The Roots of the Youth Sports Gold Rush

This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.

Washington, D.C., has a higher median income than any state in the union, and yet I never really felt destitute until a rainy Sunday morning last May, when I booked my youngest kid’s seventh birthday party at the St. James, a sprawling luxury sports complex about half the size of Reagan National Airport, some 12 miles west of the Potomac River. At 8:30 a.m., not only was every space in the parking lot full, but every adjacent square inch of pedestrian walkway and grassy median strip was occupied by Rivians and BMW X3s. Adjacent the trampolines and the Ninja Warrior course, swarms of parents and grandmothers in $700 raincoats and $7,000 watches waited to stampede into assigned private rooms for their designated 90-minute play windows, while staffers set up pancake stations and $20-a-head taco buffets.

“Oh, it’s no problem, we’re here four nights a week so we’re used to it,” one of my son’s classmate’s dads replied when I apologized for the Darwinian parking situation. “Gymnastics, swimming, ice skating, and lacrosse.” Sounds like a second mortgage payment!, I marveled, as the dad, a small-restaurant owner whose daughter is easily two or three years ahead of her classmates in reading and math, gave the resigned laugh of someone who definitely did not have an extra mortgage payment to spare. “It’s not cheap!”

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He wasn’t alone. Strolling the hallways afterward, I realized there were hundreds, very likely thousands, of parents who veritably lived at the St. James, tapping away in noise-canceling headphones while their children partook of indoor batting cages and futsal fields, squash courts and basketball courts, climbing walls and diving boards and multiple NHL-sized hockey rinks with ingeniously designed raised viewing concourses, seemingly designed to feel like VIP box seating. Someone, I thought to myself, is getting so fucking rich off this place.

Steve Griffin experienced a similar epiphany nearly 15 years ago, when his 12-year-old son was beginning to display unusual talent for baseball. Somewhat by accident, Griffin is today one of America’s foremost experts on the financialization of youth sports, and he shared copious insights into the business practices of the private equity billionaire who bankrolled the St. James, to which I will return. But back in 2012, he was just one of those naïve middle-aged white guys who dared to wonder if he could somehow avoid becoming Detached Irritable Workaholic Dad and make money doing something fun, something that might even impress his kids.

GRIFFIN, A NO-NONSENSE CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT with an acutely honed bullshit detector and a native New Englander’s hardwired contempt for new-money extravagance, was a consultant who had honed a reputation as “the guy who got the call when something was going wrong at a portfolio company.” Then as now, America was swimming in newly minted billionaires, mostly men who had made so much money managing other people’s money they needed to hire other people to manage their own money. In his telling, he self-deprecatingly described his role as a “financial janitor.”

Griffin’s son’s team had missed its chance to go to the Little League World Series in Williamsport. But he got something else: a weeklong youth baseball tournament in Cooperstown, New York, where a man named Lou Presutti had built 22 baseball stadiums designed to draw tourists to the nearby MLB Hall of Fame. A few days later, someone affiliated with an outfit called Perfect Game, who had apparently been watching the games, called Griffin and suggested Griffin’s son come down to Jupiter, Florida, for an invitation-only baseball development program. “My jaw dropped,” Griffin told me. “There were hundreds of golf carts running around this massive sports complex, with college coaches driving from field to field to field to watch the next superstar.” Perfect Game played its tournaments in a stadium that was home to four minor league teams and spring training for the Miami Marlins and the St. Louis Cardinals—meaning Perfect Game did not have to purchase its own stadiums and make big capital expenditures, which appealed to Griffin’s fear of money-hole capital expenditures. “I thought, oh, this is an interesting business.”

He invested in Perfect Game, though he divested his stake a few years later when he got an even more promising opportunity: the chance to join one of the pre-eminent organizations in what would soon become a $40 billion youth sports industry.

“Hand in the cookie jar” syndrome has long beset youth sports.

The New Hampshire–based company was called Legacy Global Sports. Its charismatic founder/CEO John St. Pierre had a huge presence in two of the most demographically appealing youth sports—soccer and hockey—and an increasing foothold in the even faster-growing sport of lacrosse. On a good day, St. Pierre gave the impression he might be the John D. Rockefeller of youth sports.

Griffin thought this could be the kind of fun, profitable enterprise that could become a real juggernaut. So he invested in Legacy during its next fundraising round in 2017, which would be led by Jefferson River Capital, the family office of Hamilton “Tony” James, the chief operating officer of the largest private equity firm on Earth (Blackstone) and one of the best-connected men on Wall Street. Griffin joined the company as executive vice president of strategy, mergers, and acquisitions.

