Here's a number that should change how you think about your families.
The Aspen Institute's Project Play initiative found that parents of youth athletes spend an average of more than three hours per day on their child's sports participation. Not three hours per week. Per day. That includes driving to and from practice, waiting during sessions, traveling to games, washing uniforms, managing schedules, coordinating carpools, packing gear bags, and the dozen other invisible logistics tasks that keep a kid in organized sports.
Three hours a day. That's 21 hours a week. That's a part-time job. And for families with multiple kids in sports, it's closer to a full-time one.
Most directors have never thought about their program from this angle. They think about the hour of practice. The 90 minutes of the game. Maybe the 15-minute drive. But the family's experience extends far beyond the time their child spends on the field. It includes everything that happens before, during, and after, and all of it shapes how that family feels about your program.
A family that feels like your program respects their time stays for years. A family that feels like your program devours their time, even if the kid loves it, eventually hits a breaking point. And when they leave, they won't say it was the time. They'll say the schedule didn't work or their kid wanted to try something different. But underneath, the calculation was simple: this costs our family too much life.
Understanding the full time burden your program places on families isn't about guilt. It's about empathy. And empathy, turned into operational decisions, is what separates programs families endure from programs families love.
The Invisible Hours
Directors see the scheduled hours. Practice is 5:30 to 6:30. The game is at 10 AM. That's the time commitment as far as the program is concerned.
Families experience something completely different.
Practice is 5:30 to 6:30, which means leaving the house at 5:00, which means starting the homework-dinner-gear-packing scramble at 4:15. The parent who works until 5:00 is either leaving early, arranging alternate pickup, or sprinting through traffic hoping to arrive before warmups end. After practice, it's back in the car, home by 7:00, bath time, finish homework, bed. The "one hour of practice" consumed the entire evening.
The Saturday game is at 10 AM, which means arriving at 9:30 for warmup, which means leaving at 9:00 if the field is close or 8:15 if it's across town. Younger siblings come along because there's no other option. The family packs snacks, chairs, a blanket for the baby, a charger for the teenager's phone, and enough patience to survive a two-hour morning on a field with no shade and no bathrooms. The "90-minute game" is a four-hour family event.
And that's one kid in one sport on one day. Layer a second child's practice on Tuesday and a tournament that eats all of Sunday and you've consumed an entire family's weekend and three weeknights before anyone's had a chance to do laundry.
The families navigating this aren't complaining. Most of them genuinely love watching their kids play. But there's a cumulative weight that builds over months and seasons. And the programs that never acknowledge it, that operate as if the only time that matters is the time between the first whistle and the last, miss the full picture of what they're asking families to give.
The "Second Home" Tipping Point
There's a phenomenon that happens with families who are deeply embedded in a youth sports program. The facility becomes a second home. The other families become a second community. The rhythm of practices and games becomes the organizing structure of family life.
When this happens positively, it's powerful. The family looks forward to Saturdays. The parents have friends on the sideline. The younger sibling has a pack of other younger siblings to run around with. The program doesn't feel like a time burden. It feels like a place to be. The hours stop registering as a cost and start registering as an investment in something the whole family values.
When it happens negatively, it's suffocating. The family feels trapped in a schedule they can't escape. Every weekend is spoken for. Family dinners don't exist during the season. Vacations require permission from the coach. The parents are physically present at the field but mentally exhausted, going through the motions because their kid loves it and they don't want to be the ones who pull the plug.
The difference between positive second home and suffocating second home is not how much time the program requires. It's how the program treats the time it takes.
A program that takes three hours of a family's evening and makes every minute feel purposeful, welcoming, and worthwhile creates loyalty. A program that takes the same three hours but wastes 45 minutes of it on a late start, a disorganized practice, and a coach who didn't plan the session creates resentment. Same time investment. Completely different emotional return.
Respecting Time Is an Operational Decision
Families can't articulate what "respecting time" means. But they feel it instantly. And it comes down to a handful of operational choices that are entirely within a director's control.
Start on time. This sounds absurdly basic, and it is. But programs that consistently start practices and games five or ten minutes late are communicating something specific to families: your time isn't valuable enough for us to honor. A family that rushed through dinner, battled traffic, and arrived at 5:28 to watch their kid stand around until 5:42 has just learned that urgency flows in one direction. Over a season, those lost minutes compound into a feeling that the program doesn't have its act together.
End on time. The practice that runs 15 minutes long doesn't feel like bonus coaching to the parent sitting in the parking lot whose younger kid has a bedtime in 30 minutes. It feels like someone else deciding how their evening ends. Respect the clock. If the session was supposed to end at 6:30, end it at 6:30. The families who need to leave will be grateful. The ones who can stay will appreciate that you asked rather than assumed.
