Take Back the Game
How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids' Sports and Why It Matters
Take Back the Game by Linda Flanagan (2022) — A journalist and 19-year coach follows the money through a $40 billion youth sports industry and shows how it rebuilt childhood around performance.
Reviewed by Ryan Vet · Last updated
What is Take Back the Game about?
Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection, and at their best they insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Linda Flanagan argues that kids in competitive organized sports are now more likely to burn out or pick up an overuse injury than to build character or healthy habits, and she traces how an industry grew up around parents' anxiety about their children's futures.
Is Take Back the Game worth reading?
Read it if…
- You have a child in organized sports and the schedule has started running your family
- You are trying to decide whether travel sports are worth it
- You coach, run a league, or set policy for youth athletics
- You want the economics behind the youth sports boom, not just the complaints about it
Skip it if…
- You are looking for a training or recruiting manual. This book is about the system, not about getting your kid recruited
Ryan's take
Linda is the rare critic who is not arguing against sports. She competed as a runner for most of her life and coached high school cross-country and track for 19 years, and that is exactly what makes the book land. Her case is that the system quietly swapped a participation model for a performance model, and that families are paying for it in money, in time, and in the everyday things a child used to do at home. The finding that stuck with me: the more money parents spend on a kid's sport, the less the kid enjoys it and the more pressure they feel. Linda joined The Ryan Vet Show on August 24, 2026 to walk through how it happened.
What others are saying
“I think Take Back the Game is a profoundly important book. Every parent needs to read it.” — Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History
“In Take Back the Game Linda Flanagan offers us solutions and actions to help take back sports for our children, to return it to a powerful yet positive experience. Any parent with a child should read this book.” — Kara Goucher, two-time Olympian runner and author of Strong
“This book is for anyone who has ever found themselves spending entire weekends at youth soccer events and asked, ‘Why?’” — Mackenzie Dawson, New York Post, “Best books of 2022”
Where Ryan has discussed this book
Parents now spend an average of 3 hours and 23 minutes a day on their kids' sports on game and practice days. Journalist and 19-year coach Linda Flanagan follows the money through a $40 billion industry and shows what families give up without ever deciding to. Linda Flanagan: Take Back the Game, Private Equity, and the $40 Billion Youth Sports Machine Frequently asked questions about Take Back the Game
What is Take Back the Game about?
It is Linda Flanagan's account of how youth sports became a $40 billion industry, and what that did to kids and families. She traces the money, the tournament and travel economy, and the college-admissions incentive that pulls parents in, and she argues that competitive organized sports now burn kids out more reliably than they build character.
Who is Linda Flanagan?
She is a journalist and researcher who competed as a runner for most of her life and coached high school cross-country and track for 19 years. She is a founding board member of the New York City chapter of the Positive Coaching Alliance and has written on youth sports for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Runner's World, NPR's MindShift, and the Aspen Institute's Project Play.
Is Take Back the Game anti-sports?
No. Flanagan's argument is that sports are good for kids and that the current system gets in the way of what makes them good. Her fix is more local, cheaper, lower-stakes play for more children, not less play.
Books like Take Back the Game
Publication details
- Publisher
- Portfolio (Penguin Random House)
- Published
- 2022
- Pages
- 304
- Format
- Hardcover
- ISBN-13
- 9780593329047
