcastically say to the officials when they would come over and be like, “Hey, did you have a parent to run the clock?” I’m like: “Oh, the tournament director doesn’t have anybody. Didn’t they hire anyone?”

And you start looking at the economics of how these clubs stay in business, and if you take away all those volunteer hours of people who are sitting at the table running the scoreboard, suddenly the economics of running a tournament looks a lot different. So just talk a little bit about that piece of it.

[00:50:30] Ken King: Yeah. So an important piece here is that sport is not a financially healthy system that just so happens to use volunteers. It’s an entire system whose cost structure is subsidized by unpaid or unpriced labor, and we’ve been– we’ve spent 30-plus years drawing down on that subsidy. We have an organization here in Canada that– called Statistics Canada, and you can imagine that they probably do a little bit of math.

And the– what they found was actually that when parents are involved or aren’t involved at all in s- youth sport, 24% of children participate. When mom and dad stay home, they don’t do anything. When parents are involved, even just as a spectator, even just watching, 62% participate, and when a parent coaches, officiates, or administrates, it goes up to 82% participation.

And I say all that because remember, we’re talking about sport as a society, so that’s a supply chain. Volunteers aren’t just unpaid labor. They’re the strongest predictor of whether the next cohort will play at all. If you lose your volunteers, you don’t just lose the work, you lose the children and the children of the families that watch them.

And so there’s really two numbers that belong in all reporting. And like I said before, retention is something that I would encourage families to ask about and seek out. But there are two more numbers that I can give to families: how many people participated and revenue per participant.

Because most organizations will report r- will report revenue or how much it costs, obviously, to be involved, but not the total amount who participated. And that matters because it predicts stability, but it also matters because you can really see the actual business model, and sta-stable revenue can mean two totally different things.

In one world, it means that participation grew and prices held. It made more money because more people are participating. In another world, participation dropped and prices rose to cover it. And only one of those models is a business. The other is a spiral or potentially more looking like a tub or a sink emptying as things just start to go down the drain, paying more and more to sustain a structure that was designed for a larger pool of people.

And so I’m not going to go all the way into the Roman levers because I do mention a bit about that in the book. But when we talk about… I’ll come back to a stat from Canada because we have a whole organization for it. Fifty-five percent of adults participate, and cost is the top reason why they don’t by about the rate of about another rate of fifty percent.

And the major reason for that is that when you become an adult, obviously you’ve got different financial obligations, but it’s also your general motivations start to drop. And so when we talk about specialization and being active or sporty or whatever you want to call it for life, we’re actually describing that second world I talked about, where participation’s falling and prices are going up and we’re going down the drain.

Because what does that look like in adults? It looks like adults that don’t participate because the prices are too high

[00:53:51] Mike Klinzing: And not only are the prices too high for the actual participation itself, but then you think about all the surrounding costs that go along with participating. So not only am I paying my club fee, but then I have to travel. I have to go and stay in a hotel. I have to factor in the amount of time that I’m spending, as you talk about in the book, the number of families that are just orienting their entire family life around the youth sports machine.

And one of the other things in the book example that touched a nerve with me too is the, I’m staying in a– I’m playing in a tournament, and now I have to stay in the tournament-approved hotel. And so this is a whole thing that I remember the first time I saw that, I was like, “This is this is unbelievable that we all are putting up with this.”

And again, it kinda goes to the fact of there’s no way to exit the system. If I’m going to play in this tournament or I’m going to do that, like you just kinda eventually get to this point where there’s nothing you do. Like my daughter’s AAU team this year went and played in a tournament, and one of the players did not book the hotel, her hotel through the tournament.

And in order to p- be able to play, she was not going to be allowed to play unless she paid $150 to make up for the fact that she was not staying in the tournament-sanctioned hotel. That to me is, that to me, Ken, is insane

[00:55:24] Ken King: Yeah. And like I said, the business model might work out for some, but you can’t fake the business model when you look at that cost amount to participants, cost per participant side.

The pay-to-play structure and the private equity, particularly in the US and sport, which I obviously came across many examples and many aspects of that is pretty alarming in general. And I’ve actually already had– I wouldn’t call it describe it private equity, but I would describe it as a group of people who s- make money, a fair bit of money off youth sport.

