What Is a Child's Opportunity Worth?
Introducing Priced Out of Play

The number that stopped me wasn't the one I expected. It wasn't a disability metric or a healthcare figure. It was $693, the average annual cost for a child to play one organized youth sport in the U.S., more than double what it was ten years ago.

That figure comes from the Aspen Institute's State of Play report, which also found that families earning under $75,000 are nearly three times as likely to have kids who play no organized sport at all.¹ Cost, more than interest, more than geography, more than anything else, is what keeps children on the sideline. For most families, that's a real burden. For families managing disabilities, adaptive equipment, and programs that are harder to find and more expensive to run, $693 isn't even close to the full picture.

I've been building Able Athletics with my family since 2020, when it started as a single lacrosse program, Able Lacrosse, in a backyard in Westchester. We've grown since then. More than 485 athletes served across programs, volunteers from over 16 school districts. And in all of it, the thing I keep thinking about isn't what we've done. It's what isn't getting done everywhere else, and why.

What I've seen from personal experience is that the kids who need adaptive sports the most are exactly the ones most likely to be priced out of them. Families who have already spent years navigating IEPs, expensive therapies, and insurance rejections are then hit by another frustrating financial wall when they go looking for a sports program their child can actually participate in. The cost isn't just registration. It's equipment. Transportation. Specialized support systems. The overhead every adaptive program carries because nothing about running one is standard. The insurance premiums required to cover a twice-vulnerable population, youth and people with disabilities, run higher than typical sports programs by a wide margin.

There's a kid I'm thinking about when I ask this question. Not a future Special Olympics athlete. Someone with higher support needs whom most programs quietly turn away. What does it cost society when that kid never plays? And what is it worth when a program figures out how to say yes to him?

Introducing Priced Out of Play

In Spring of 2026 I'm starting a research project to try to answer that. It's called Priced Out of Play, and I'm running it under the mentorship of Ashvin Viswanathan, CFA, at Wilmington Trust and board member of Able Athletics. The framework I'm using is Social Return on Investment (SROI), a methodology developed by Social Value International for translating social outcomes into financial terms that institutional funders, policymakers, and grant-makers actually use.²

There's a lot of research on the benefits of sports for kids with disabilities. Genuinely good research. The issue is that almost none of it makes it into the rooms where funding decisions actually get made. A program director and a foundation officer are usually solving for completely different things, and nobody's built the translation layer between them. That's what SROI does (or can do) when it's done right.

What I want to build isn't a number for its own sake. It's a number that means something to the people writing the checks and makes it harder to say no.

What the Research Already Shows

I spent time going through the literature before starting this and truthfully, there's more than I expected. The Journal of Disability and Health and Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly have years of research on the physical and psychological effects of structured sport for kids with disabilities. It's not a thin evidence base. It just never comes together in a way that travels outside academic circles. Special Olympics' research across more than 1.5 million athletes in 190 countries points to diminished healthcare utilization and stronger long-term social integration.⁴ The federal Physical Activity Guidelines have an entire chapter on youth with disabilities stating that regular physical activity reduces anxiety and depression, improves sleep, and builds the cognitive and motor capacities that carry into academic performance and adult independence.⁵

What doesn't exist, at least not at the local replicable program level, is a translation of those outcomes into dollar figures that withstand scrutiny. That's what I'm trying to build.

How I'm Going About It

Three phases. First, stakeholder mapping: identifying who benefits from what Able Athletics does and documenting what actually changes in their lives, using athlete and family surveys, interviews with school partners, and program data going back to 2020.

• 1
  Stakeholder Mapping and Outcome Identification. Who benefits, and what changes for them. Athlete and family surveys, school partner interviews, and six years of program records.
• 2
  Monetization and Evidence Review. Assigning financial proxies to each outcome using QALY benchmarks, healthcare cost offsets, and special education expenditure data sourced from peer-reviewed literature. Every number needs a citation.
• 3
  SROI Ratio and Sensitivity Analysis. Social value returned per dollar invested, plus scenario modeling to understand where the return is strongest and where it's more conditional.

I'll be honest. I don't know what the ratio will look like yet. That's the point. I have a strong sense that it's significant since everything I've seen over four years of running these programs points that way. But a prior isn't a finding, and a finding is what actually changes minds.

Why I'm Doing This

We apply for grants constantly. It's just part of running Able and I've watched it up close long enough to understand the problem. The work isn't hard to defend if you've seen it. Explaining it to someone who hasn't, in terms they can actually act on, that's the hard part. This study is my effort to solve that. More to come.