Yet within months, Griffin was suddenly told the company needed cash injections or Legacy might not make payroll. He was dumbfounded: One of the things he’d found most appealing about Legacy was that it owned no real estate or machinery of consequence, and customers paid for tournaments and summer camps well in advance. “The company should have been in a liquid position, but it wasn’t,” he said.

But Legacy’s finances were nothing like St. Pierre had suggested, as Griffin would later detail in a memoir. For starters, the company had been dramatically overstating its annual revenue on the basis of … vibes. The $100 million revenue figure they threw around was profoundly inflated, in part because some divisions of the company had substituted rosy forecasts and revenues for the real thing, Griffin claims. In reality, revenues were no greater than $55.1 million. None of the accounting systems of the dozen or so smaller companies Legacy had gobbled up had been integrated, and most months, Legacy didn’t even provide a full set of financial statements. Ultimately, Griffin would determine that “a business that we thought [generated] $8 million or so of EBITDA … was really not generating any free cash flow at all.” All this had gone undetected because prior investors never demanded a formal audit, he said.

Griffin began to work long hours to stop the bleeding. As he recalled in two books on his Legacy Global experience, a “novel” and subsequent follow-up memoir, sometimes he would even work all night. By late November 2018, the board had fired St. Pierre and installed Griffin as CEO to clean up the mess. This made him one of Legacy’s few employees who stayed in the office after business hours, which is how he first noticed a woman with bleach-blond hair and aggressive makeup who would sometimes arrive at the office as late as 6:00 and leave after nothing but a cigarette break. He was told she worked in accounts payable, had young children and a messy divorce, and to let it slide.

Within a year, the FBI came knocking at the door.

“HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR” SYNDROME has long beset youth sports; most leagues are still tax-exempt nonprofits, though that requires far more public disclosure than private equity. Every few weeks, a youth sports league official in some county or another is arrested for embezzling from angry parents; in 2019, a travel baseball team official in New Jersey was arrested for robbing a bank to repay $6,500 he’d stolen from his team. But as money and financial expertise has flooded the sector, the scams have gotten bigger and harder to prosecute. Last fall, USA Today documented a complex scheme uncovered by a volunteer hockey mom whereby Colorado youth hockey authorities were allegedly siphoning money into shell companies owned by the board chairman. USA Hockey eventually pushed the chairman and an associate out of their positions; the chairman was later found liable for civil theft, unjust enrichment, conversion, and breach of fiduciary duty, though that’s currently under appeal.

Such amateurism is an important part of private equity’s thesis of investment in youth sports properties, Griffin explained on a 2021 podcast appearance. Youth sports was “the Wild West,” Griffin said. “We thought there was an opportunity to come in, invest capital in a business that could serve as a platform across multiple sports, elevate the experiences for the consumer … [build] appropriate back office infrastructure to operate the business more efficiently … and simultaneously see a good investment financially … but also [better satisfy] a consumer that deserves more value.”

One model for this is Varsity Brands, a private equity–backed cheerleader-turned–monopolist that rolled up well over a dozen cheerleading camps and tournaments, uniform and equipment suppliers, and professional associations and sold it to Bain Capital for $2.5 billion. But as the world was just beginning to learn, the Varsity Brands success story was not about efficiencies or economies of scale: The company was in the early stages of a litigation tsunami stemming from alleged blatantly anti-competitive conduct and failure to police coach sexual abuse.

Griffin was also beginning to realize travel sports were not particularly “scalable.” The ratio of “customers” to coaches, referees, and field or rink hours is relatively immovable; subsidies, sponsorships, and apparel discounts are often easier to come by with a tax exemption and volunteer staff. Although “professionalizing” Legacy would prove an eye-opening intellectual journey, it also came at a cost: a lawsuit filed by St. Pierre against Griffin, Jefferson River Capital, and the board that fired him at the end of 2018 accused the private equity firm of ballooning overhead by $18 million from 2018 to 2019. (St. Pierre declined to comment for this story, citing the terms of the eventual lawsuit settlement.)

In Griffin’s defense, a seven-figure chunk of that increased overhead went to the various law firms and crisis advisories retained to grapple with the fallout of an FBI raid of the Legacy Global soccer division in October 2019, not long after the board voted to fire St. Pierre. It turned out that the division, which Legacy had acquired via a Boston-based company called Global Premier Soccer (GPS) in 2016, had been operating a massive labor trafficking scheme that dated back as far as 2012, and the Department of Homeland Security finally moved to shut it down.

GPS was the brainchild of two brothers from Northern Ireland with accents that seemed to grow more exaggerated among bigger crowds. The elder brother, Joe Bradley, had captained the Harvard soccer team and still nursed a bit of a chip on his shoulder from his formative years among the super-elite, but the combination of pedigree and brogue was the perfect balm for parents desperate to enroll their sons and daughters in extracurricular activities that might yield future status dividends.

