Playing the Wrong Game
The Incentive Problem
Most club directors I know want what’s best for their athletes. Ask any of them privately, and most will tell you some version of what coaches have believed for years: kids who play multiple sports through their early teens tend to develop better, both as athletes and as people. Fewer overuse injuries. More transferable skill. Longer careers. Less burnout.
Now ask what their organization actually does. Many of those same directors run programs that quietly reward families for doing the opposite: single-sport travel tracks starting at ten, showcase circuits that punish athletes for taking a season off, schedules that make multi-sport participation logistically impossible by design, not by accident.
Healthy organizations don’t drift away from their mission because people stop caring. They drift because the incentives shaping daily decisions quietly stop pointing where the mission does. They’re not making bad decisions. They’re playing the wrong game.
This isn’t a hypocrisy problem. Nobody sat in a boardroom and decided to work against what’s best for kids. It’s a design problem: the quiet, structural kind that never shows up in a mission statement, but shows up every year in the budget.
The Incentive Map
Mission: Develop young people.
Incentives:
Parents → Positioned for future opportunities
Coaches → Winning, this season
Directors → Predictable enrollment
Boards → Growth
Business model → Year-round participation
Recruiters → Current performance
Outcome: Earlier specialization.
Organizations rarely produce the outcomes they intend. They consistently produce the outcomes their incentives encourage.
Nobody intended that outcome. Nobody voted for it. It emerged because the incentives quietly aligned around it, each one reasonable on its own, all of them pointing the same direction once you stack them up. Incentives don’t need bad intentions to produce bad outcomes. They only need to be stronger than the mission in the moments decisions get made.
Incentives rarely announce themselves. They don’t appear in mission statements or strategic plans. They show up in what gets celebrated, funded, measured, rewarded, and repeated. Over time, organizations begin doing more of what those systems encourage, not because people stopped believing the mission, but because they’re responding to the environment they’ve created.
Early specialization is simply one example of a much larger pattern. Once you begin looking for incentives, you’ll notice the same dynamic shaping coaching evaluations, roster decisions, communication with families, scholarship chasing, pricing, and dozens of other organizational choices.
The research on early specialization matters. But this article isn’t really about the research. It’s about why organizations often struggle to act on research many already accept.
The answer is in the incentive map, not the research
A travel program that runs eleven months a year produces more reliable revenue than one that takes summers off. A showcase circuit that features year-round events keeps recruiters engaged and keeps players playing. A coach measured on this season’s win total, with players’ scholarship chances riding on current performance, has no structural reason to advocate for a player spending August somewhere else.
Every one of those decisions makes sense from the viewpoint of the role that made it. None of them were made because of a directive that said “we’re prioritizing revenue over development.” They were made by reasonable people responding, one decision at a time, to what their role actually incentivizes.
None of this is easy. Payroll still has to be met. Coaches need work. Facilities have to stay full. Financial sustainability isn’t the enemy of the mission. The challenge is designing a business model that strengthens the mission rather than slowly replacing it.
Zoom out
This is the pattern I keep running into, across nearly every organization I work with: the gap between what a club believes and what a club does is almost never a people problem. It’s an alignment problem.
Healthy organizations don’t consistently produce better outcomes because they have better people. They do it because they’ve designed systems that make the right decisions easier to make.
What alignment actually requires
Mission statements don’t change behavior. Systems do.
Organizations become aligned not because they write better mission statements, but because they redesign the systems that shape everyday decisions. If your mission says one thing and your incentives reward another, the incentives will eventually win.
Organizations with greater financial flexibility have greater freedom to align decisions with their mission. What those systems actually look like, and how clubs can redesign them, is a conversation for another issue.
Where this leaves you
The next time your organization makes a call that doesn’t sit quite right, whether it’s a policy, a track, or a program you’d never defend if a parent asked you to justify it from first principles, resist the urge to ask who made a bad decision.
Ask instead: what behavior did our system just reward? The answer to that question often reveals more about an organization’s future than the decision itself.
Questions for Leaders
If an outsider watched our organization for one season, what would they conclude we truly value?
What behaviors are we consistently rewarding?
Where are those rewards strengthening our mission?
Where might they be quietly competing with it?