By Nolan Livsey
Who's actually in your corner? Not who's coaching you. Not who's training you. Not who's recruiting you. Who's actually thinking about your whole career, on the field and off it. Ask most young athletes that question and they can't answer it, because almost everyone around them, however well-meaning, has some stake in the story.
Every travel ball program, high school program, and every other youth sports organization sells the same thing: the emphasis on college, and for some, pro. Kids are sold on the idea of what their future could hold while pursuing a sport. And why not pursue it? It gives a person direction, integrity, commitment, and teamwork skills. There are real, lasting benefits to playing a sport long term.
There isn't a small industry sitting behind the dream. American families now spend more than $40 billion a year on youth sports, and that number has grown 46% just since 2019, according to the Aspen Institute. A competitive travel baseball family alone spends somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 a year just on travel and lodging, before a single hitting lesson, strength session, or private coach gets paid.
And the odds most of those families are chasing are a lot longer than the ecosystem lets on. Only 12.4% of high school baseball players go on to play in college at any level, and just 2.3% ever reach Division I, per NCAA-sourced data. Of the athletes who do make it all the way to the NCAA, the NCAA's own numbers say 98% “go pro in something other than sports.” That's not because anyone's lying about the odds, it's just not any single program's job to sit a family down and say it plainly.
Almost the entire industry around a young athlete is built around a shot that almost nobody actually gets.
The cost of that shows up early. About 70% of kids quit organized sports altogether by age 13, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the two biggest drivers behind that are overscheduling (kids stretched across multiple programs and coaches year-round) and pressure from the adults around them to measure success only by outcome. That's what happens when a kid gets scattered across five disconnected specialists, each one measuring “success” by their own version of it, with nobody responsible for seeing the whole athlete.
That's where a recruiter actually fits, not as another specialist competing for the same hour of a kid's week, but as the one person whose only job is the whole picture. I'm not trying to replace the hitting coach, the strength coach, or the program. I'm the person who sits above all of it with the athlete and asks the questions nobody else in that room is positioned to ask: what actually fits this specific kid, what timeline makes sense for them, which of these voices should carry the most weight this year, and what their career looks like if the ball doesn't bounce their way. That's not a knock on anyone else involved. It's just a role nobody else in the room can hold, because everyone else in the room has their own program to run.
In my experience, I wasn't always sure of the next steps in my own playing career, and I know how much that uncertainty costs a young athlete when nobody's fully in their corner. That's the gap I want to close, starting as a recruiter working directly with families, and eventually with my own training center that pulls every piece of this together in one place: on-field development and off-field guidance, under one roof, with one person who actually knows the athlete's whole story. I want the same place an athlete works out at to be the same place they can walk up and talk to someone about their actual career. I believe that vision exists.
Former collegiate pitcher, coach, and now a recruiter and advisor. Nolan founded NSAC to make sure athletes have someone thinking about the whole career, not just the next deal.
