Building a Culture of Safety in Youth Sports, Hosted by Buying Sandlot

Ask any youth sports operator about safety and compliance, and you'll hear the same thing: everyone wants to do the right thing, but the system makes it extraordinarily hard to get there.

That was the central theme of our recent panel discussion hosted by Buying Sandlot, featuring industry leaders across the youth sports landscape — including our CEO Seth Lieberman; Meredith Thompson, Senior Director of Health and Safety at Unrivaled Sports; and Wally Orlov, President of Lower Merion Little League and operator of Big Show tournaments and Steelyard Sports.

The conversation revealed a stark reality. Whether you're running 200+ programs across a state or 1,600 teams in a single community, the challenges are remarkably similar — and the solutions are still evolving.

Today's compliance landscape is fragmented

Youth sports safety lives at a chaotic intersection of federal law, state law, national governing body rules, sanctioning body requirements, and community standards. As Lieberman explained, organizations struggle to even know what they're required to do, let alone execute on it.

"If you're part of the U.S. Olympic movement, you have a national governing body with their own set of rules. If you're part of Little League, that's a sanctioning body with their own set of rules. Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, California, Florida — they all have their own state laws. And then we have community standards and best practices," Lieberman said.

The result is a disparate system where even the most diligent operators are left piecing together requirements from multiple sources that don't communicate with each other.

Orlov, who oversees hundreds of volunteer coaches across his Lower Merion Little League program, illustrated the burden. Each of his coaches must complete a background check, a child abuse awareness course, a separate state background check, a separate state child welfare certification, and an FBI fingerprint check. That's five separate requirements per coach — roughly 2,000 individual compliance actions across his organization — with little coordination between the bodies that mandate them.

The real barrier is friction

The core problem isn't a lack of intent. It's friction.

"I believe that 99%, maybe even higher, of youth sports operators want to do the right thing," Lieberman said. "The problem is the friction to do it. When Wally gets a volunteer coach and tells him, 'Go to these seven places to do 14 things and email me this certificate, and then go get your fingerprint background check' — that person is trying to get dinner on the table or work their job. They have four kids. You can't send them to do 20 hours of stuff so they can get on T-ball with eight-year-olds."

This friction has real consequences. Overburdened volunteers either delay compliance or skip it entirely, leaving organizations exposed. And while the industry waits for federal legislation that many believe is coming but not imminent, the burden falls squarely on operators to bridge the gap.

Compliance and safety are two different things

One of the most important distinctions to emerge from the discussion was the separation of compliance from safety — two concepts that are entwined, but not identical.

"Compliance is the stuff you have to do legally," Lieberman explained. "Safety is the stuff you want to do because you think it's the right thing to do. Many states don't have concussion laws, but most of our customers do that because they think that's about being safe."

This distinction matters because it reframes the conversation. Compliance is the floor, not the ceiling. Organizations that treat safety as a checkbox exercise miss the broader goal: creating an environment where kids can grow, learn, and benefit from sports. Only 6% of high school athletes go on to play in college. For the overwhelming majority, youth sports is about character development and life lessons — and that requires a safe environment as a foundation.

Building a culture of safety from the top down

Orlov, whose Little League has tripled in size under his leadership, offered a powerful framework for how organizations can move beyond compliance into genuine culture.

"You have to employ a culture of safety," he said. "It has to be nurtured, fed every day from an organizational standpoint."

At Lower Merion, that culture manifests in several ways. The organization is highly transparent about incidents and consequences. When a coach was suspended for a year for bad behavior, the league communicated openly with its membership. When a child punched another child during a game, Orlov responded to 22 texts and emails from a plane to Texas, and the board conducted a deep dive within hours. The message is clear: the buck stops at the top, and infractions are addressed immediately.

"The fastest time measured is a coach acting badly and Wally finding out," Orlov said. When an organization allows bad behavior to happen, "you're basically encouraging bad things to happen."

Thompson echoed this from Unrivaled's perspective, emphasizing that safety must move beyond checklists into everyday practice. "The checklist is great, and it makes sure we're staying true to the course of compliance," she said. "But where does the checkmark come to life for us? What am I actively doing that is in support of these requirements?"

Where to go from here

The panel landed on a shared conclusion: the people running youth sports aren't short on commitment. They're short on time, coordination, and a system that makes the right thing the easy thing. That's where technology can close the gap. As Lieberman described it, our approach is about removing barriers. Volunteers get one place to complete training, background checks, and policy acknowledgments. Administrators get an audit trail that shows it happened.

Tools only carry part of the load, though. Culture carries the rest. For operators looking to act on what the panel shared, here are a few places to start: 

• Map every requirement that applies to you. List what your state, governing or sanctioning body, and insurer require, and where they overlap. You can't reduce friction you haven't measured. Our Requirements Library is a good starting point.

• Count the steps you're asking of each volunteer. If a coach has to visit multiple sites and email certificates back to you, consolidate wherever you can.

• Define safety beyond the legal floor. Concussion protocols, codes of conduct, and incident response are choices you make because they're right. Make them explicit.

• Decide how fast you'll respond. Like Lower Merion, set in advance how incidents get reported, reviewed, and communicated to families.