Extraction vs Investment

I have spent  my entire career bouncing between public and private education spaces. 

One of the contrasts that experience has helped illuminate for me is the the extraction vs investment mindset, evident in the way most conversations are framed. 

I’m confident my teaching background in American history also gives me that  specific framing. 

I’ve been sitting with that categorization lately, and how it applies to my work in athletics. 

Simply put, I think the biggest narrative arc athletics  has traveled in the last 50 years is from a community based, investment centered model to a mostly extractive model.

We went from centering an extra curricular activity focused on community building to “how do we leverage this for more revenue?” .

I want to be clear - Responsible decision making and fiscal challenges are real. 

So are the decades of social contract norms and implicit promises built around athletics. 

This polar framework is colliding everywhere within athletics. 

Collegiate athletics leveraged athletes for revenue in a way that undercuts all basic social agreements, then recoiled in horror that their revenue generating labor force also wanted to make athletics transactional. 

I remember when a small college administrator I worked with soft launched the idea that “some of these kids are making more than me” (which was very untrue, for the record). But - the spreadsheet was unbalanced, that administrator had to take student loans for his own college degree, and he refused to imagine a better economic exchange than that.

This extraction, comparison based narrative sums up where we’ve landed in college athletics. It’s also taken root as a guiding principle.

That idea became a common foundation on that campus. I then, when advocating for students, would often be met with the retort, “why don’t we do what’s best for the institution?”

I always struggled with this framework – how did we arrive at a polarized framework where what was best for students was almost always in conflict with what was best for the university?

Instead of “how can we offer the best experience”, the framework became “what is the most we can take with the least investment”. Simply put, this framework may  build resumes and improve columns in a spreadsheet, but it also functionally dehumanizes and exploits people.  

I would argue this infrastructure, now present in every corner and level of athletics, undercuts any ability to build culture of belonging in a non-transactional manner. It’s incongruent with the physiology, psychology, and sociology of the history of athletics. 

The data would agree. See the following data points:

• Journalist Linda Flanagan’s Take Back the Game documents how youth sports shifted from community-based participation to a high-stakes, high-cost competitive model that has created accessibility barriers, especially for lower-income families.  (Forward Pathway)

• Aspen Institute data shows the average number of sports kids ages 6-17 play regularly dropped 13% since 2019, a decline tied to increasing commercialization and pressure to specialize early.  (Project Play / Aspen Institute)

• Academic research on commercialized youth sport describes how businesses market “immaterial values” — turning youth sport itself into a product sold to families rather than a community good.  (Taylor & Francis)

No amount of personal relationships can undo the extractions framework once it find imbalance with investment – holistically, but also fiscally.

The other disturbing trend that’s emerged in athletics has been a disparate values proposition. 

Institutions, organizations, and leaders hold stakeholders to an investment mindset (how can you serve the mission, what are you getting out of it, how can you give a little more) while operating from a purely extractionist guiding principle (how much can I gain with the least I can give). 

They operate under an implicit power hierarchy - the institution they represent (and themselves by default) deserve one set of standards, and their stakeholders deserve another. 

The common rebuttal to naked profiteering that I’ve experienced is “how else do I protect the institution”?

 I’d actually argue that if you’ve arrived at that question, the time for that query has passed.

The better question has become “do we have an institution, leader or organization worth protecting?”

Once I saw that framework, I see it everywhere. I can’t unsee it, from horribly run youth sports event, to relentless self promoting coaches, to athletes who can  no longer give themselves over to something bigger than themselves - because theyve learned at every turn that selflessness will be exploited. 

If you, like me, are displeased with the reductionist mindset infiltrating and commandeering every level of athletics, I’m

encouraging you take a couple action items:

1. Use this question to interrogate your own leadership on a daily basis: “is this decision I am making based on extraction (what I can profit off of this decision) or based on investment (what does our community benefit off this decision). 

2. Try to never use the words “I” or “me” when addressing your team or any stakeholder. They have become subconscious triggers for our society as indicators as a participator in an extraction economy, and they act as small hits on your authentic credibility. 

3. Use this framework to gently remind your executive leaders that this tension will quickly insure an undercutting of all the things athletics is supposed to provide to young people. Whether they are engaging in breaking promises or not, an extraction mindset insures exploitation and misalignment with common athletic expectations and cultural norms. No amount of mental gymnastics or spreadsheets can justify this.

4. Offer this framework to your athletes. To take back athletics, we must restore the question “what can I give” to the center of it, and replace the “what can I take”, that currently dominates every corner.

Athletes are people.  The foundation and cultural expectations around them can never be fully commodified. Don’t turn them into profit and loss sheets. Athletics makes a promise to build community.

 If you can’t identify how to center that effort, don’t be in athletics. 

Create belonging. Watch what follows.