- [Father] I don't know where I would be without youth sports.

They provided the foundation for my childhood and helped me become the man I am today.

Now I'm the father of a young boy who just started playing sports and the landscape of youth sports is a lot different from when I grew up.

There are more opportunities and more awareness about the risks, but also more pressure and more cost.

- [Speaker] Most people think it's just the game.

It's not the game, it's the lessons.

It's the things that correlate directly to life that sports can provide.

- [Father] I found out pretty quickly that there was a lot to learn, so I spoke to doctors, coaches, and other experts about the new realities of youth sports and how parents can best properly prepare their kids and themselves for experiences that could have lifelong impacts.

I also learned how coaching has changed over the years.

- [Speaker] It was a wild West.

Coaches basically could do as much as they could handle.

We did two a day every day, and Monday was a three a day.

Now we know so much more about the risk and how to minimize 'em.

- I want the kids to be physically active, right?

And I think there's some element of kind of balancing the risks and benefits because what I don't want 'em to do is sit at home playing video games, get diabetes, end up with heart disease, and have much worse problems than a bad knee.

- [Speaker] There's gonna be contact for sure and different levels as you progress through will have more contact and harder contact actually.

And so that's, you know, something to prepare our kids for.

- [Speaker] I learned that disparities still exist.

- [Speaker] The lack of quality coaches a lot of these organizations have, and I don't blame necessarily the organization for having a lack of quality coaches because a lot of these organizations don't have the funding to have quality coaches with quality training.

- [Speaker] Some parents think, well, if I sign my kids up for a sport when they're six, then it's gonna be, you know, super intense and they're gonna lose their childhood.

Try to make it fun to help kids learn at an early age that sports, physical activity, is something to look forward to.

Expose them to lots of different sports, like try something one season.

If they like it, great.

If not, then try something else.

- [Speaker] Although much has changed since I was a kid, the spirit of youth sports still strong as ever.

As it should be, everybody's youth sports journey is a little bit different, but there's still so much we can learn from each other.

So join Dorian and myself as we set out on our own youth sports adventure and make our own game time decision.