What's happening to youth sports.
Walk into any community rec league and you'll hear the same conversation. Kids are leaving for club. Families are paying $3,000+ a year for a single sport. Weekends disappear into tournament travel. Coaches push 10-year-olds to specialize. Parents go along because falling behind feels worse than the cost.
The market has been consolidating for years. The same ownership groups run travel programs, tournament circuits, and the software those clubs use. The result for families is more cost. More travel. And burnout sets in earlier.
Kids are dropping out of sports at the highest rate ever measured. The ones who stay specialize too early. Multi-sport play, the most proven path to long-term development, has been quietly disappearing.
Why rec still matters.
Rec leagues are the antidote. They cost a fraction of club. Weekends stay yours. The kids on the team are the kids in your neighborhood. And because rec is built around availability, kids can play more than one sport. Multi-sport kids develop better, burn out less, and stay in sports longer.
Rec without the disorganization.
Drafts can be fair. Evaluations can be real. Teams can be balanced. Roster Raptor exists to make the league side of rec as clean and competent as anything a kid would experience at a club, without the cost, travel, or pressure.
Built for volunteers, not paid administrators.
Most platforms in this space were built for paid administrators. Fine if you have a paid staff. Frustrating if you're a volunteer board member doing this on a Tuesday night.
Rec leagues are almost always non-profits run by volunteers. The treasurer also manages registration. The program president also coaches the 12U Hawks. We built Roster Raptor for them: per-league pricing, sensible defaults, no features you don't need.
Sounds familiar?
We're building this with rec leagues, not just for them. If any of this sounds like the night you just had, we'd love to talk.