In the early days, recruiting foreign coaches to run kids’ summer camps that might have been staffed by American teenagers was a marketing ploy. As American soccer star Alexi Lalas told The Guardian for a 2014 story on Bradley’s burgeoning empire: “US soccer is littered with decades of people coming over with little more than an accent to their resume, and using the naivete we’ve had and the inexperience and lack of soccer history and culture to their advantage.” But by that point, the naïveté of the coaches was a bigger problem than the soccer moms: twentysomething soccer fanatics in Barcelona and Belfast could easily be convinced that coaching suburban third graders in Brookline or Cape Cod was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Once in America, the coaches quickly learned that the opportunity was not so glowing. According to allegations in The Guardian and anonymous job sites like Glassdoor, GPS housed them in cramped apartments, forced them to work long hours, and paid them meager wages. Most insidiously, they were enlisted as part of a set of elaborate immigration schemes regarding the nature of their business in the United States.

“There were a lot of very sketchy practices with visas,” one British former Global Premier coach told The Boston Globe. “At the time, you’re not entirely sure it’s above-board, but you go with it anyway because you want a job.”

Steve Griffin wrote two books based on his experiences with private equity–backed Legacy Global Sports and Global Premier Soccer. Credit: Tony Luong

Different visas required different schemes. H-2B visas are for temporary jobs if a company doesn’t have enough U.S. citizens to fill roles—obviously not the case in youth coaching. But the most brazen lies governed the coveted P-1 visa, which entitled coaches to stay up to five years, so long as they could convince DHS they were actually being recruited to work as “talent scouts” for professional soccer teams. This required, in addition to a script reminding applicants “DO NOT TAKE YOUR GPS CONTRACT WITH YOU” to the embassy, the collusion of at least seven teams, including an indoor franchise then called the Syracuse Silver Knights and two women’s professional teams, the (now-defunct) Boston Breakers and (since-renamed) Sky Blue FC, the latter of which was co-owned by Goldman Sachs veteran Phil Murphy, who had been inaugurated as the governor of New Jersey just ten months before the raid. In reality, the coaches would not scout for the teams at all; they would just fan out across the country to work for GPS. The British coach told the Globe that he was instructed never to tell anyone that they were soccer coaches, even though that was their primary job.

The Breakers alone gave more than 70 scouting visas to GPS/Legacy coaches before the team folded in 2018; Sky Blue applied for at least 40. Griffin found multiple internal Sky Blue emails detailing the scheme to Murphy, who offered “good luck” to his team before a 2016 meeting to discuss the arrangement with an immigration attorney. Murphy, now out of office, did not respond to a request for comment. (Murphy did not respond to requests for comment on the allegations.)

GRIFFIN HAD BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH EARLY-ONSET Parkinson’s disease after joining Legacy. When the company finally collapsed amid the COVID-19 shutdowns, his doctor convinced him to start journaling his ordeal, to “transfer the experience from the emotional half of my brain where trauma resides, to the intellectual half where catharsis happens.” For two months, he woke before dawn, brought his laptop to the beach, and typed out everything that had just happened. He changed all the names except those of his wife and children and self-published it as a “novel.” A portion of the proceeds went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit founded in the 1990s to “train” parents to behave less counterproductively during games, which has since broadened its mission to include grappling with the various crises plaguing youth sports.

St. Pierre’s wife sued him pro se for defamation; the case was dismissed. But in increasing volume, former Legacy and GPS employees, customers, coaches, and even coaches’ mothers contacted him, according to his memoir on the topic. One former coach told him GPS had a doctor who helped them falsify staff and players’ vaccine records. He also told him that coaches had to pay for the gasoline used in company-owned cars, submit receipts for reimbursement, and would receive only 75 percent of the expense.

One night, Griffin watched the movie Spotlight and realized something: He had read a 2015 newspaper article about the shutdown of a GPS sleepaway camp in Western Massachusetts following a bad health inspection. Among the infractions, the camp could not supply criminal or sex offender background checks. He realized that if coaches had been brought to the country illegally and steps had likely been taken to conceal their roles, it was very unlikely they would have been subjected to background screenings. Griffin looked into it. He found people brought into the country who were never screened, then found several of them had allegedly abused children. A few months later, Christy Holly, a longtime GPS coach, was fired as head coach for the Racing Louisville women’s soccer team following numerous allegations of inviting players to watch game footage with him, then groping them each time they “fucked up.” (The National Women’s Soccer League gave Holly a lifetime ban on coaching; he denied some, but not all, of the claims.)

By 2025, the estimated annual revenue of the youth sports business had doubled from its pre-pandemic size to $40 billion.