I’ve already had people offer me money to not keep selling this book because the, the book’s been out for a week and it’s and I’ve already actually been told “What do you think you’re going to make in the first year on this book? What if I beat that by this amount and you just take it out?”

It’s like if there was ever anything that’s going to convince me that this is, this, it’s worth keeping it up, it’s a conversation like that

[00:56:23] Mike Klinzing: That, that’s unbelievable to me. It’s not, but at the same time it’s crazy. And the private equity p- private equity piece is one that is very interesting.

It’s something that probably up until two, three years ago, I wasn’t aware that it was a thing, and then slowly over time, you start to see that, hey, this group that used to be independent, now suddenly I see that there’s this other sort of umbrella organization over the top of it, and the way that it gets rebranded and the way that it’s being run and all these things.

And it speaks to the idea of, again, the word that you use throughout the book is extraction, and I think it’s a good way of thinking about how organizations extract time, money, resources from the families and the participants that they’re a part of. And yeah, I don’t know where, I don’t know where that particular piece of it, where that ends, but you make a very good point about the amount of revenue that you’re getting per participant, right?

And as we shrink the number of participants, we have to increase the amount of revenue. In order for it to be a business, we have to increase the amount of revenue that we’re getting out of each kid who’s participating. And in, in the meantime, we’re driving away a large percentage of kids that would still like to play in some capacity, but again, they don’t have the avenues to be able to do that.

It’ll be very interesting to see how it continues to evolve in terms of the system. I want to talk about another thing that touched a nerve with me in the book, was your discussion about officials and just the alarming rate that officials are leaving the game. And I say this to people all the time when I’m sitting and watching a game I don’t know why anyone wants to do this and take the abuse that they take.

And I understand talking to officials and knowing some personally, the reason why they do it is ’cause they love the game. They want to stay involved in it. They want to give back, and it’s important to them, and I understand all that. And yet sometimes I look at the way that they’re treated and you think, gosh why would somebody want to do that?

And you give the story in the book, and I think it’s really instructive to just the whole experience of youth sports, no matter what the sport is, of We have to give officials who are underaged an armband to identify that they are not adults, that they are children, and then that is what causes adults who might normally, verbally or physically abuse an official to curb that behavior because, oh, I see that is an official who is under the age of 18.

And you make the point of, if we can regulate our behavior because there’s a visual reminder on the referee as they’re refereeing the game, that why can we not attack the problem from where the problem is? It’s not the fact that the referee should be identified as someone who’s under the age of 18.

Every referee, regardless of their age, should be treated in a certain way, and if they’re not, then us as an organization who’s put that official out on the ice or out on the court, we owe it to them to be able to defend them against that type of view- abuse. But that’s oftentimes not what happens. So describe how you went about talking to officials, what you heard, a- and some of the just things that we can maybe do or that you see as, as a way to be able to keep and retain more officials.

[01:00:09] Ken King: Yeah. And I mentioned my– one of my roles on the basketball side right now as we have our own referee organization of over 300 officials, some as young as 14. I think our oldest is in his 70s. They– We have a blue whistle program, so not the armband, but we color the whistle and sometimes give different jerseys.

And I’ll give credit on the hockey side to that because I think it was Eastern Ontario Hockey, an-another province that, that had almost half its officials under 18 and they put– they started the armband thing, at least in the hockey world. But the reality is that an organized sports system in a wealthy country, first world country, has concluded that grown adults will abuse children at y- at youth hockey games, youth basketball games, often enough to require intervention, and the intervention is to mark the children, not remove the adults To label the child so that we can accommodate the adult, right?

And so that’s really where it– I started to go down the road of can we… is there research-based or ideas out there that maybe instead of just trying to stop that part, then we start looking at what we do in terms of when something gets reported or when something happens? We will probably start to see that as a bigger deterrent than a colored armband ever would be.

Because you can’t recruit your way out of retention failure. You’re just refilling a bucket with a hole in it. And then and then finally somebody goes like, “Have you ever thought about plugging the hole?” It’s, it– and so I don’t want to minimize the abuse because officials have been screamed at, spat on, followed to their cars, harassed, assaulted but the abuse is the proximate cause not, but not the reason that they leave.