Minimize dead time. The minutes between arrival and the start of activity. The time between games at a tournament. The gap between when warmups could start and when they actually do. Dead time is where the time burden becomes acute because the family is present, committed, and getting nothing in return. Programs that structure transitions efficiently, that run warm-ups promptly, that communicate tournament schedules clearly so families aren't sitting around for 90 minutes between games, are programs that families feel good about even when the total hours are high.
Communicate schedule changes as early as possible. A practice moved from Tuesday to Wednesday with three days' notice is manageable. The same change with 12 hours' notice is a logistical grenade. Families have built their entire week around the published schedule. Every change forces a cascade of rearrangements. The earlier you communicate, the more time families have to adapt without stress. This is one of the simplest ways to demonstrate respect for the time your program demands.
Consolidate when possible. If a family has two kids in your program, scheduling their practices back to back at the same facility instead of on different days at different locations is a decision that saves that family four hours a week. It costs you nothing except the willingness to think about your schedule from the family's perspective rather than purely from a facility availability perspective.
The Waiting Parent Problem
Here's a reality that most programs ignore entirely: parents spend a staggering amount of time waiting.
Waiting during practice. Waiting between games. Waiting for the coach to finish talking to the team. Waiting in the car in a parking lot because there's nowhere to sit and it's too far to go home and come back.
For programs that run practices at facilities with no seating, no wifi, no coffee shop nearby, and no other families to talk to, the waiting is dead time in the purest sense. The parent can't do anything productive. They can't go anywhere useful. They're just parked, burning an hour they'll never get back, twice a week, for twelve weeks.
You can't eliminate waiting. But you can influence the quality of it.
Programs that create welcoming sideline environments transform waiting from dead time into social time. When parents know other parents, when the sideline has a culture of conversation and connection, the hour of practice becomes an hour of community. The parent isn't burning time. They're investing it in relationships that make the program feel like home.
This is where the time burden conversation connects directly to belonging. A parent who spends three hours at the field and experiences community during that time has a completely different relationship with those hours than a parent who spends three hours at the field alone. The time is identical. The experience of the time is not.
Some programs get creative. A parents' coffee at 8 AM before Saturday games. A designated parent area with chairs and a canopy during practice. A text to parents of younger teams: "Practice runs until 6:30. The coffee shop on Main Street is five minutes away if you want to grab a cup and come back." Small gestures that acknowledge the reality of what you're asking families to give.
The Saturday Conversation
Tournament culture deserves its own honest conversation.
An all-day Saturday tournament asks a family to surrender their entire weekend day. For many families, this is fine a few times per season. It becomes a problem when it's every weekend. When the family hasn't had a free Saturday since September. When the younger sibling has been dragged to fields for three months straight and is starting to dread it. When the parents realize they haven't done anything as a family that didn't involve a folding chair and a cooler since the summer.
Directors can't eliminate tournaments. But they can be thoughtful about frequency and honest about the ask. A preseason communication that lays out the tournament schedule and says "we have five tournament weekends this season, here's when they are, and the remaining weekends are game-only with no all-day commitments" gives families the ability to plan. They can protect the open weekends. They can mentally prepare for the tournament ones. The burden is the same. The feeling of control is different.
Programs that stack every weekend with commitments and then wonder why families burn out by February are missing the most basic element of the time equation: families need space. Not just during the week. On the weekends too. A program that builds breathing room into the calendar is a program that families can sustain for years instead of surviving for months.
The Question That Changes Your Perspective
Here's a exercise worth doing before you set next season's schedule.
For every practice, game, and event on your calendar, ask: what does a family's full day look like on this day because of our program?
Not just the hour of practice. The whole day. The preparation. The drive. The waiting. The return. The impact on dinner, homework, bedtime, and the rest of the family.
When you see the full picture, you start making different decisions. You start the 6 PM practice at 6 PM instead of 6:10. You consolidate siblings' schedules where possible. You communicate changes earlier. You think twice before adding a sixth tournament weekend. You build a few open weekends into the calendar because you recognize that families need room to miss your program a little.
None of these changes compromise your programming. They just acknowledge that the hour you see on the schedule represents three hours in a family's life. And treating those three hours with the same care you bring to coaching is what makes families feel like your program gets it.
The programs families love for decades aren't always the ones with the best coaching or the most wins. They're the ones that felt like they understood what it costs a family to be there, and they made that cost worth it, every single time.
Ian Goldberg is the GM of Signature Media and the Editor of the largest and fastest growing sports parenting newsletter. He's been recognized as an industry expert by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, the US Olympic Committee's Truesport, and the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Ian is also a suburban NJ sports dad of two teenage daughters and has over 2,000 hours of volunteer time coaching them (which he calls the most fun form of R&D for his newsletter content). Ian and his team provide players, coaches, parents and program directors with the articles and content they need to have a great sports season. Ian has spent most of his career in digital product development and marketing and got his start at the White House where he worked for the economic advisors to two US Presidents.