Griffin kept spreadsheets, timelines, and detailed notes documenting all these new revelations in hopes it would prove useful to the Department of Justice investigation; all that happened was the COO pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit visa fraud and a single other employee pleaded guilty to destroying records in connection with this investigation.

Meanwhile, the youth sports gold rush continued apace. During the first two years of the pandemic, Murry Gunty, a private equity acquaintance of John St. Pierre and boss/owner of one of the three creditors who sued to force Legacy into Chapter 7 liquidation, more than doubled the physical size of his burgeoning mid-Atlantic hockey empire, variously known as Black Bear Sports and Blackstreet Capital Holdings. (In 2024, he acquired St. Pierre’s own ice arena in Exeter, New Hampshire, for an undisclosed sum.) A Massachusetts upstart called 3STEP Sports with funding from the Fertitta family scooped up about a dozen youth sports franchises, including Seacoast United, a regional league associated with the Bradley brothers. When Legacy folded, 3STEP’s founder David Geaslen could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I feel bad … for everyone who … will never see their money again,” he told The Boston Globe. “But every single kid who played for a Legacy program is going to be playing for somebody else.”

By 2025, the estimated annual revenue of the youth sports business had doubled from its pre-pandemic size to $40 billion, despite a modest decline from pre-pandemic participation levels. At the same time, any parent who could still afford to shell out a second mortgage payment for travel soccer/taekwondo/speed skating after COVID was more determined than ever to do so, because the specter of screen addiction was orders of magnitude more terrifying than the thought of not getting into a respectable college. Family spending on youth sports rose 46 percent from 2019 to 2024, and parents are running GoFundMe campaigns to get their kids to that Little League tournament in Cooperstown.

Thanks to the Legacy debacle, federal investigators began contacting Griffin for help demystifying financial frauds, all too many of which have involved youth sports. There was, for starters, a dubious deal to build a $284 million complex in Mesa, Arizona, called, of all things, “Legacy Sports Park.” A father-son minor league baseball duo had somehow convinced taxpayers to approve nearly $300 million in municipal bonds for the complex, then failed to generate enough cash to make a single interest payment. The developers claimed to have secured a ten-year lease with Manchester United, an iconic team that was most certainly not going to set down its first physical American roots in Mesa, Arizona. Griffin assisted in determining the lease provided to sell investors on the deal was a forgery. The owners pleaded guilty to fraud last year, and the complex was recently sold to a private equity–backed Philadelphia investor named Mike Burke for $25.5 million, or roughly one-tenth what it cost taxpayer-subsidized bond investors to build.

“The thing about fancy sports complexes,” Griffin told the Prospect, “is that they are exactly like stadiums: No matter how successful they are, they never seem to generate enough cash to cover the cost of building and maintaining them.” So the institutions involved in developing or controlling them need to get some sucker—ultimately, you and me—to shoulder that expense. Some, like Murry Gunty and Mike Burke, buy ice rinks on the cheap from county park authorities and recreation commissions, then torment customers with rent hikes and junk fees, like the up to $50 “streaming service” to which Gunty’s Black Bear Sports required parents (including a U.S. senator) to subscribe if they wanted to view video of their kids’ games, until called on it by The Lever.

This brings us to Todd Boehly, the multibillionaire MAGA donor and fellow Miamian who co-owns Chelsea FC, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the awe-inspiring St. James Sports & Wellness Complex, to which I shelled out a grand or so on my kid’s birthday party. Boehly pioneered the fine art of using insurance premiums to fund risky private equity investments at Guggenheim Partners; now he controls a $74 billion annuity and structured settlement empire called Eldridge Industries that he can leverage to finance boyhood retirement fantasy purchases, only by virtue of the fact that Eldridge has walked up to the line of state insurance regulations. (Boehly did not respond to request for comment.)

There already may be signs not all is financially well at the imposing St. James: Another private equity–backed youth sports conglomerate, Total Package Hockey (TPH) Academy, recently sued it for breach of contract and poaching one of its executives to be the “chief academic officer” of the new online school the complex is now offering to child athletes too serious about sports to attend traditional school, a business model that is for some reason all the rage in the youth sports business. A glance at the TPH website promises that student athletes will log in to daily lectures on “Defining What It Means to Be a Great Teammate” and “The 9 Core TPH Way Principles for Aspiring Elite Student-Athletes” while becoming “holistically connected in the TPH Performance App, a tool that allows for wellness, commitment, and performance to be tangible and measurable,” while also hearing from frequent guest speakers “across a range of disciplines (sports, business, leadership)” and even gaining access to extracurricular activities “such as investment club or public speaking skills development.”

It’s almost enough to make you pine for the days when the purpose of travel sports was supposed to be a college education, or even the joy of the game.