What we really need to get into our heads is that they aren’t quitting because of the abuse. They’re quitting because of the verdict rendered against the abusers, which is oftentimes not enough. There was a study in the Journal of Sport Management where they looked at seven factors on twenty-eight items across almost a thousand refs, and the largest single factor for referee retent-retention was administrator c-consideration.

And what that means is whether the administration treats you as though you matter. They’re not talking about abuse, and they’re not talking about pay. They’re talking about whether or not administration makes them feel like they matter. And in the underlying work, the officials named abuse as the most problematic and administrative issues second.

And when they were asked what they– what we could do to retain more of them, the most common answer was mentors, training, and supervisors. And hard punishments were also on that list for people who were guilty. Because the adults were always ca-capable of behaving differently. They weren’t confused.

They did not lack information about how to behave at a children’s game. They simply had never been given a reason to bother. So what we’ve done in Calgary Minor Basketball is we’ve increased punishments a lot. You can be banned from the organization indefinitely for abuse of an official in any form.

That a couple years ago, the bans went way up in a pretty much vertical shape, and then over the last two years have plummeted. We’ve gone from forty-eight percent athlete retention to now almost seventy percent– or sorry, referee retention to now almost seventy percent referee retention. And it’s because we punish harshly.

We’ve– And we’ve educated spectators and parents more. Education is a tool that we can use to be proactive, but then the punishment shows that the administration is invested in you, that we care about you. And like I mentioned in that study we want to show you that you matter even though something happened that shouldn’t have happened

[01:04:11] Mike Klinzing: I think it’s a huge…

it makes so much sense in this context because it makes sense in so many other contexts, right? If we let things go if we cater to the lowest common denominator of we’re not going to punish the parent who behaves poorly towards officials, even though we might have at the beginning 98% of our parents might behave exactly the way we would hope at a game, and that one or two parents Does something towards the officials, we don’t punish them.

Everybody else looks around and says either now maybe it’s okay for me to do that,” or there are other people who look around and say, “I don’t want to be around that.” And that’s what we’re talking about with officials. “I’m going to, I’m going to leave.” But even the parents, right? That either it emboldens me to do those kinds of behaviors, or if I’m a parent who doesn’t want to be around that, maybe I just take my money and my kid, and I go and hopefully participate in a place where we don’t have that.

And it’s a… Again, I think that works in business too, right? You have somebody that is a part of your organization that isn’t doing what they’re supposed to do. Everybody knows that they’re not a good employee, and if you just continue to look the other way, one of two things happens, or maybe two of two things happens.

The good people that are in your organization look and go, “I don’t want to work with this person. Let me get out of here and go work somewhere else.” And then the people that are there who stay, the standard just keeps getting lowered and lowered. And I think you make a great point about why are we labeling the kids who are officials and not holding the adults accountable for their behavior.

When you really stop and look at it, it obviously makes, it makes zero sense.

[01:06:00] Ken King: Yeah. And I don’t want to be– I definitely want to talk about some of the solutions and before the end of this, I want to make sure that people understand that it’s not all… the sky isn’t falling. But a first-year official doesn’t need a marker because everyone in the gym already knows what happens to adults who abuse officials.

If that’s our culture, if that’s… if we know someone who’s never allowed to watch their son or daughter play basketball again, that’s, that will create some change. But the good news is that we know we can create change this way because the identification is working, too. It’s just not right.

We know we can create change because people respond to the identification, but if people can respond to that, they can respond to education, they can respond to harsh punishment.

[01:06:47] Mike Klinzing: Correct. Absolutely. All right. And you made the point, and this is where I want to go next, and this is always an important part of this discussion to me is, like I said at the top, everybody is capable of listing the challenges, the problems, the things that they’d like to see be different.

Where people oftentimes struggle is, okay, I see that the system is broken. It doesn’t work the way that we would like it to But I’m not sure what I can do. I’m a parent, I’m a coach, I’m an organization, I’m a player. I don’t know what to do. This is the only system that I see. This is the only path that I can figure out to be a part of.

