No Tryouts, No Travel, Just Play: Philadelphia Organizations Offer Youth Low-Stakes and Low-Cost Chance at Sports
- Hermes Falcon
- Jun 27
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 1
By Eyitemi Odusola, Alanna Nicholson, Piper Mangold, Gabrielle Garcia and Natalie Spina
June 27, 2025
Youthcast Media Group®
On a Tuesday evening 12 years ago, Graham Bailer stepped onto the field at Capitolo Park in South Philadelphia as a parent volunteer, hoping to introduce his toddler to soccer with a small group of neighborhood kids. As his daughter grew up playing through Capitolo Youth Soccer Club, the casual grassroots league expanded, too.
More than 300 children now play through Capitolo Soccer six days a week, and the league’s mission of providing low-cost recreational soccer has remained steadfast: Team composition changes each week, the competition remains friendly, and it never costs more than $30 for a child to play each season.
“We just wanted to have fun on Tuesday nights, and then the next thing we knew we had 30 kids, and then we had 50 kids, and then we had 100 kids,” said Bailer, the club’s volunteer president.
Capitolo Soccer offers an alternative to the pay-to-play model most youth sports follow, making sports more accessible for children in Philadelphia. Participating in youth sports has become increasingly expensive for families across the country, who now spend an average of $1,016 annually for a child’s primary sport — 46% more than 5 years ago, according to the Aspen Institute’s latest Project Play survey. In addition to the costs of registration, traveling, equipment, and other fees that pile up throughout a season, other challenges like transportation, limited fields and resources, and extreme competition can add to the barriers that keep youth from playing sports.
But organizations like Capitolo Soccer are working to keep more youth playing sports by lowering costs and pressure on players, aligning with a broader effort in the city to invest in youth sports.
Inactivity among youth is common in Philadelphia. In 2023, only 37% of high schoolers in Philadelphia played on at least one sports team — about 15 percentage points lower than the national average–and one in five high schoolers had not engaged in physical activity in the previous week, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s High School Youth Risk Behavior Survey. As of 2019, only one in five of the city’s youth met physical activity recommendations, according to a University of Pennsylvania study.
Youth who are not physically active may miss out on the physical and mental health benefits of exercise, including lower rates of disease and death, body strengthening, cardiovascular endurance, enhanced attention, improved memory and an overall decreased risk of depression.
“It makes my happiness go up more when I'm running around and playing soccer,” said Logan Bailer, Bailer’s now 16-year-old daughter who provided the inspiration for joining Capitolo Youth Soccer Club.
For some Philadelphia families, high upfront costs and expenses that arise throughout the season are enough to hinder children’s participation in all types of sports. But financial aid and low-cost programming can help.
Alisson Ochoa-Lopez, 16, a sophomore at Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School, experienced this firsthand as a competitive cheerleader. She recalled her family spending roughly $3,000 per year for a season that only spanned a few months. Her cheer team did not offer financial aid, and her father often had to work overtime to cover the costs, she said.
“It was pretty expensive when you add up the uniform cost, competition cost, makeup cost, all that,” she said.
Alisson switched to club volleyball in early 2025. Her parents initially hesitated to let her play due to the price, she said. But she joined the team after receiving about $750 in financial support from her club.
“I was, like, 90% sure that I wouldn't play volleyball until I asked for financial aid and it was given, and that's what allowed my parents to accept the offer,” she said. “If it weren't for that, I wouldn't have played.”
Keeping the price tag out of the equation is key for Street Soccer USA (SSUSA), which focuses on providing programming in neighborhoods where at least one-third of residents live below the poverty line. SSUSA’s Philadelphia chapter offers free coaching and games to about 600 children at a dozen sites across the city. As of March, Street Soccer USA was among 44 organizations in Philadelphia that had received funding from the Philadelphia Youth Sports Collaborative (PYSC) as part of a $3 million investment by the Mayor’s Office to improve access to youth sports in an effort to reduce violent crime.
Among other locations, Street Soccer USA collaborated with PYSC to provide programming at James Finnegan Park in Southwest Philadelphia. Becca Fagan, PYSC’s chief program and evaluation officer, said she saw that as evidence of the difference sports programming could make for neighborhood children. At the national level, 92%of SSUSA participants saw improvement in social-emotional learning and 20%saw improvement in math and language art proficiency.
“I think youth sports creates a space where a community is built, peer to peer,” Fagan said.
Finnegan Playground is just one underused space that Street Soccer has helped transform for gathering, playing and building community relationships for players in the organization’s Philadelphia programs, said Shankar Sriram, a SSUSA coach who oversaw 25-30 kids at Finnegan Playground in the fall of 2024.
“A lot of these communities don't have safe places for these kids to play,” said Sriram, who is also a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. “When we come in and identify these areas and convert them into Street Soccer spaces, it gives parents a lot more confidence.”
Street Soccer USA’s benefits to players extend beyond the pitch. Older children who graduate from the program become coaches for younger kids, and Street Soccer encourages adults to participate in pick-up games after youth programming ends. The organization also hosts events to promote community building.
“We could see that the kids have a sense of community and friendship, but it also translates to the parents and the community members,” Sriram said. “They get to understand who the other people are, they're able to form a community together.”
The sense of community is also strong within Capitolo Youth Soccer Club. At Capitolo Soccer, practices include age-appropriate drills for players ages 3 to 13 — from the youngest “tykes” exploring the grassy field to scrimmages for school-age children. Four- and five-year-olds explore how their body and the ball interact; older elementary and middle schoolers play organized games starting at age 8; and preteens and teens help coach younger kids through the club's junior coach leadership program.
Logan Bailer often helps her father as a coach for the younger children in Capitolo’s programs.
“The point is not to get good at soccer,” she said of coaching. “The point is to get them to keep wanting to come back to soccer.”
When Graham Bailer expanded the intramural program, his goal was to extend the benefits as generously as possible to neighbors and anyone interested. Costs remain low, partially because of leadership decisions he has made, including offering registration for $30 per player, relying on parent volunteers, and volunteering his own time. He spends about 40 hours a week organizing programming and communicating with volunteers, without financial compensation — a model he said is not sustainable.
"For this to move to the next generation, we will need to entice somebody to either do it for free, as I have, or come up with a fundraising strategy," he said.
For now, costs remain low and engaging kids in movement is still the goal. Practices, games, and other events are all hosted at Capitolo Park — eliminating travel burdens — and players only receive new jerseys when they outgrow or damage their old one.
“In our society… we put winning as the metric of how well you're doing,” Graham Bailer said, and clubs are too quick to cut kids from teams because of it.”
Bailer said that’s why he doesn’t care about winning.
“I love instilling the need to keep trying and the need to come back from losing, and the need to be a good sportsman — win with grace, lose with grace.”
Eyitemi Odusola is a rising senior at Philadelphia High School for Girls, Piper Mangold is a rising junior at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), Alanna Nicholson and Natalie Spina are rising seniors at CAPA, and Gabrielle Garcia is a rising senior at Julia R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. They were participants in a Youthcast Media Group reporting workshop and worked with journalist-mentor Sarah Meehan on this story.