The number that stopped me was not the one I expected. It was not 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. What I kept asking was not how much it costs to be left out. It was how much it is worth to be included.
That $693 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 is a real burden. For families managing disabilities, adaptive equipment, and programs that are harder to find and more expensive to run, that number is not even close to the full picture.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Disability and Health Data System, 2023
I have been building Able Athletics with my family since 2020, when it started as a single lacrosse program in a backyard in Westchester. We have grown since then. More than 1,215 athletes served across programs, volunteers from over 16 school districts. In all of it, the thing I keep thinking about is not what we have done. It is what the data says about what happens when a program like this exists versus when it does not — and what it is worth to the families, the healthcare system, and the community when it does.
What I have seen firsthand is that the kids who benefit most from adaptive sports are exactly the ones most likely to never access them. Families who have already spent years navigating IEPs, expensive therapies, and insurance rejections face another wall when they go looking for a sports program their child can actually participate in. The cost is not just registration. It is equipment, transportation, specialized support, and the overhead every adaptive program carries because nothing about running one is standard. But behind all of that cost is a return that nobody has bothered to measure at the program level. That is what I intend to change.
There is a child I think about when I frame this question. Not a future Special Olympics athlete. Someone with higher support needs whom most programs quietly turn away. What does it produce for that child, that family, and that community when a program figures out how to say yes? That is the question this research is built to answer.
Introducing The Return on Inclusion
In the spring of 2026, I began an independent economic research study to quantify exactly that. It is called The Return on Inclusion: A Social Return on Investment Analysis of Adaptive Youth Sports Access. The framework I am 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 Data collection is underway this summer, with findings to be published on the Able Athletics website before fall.
There is a great deal of research on the benefits of sports for children with disabilities. Genuinely good research. The problem 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 no one has built the translation layer between them. That is what SROI does when it is done rigorously. The output of this study is not an advocacy document. It is a financial analysis — with primary data, documented methodology, peer-reviewed benchmarks, and a ratio that either holds up to scrutiny or it does not.
What I want to build is not a number for its own sake. It is a number that means something to the people allocating capital and makes inclusion harder to deprioritize.
What the Research Already Shows
I spent time going through the literature before starting this project and there is 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 children with disabilities. It is not a thin evidence base. It simply never comes together in a form 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 does not exist — at least not at the local, replicable program level — is a translation of those outcomes into dollar figures that withstand scrutiny from a financial audience. That is what this study is designed to produce.
How the Study Works
The research proceeds in three phases, drawing on primary survey data collected from Able Athletics families alongside published health economics benchmarks.
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1
Primary Data Collection. Families of Able Athletics athletes complete a structured survey capturing direct spending, therapeutic substitution, parental labor recovery, search costs, and caregiver wellbeing before and after joining the program.
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2
Financial Modeling. Survey data is combined with peer-reviewed benchmarks (CDC physical inactivity costs, BLS wage data, Holt-Lunstad social isolation research) across five value streams, with deadweight and attribution adjustments applied per SROI Network methodology.
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3
SROI Ratio and Sensitivity Analysis. Social value returned per dollar invested, plus scenario modeling to test how the ratio holds under pessimistic assumptions. A finding that survives a 20% downward sensitivity adjustment is a finding worth publishing.
I will be direct about what I do not know yet. I do not know what the ratio will be. That is the point. I have a strong prior that the return is significant — everything I have seen over six years of running these programs points in that direction. But a prior is not a finding, and a finding is what actually changes how capital gets allocated.
Why This Matters Beyond Able Athletics
We apply for grants constantly. It is part of running Able, and I have watched it closely enough to understand the core problem. The work is not hard to defend once someone has seen it. Translating it for someone who has not, in terms they can act on, is where the gap lives. This study is my effort to close that gap — not just for Able Athletics, but for every adaptive sports program making the same case to the same funders with the same missing piece. The SROI model and dataset will be released publicly so any organization in this space can use the framework. More to come.