So I’m going to just throw it in your court, ’cause I know there were a number of things that you propose that are a part of how we move towards a solution. Pick out your favorite two or three things that you think are the most important, that as we look forward with where youth sports are today and to where we’d like them to get to, what are the most important things in your mind that you think that people who are listening should know about in terms of trying to reform youth sports a- and rebuild it in a way that it’s going to be more beneficial for everybody in the system?

[01:08:00] Ken King: Yeah. I-I’ll, I’ll talk really high level because I feel like if I share all these on anybody’s podcast, then nobody’s going to buy the book. That’s

[01:08:08] Mike Klinzing: right.

[01:08:09] Ken King: So I’ll be a little bit careful so people will still want to check it out. But yeah like I said, I don’t want to be all doom and gloom and you framed it really well that it’s easy to point out problems and not present solutions.

But one of the key themes in solution is to come back, and you mentioned it earlier, to the concept of play. Play is older than culture. There, there are multiple researchers who have shown that, that play isn’t something that civilized society has produced. We see animals do it. They’ve been playing forever.

If you have multiple pets, if you watch birds, they’ll play with each other. And basketball, because of the fact that play is so inherent or any sport really, is play– the play aspect is so inherent, will s- it’ll survive the collapse of our society. Because we’re not the custodians of something really fragile and ancient, right?

A hundred and sixty years is not that long when we talk about sport as a society. We’re essentially the current caretakers of an experiment into something that human beings will keep doing regardless. It’s– it– that– I want to frame it that way because it’s a much smaller job than maybe some people make it feel like.

And so there are things that are already building on this that are coming out organically. Run clubs, I mention one in the book in the UK. We’ve talked a lot about North America, but the UK has great established thing sports structures like run clubs and other things that allow people to participate without a fee, run by volunteers, no governing body, pretty loosely organized.

And the one I mention in the book went from thirteen people in two thousand and four to five hundred thousand people this past April. We also see a lot of pickup basketball and encouraging and having more of that happen or pickup sports in general. They don’t even know how many people came. They just– They’re– It’s just open.

A-a-and that concept of just opening a place to let people play is it gets tied up in liability and legalese and that really wrecks it. And so The fixes that I put in the book are actually, obviously in my opinion, but I’ve– a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten, very achievable. There’s establishing better exits and better exit pathways and better entry pathways r- that I talk about in the book.

But a lot of it can actually be a lot more simple. I-it’s rooted in anthropology of all things because across all of humanity, the most reliable check when something’s dominating has never been laws or rules or ethics or even things like good leadership. It’s the ability to walk away. It’s the ability…

if we shatter that cage that we talked about off the start, and if all we’re trying to do is make it so that not only is it easy to exit, but there are other pathways to get to where you want to go, or there’s other obvious and accessible pathways to keep participating, just not necessarily in this way, then that will move us forward a ton because you even talked about the cage being one of your fundamental visuals that you could really relate to.

If we can really work on that piece, it’s huge. And the analogy that I would use is that America, Canada, very similar employment law. Employment law protects the right to quit. It doesn’t create legislation that makes bosses be better. It protects the right to walk away, and the reason why that exit is protected is because that’s how something can maintain stability.

That’s how jobs and large organizations can maintain stability, because it’s actually because of letting people exit

[01:12:03] Mike Klinzing: All those are great points. And for anyone who picks up the book and reads it, you’re going to see that Ken has a large number of different solutions and things that you can do to right now today just to measure the effectiveness of your organization, to think about how your organization can grow and change, and make sure that you’re doing the things that you hope to be doing as a youth sports organization.

And then talking about the greater system-wide rebuilding and how we can make it, again, more accessible with more pathways in, more exits out, and more ability to get kids to be able to participate in. Ken, for me, when I got to the end of the book, one of the things that I thought about is that what we have to consider is that sports and physical activity are for everybody, right?

It’s not just… Basketball isn’t just for the 450 guys who end up in the NBA. Basketball is for the kid who’s eight who wants to have fun and play with their friends. And obviously, there’s lots of different levels in between, but we’ve created, again, one way that we can move through this basketball system, and it doesn’t matter if you’re destined for the NBA or you’re destined to be a kid who quits at age nine, you’re forced into this same pathway in, in a lot of different situations.

