The Parent Problem
Youth sports software is built for the Player on the field. The most valuable user is the Parent in the parking lot.
Our twelve-year-old daughter Mila plays club soccer for Minnetonka United in Minnesota. In four years on the team, she has never opened the team’s app. Not once. Mary and I are the ones checking the practice schedule on Playmetrics, reading the messages from her coaches, tracking the tryout and game dates. The app has Mila’s name on it. It has never had her attention.
This is the small version of a much bigger problem. Youth sports software has a Parent problem.
The Parent is the mother. The father. The aunt. The grandmother picking the kid up from Tuesday practice because Mom is working late. The Parent is the person paying the club fees and driving to the tournament and sitting in the hotel lobby at 6:47 AM waiting for breakfast before the first game starts at 8:00.
The Parent is the most valuable user in the entire stack and almost every piece of youth sports software treats her like a secondary account.
I have looked at the back end of a lot of platforms. The Player gets the primary profile. The Coach gets the primary login. The Director gets the admin dashboard. The Parent gets a checkbox that says parent and an email address in a field.
This is backwards. The Parent is the one who writes the check. The Parent is the one who decides whether the kid plays next season. The Parent is the one who reads the email, forwards the schedule, posts the highlight to the family group chat, and tells the other parent at work about the club.
If you lose the Player, you lose a seat. If you lose the Parent, you lose a family, and the Parent will tell six other Parents why.
The youth sports industry has optimized the product for the Player and the go-to-market for the Parent and it has not yet noticed how strange this is. The Player does not open the app. The Parent opens the app. The Player does not read the email. The Parent reads the email. The Player does not pay the subscription. The Parent pays the subscription.
And yet the software does not know the Parent. It knows her email. It knows her credit card. It does not know which games she actually attended. It does not know which highlights she saved. It does not know whether she shared the stream link with her sister in NYC. It does not know whether she re-upped because she wanted to or because it was easier than canceling.
Every platform I know has the same blind spot here. They measure player engagement. They should be measuring Parent engagement. Because the Parent is the retention engine of the entire youth sports economy.
And the platforms have it backwards on time as well. They build for the season. Fall registration. Spring tournament. Summer camp. The Parent does not think in seasons. The Parent is watching her eight-year-old start something that may run for the next ten years and is making decisions on that horizon. The platforms that win will be the ones that treat the Player as an athlete starting a career, not a customer inside a season. That posture changes what retention actually means. You stop selling the next sign-up and start building the relationship that produces the next decade of sign-ups.
The clubs that build for this win. The club that picks software made for the Parent, communicates like the family is the customer, and treats the relationship as a ten-year arc retains. The club with a bad parent experience loses players even if the players love it, because the Parents are the ones who sign up next year.
Platforms have the same opening, on a bigger scale. The platform that treats the Parent as the primary user and the Player as the jersey on the court will, I think, quietly eat a lot of share over the next five years. It will feel like the platform is winning because of its streaming quality or its registration flow. It will actually be winning because it finally talked to the person who was paying with their attention and their wallet.
A lot of products in a lot of industries have figured this out. Consumer fintech figured it out when they stopped treating the actual customer as a secondary signer. Education software figured it out when they finally built the parent portal. Healthcare is still figuring it out, and it shows.
Mary is in the parking lot right now waiting for Mila’s practice to end. The team app is open on her phone. It knows her name. It knows her email. It knows her credit card. It thinks she is here for the schedule. She is here for the ten years on the other side of it.