And again, as I got to the end of the book, I kept thinking about there has to be a way that serves the needs of everybody, and a way for everybody to be able to engage with basketball, or engage with hockey, or engage with soccer, or engage with running, or whatever it might be, and we have to figure out what those ways are that make sense so that we can have A scenario where people aren’t walking away at age 13, kids aren’t done with physically participating, because we know what the benefits are over the course of your life of physical activity, again, whatever that may be.

And it just felt to me as I got to the end, I thought, man I really can see what Ken’s vision is of what youth sports can be, what it could be. And in my mind, the utopia is anybody who wants to engage with a particular activity has a way to be able to do that. And again, there are lots of different solutions and things that you propose in the book, and there are probably a lot smarter people than me that have thought about it a lot and are trying to figure it out.

But to me, it comes back to how can we create a system where everybody who wants to engage with a particular activity can do that? And I think your book does a fantastic job of laying out the challenges that we face. And as I’ve said, too often we just end up listing a bunch of complaints about what we don’t like.

But then when it comes to finding solutions, people just throw up their hands and are like I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” And you go ahead and lay out a bunch of different solutions and ways that we can start to move this thing in a direction that’s going to be beneficial for everybody.

So kudos to you. Before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance to share how can people find the book? How can they connect with you? Share email, social media, whatever you feel comfortable with. And then after you do that, I’ll jump back in and wrap things up

[01:15:43] Ken King: All right. I do have another short soliloquy, but I promise I’m not going to push you into the too long to listen to podcast range.

But I just want to say that the game– our games are not dying. I said before, play is older than culture. If every organization that I talk about in this book or allude to or that you and I have discussed disappeared tomorrow, kids would show up to gym this Thursday and be inventing rules and arguing about them.

And really, the reality is that what’s dying is the machine we built on top of that. So it’s not our job to rescue it. T-the job is to make sure that what we build next is built better and built to liberty. And I want people to take away the fact that you don’t need permission for any of this. You don’t need a national body to agree or a specific grant or a strategy session.

You can pick one aspect, one number to measure that your organization’s never measured and add that in, and that would change a lot of things. And you can choose to add another exit to your organization at any point. And I’ll close on this before I do the part that my publicist will be mad if I skip and tell people how to get the book.

The dedication of the book says, “For my son and every other kid, the game we hand you should be worthy of what you bring to it.” When I was writing the book, when I was formally sitting down to write it, I actually started with that, and it became the concept of the whole book and my entire argument. With that being said, you can buy, as much as I talked about societies and and referenced the book Goliath, talking about all-powerful things, you can buy the book Pyramid Scheme on Amazon.

And it come, it comes in three versions on there, and the audiobook’s coming out soon. But what I also did is on my personal website, ’cause I’m not a professional author. I don’t have the setup for that. You can go to justkenking.com/toolkit, and I just put the toolkit that, that kind of encompasses the action items for everybody there.

You don’t need to get… it’s not… There’s no email list. There’s nothing to pay for. You don’t have to enter anything. You just download the PDFs.

[01:17:43] Mike Klinzing: Ken, the book is really well done, and for anyone in our audience who is interested in learning more about how we can make youth sports better, the book Pyramid Scheme by Ken King is one that you want to make sure that you pick up.

I would highly recommend going out and getting a copy. You will read it. You will be nodding your head. You will be shaking your head, “I can’t believe this.” But you will recognize lots of things that you have probably experienced, again, whether you’re a coach, whether you’re a player, whether you’re a parent.

Some of the things that Ken talks about in the book, I guarantee there will be multiple anecdotes that you’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I remember when that happened to me,” or, “Oh yeah, I can relate to that,” because that’s what kept happening to me as I was going through and reading the book. So again, Ken, thank you for taking the time to research the book and write it, and thank you for your time tonight joining us on the Hoop Heads podcast.

Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening, and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.

[01:18:50] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Hoop Heads podcast, presented by Head Start Basketball