Every spring, the same thing happens.
Baseball season is opening. Soccer is mid-stride. Rosters are being finalized, registration portals are humming, and families are showing up to fields ready to play. And somewhere in the mix, a coach is stepping onto that field who hasn't completed their background check. A waiver is unsigned. A training certification lapsed in February and no one caught it.
It's not malicious. It's the gap between good intentions and actual systems.
The stakes are different now. It's time for leaders to treat them that way.
The numbers tell a story that's hard to ignore. According to the CDC, about 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys in the United States experience child sexual abuse at some point — and those figures are widely considered an undercount, since most children wait to report or never report at all. In the sports context specifically, research cited by ChildHelp suggests 40% to 50% of athletes have experienced anything from mild harassment to severe abuse, with sexual abuse in sports impacting between 2% and 8% of all athletes.
The setting matters too. In 91% of child sexual abuse cases, the perpetrator is someone known and trusted by the child or the child's family — which means the coach-athlete relationship, by design, creates the exact conditions that require systematic oversight, not just good intentions.
Legislators are paying attention. As of December 2024, thirteen states have background check laws for volunteers of non-school associated activities including youth sports and athletics. But the broader trend moves faster than that single number suggests: as of 2025, more than 30 states have enacted legislation addressing background screening for youth program volunteers. Florida enacted Level 2 fingerprint background check requirements for all youth athletic coaches effective January 1, 2025. Colorado's Safer Youth Sports Act — introduced in August 2024 and described as the strongest law in the nation regulating the behavior of youth sports organizations — requires prohibited conduct policies, mandatory reporting frameworks, and annual abuse prevention training across all youth sports providers.
Starting July 1, 2025, Colorado will also require each youth sports organization to mandate that coaches annually complete mandatory reporter training.
This isn't a compliance trend. It's a structural shift in what it means to operate a responsible youth sports program. The states that acted first are no longer outliers — they're the preview.
The most common response after a safety incident is some version of "we had no idea." The expectation from families, from courts, and increasingly from regulators is that organizations should have known — and that the tools exist to know.
The legal exposure here is direct and significant. When a child is harmed at a youth organization, the individual who caused the harm isn't the only one who can be held accountable. Organizations can be held directly liable — and a weak screening process can create serious negligence exposure when a reasonable review would have uncovered warning signs. Critically, the employee's conduct and the organization's conduct are treated as two different failures. Skipping proper screening isn't just a procedural lapse — it is itself an act of negligence.
Audit-ready compliance isn't about having perfect paperwork. It's about being able to demonstrate, at any moment, that your organization took its responsibilities seriously.
That means knowing — not guessing — which coaches have completed their background checks, which certifications are current, and which requirements are pending. It means having a record that shows when each requirement was completed, by whom, and how. It means automated systems that catch expiration dates before they become liabilities, not spreadsheets that someone updates manually when they remember to.
When a family asks "how do you know this coach is safe to be around my child?", the answer can't be "we think so." It has to be provable.
There's a tendency in youth sports organizations to treat compliance as something the admin staff handles. That's understandable — they're the ones chasing documents and sending reminders. But the liability, the reputational exposure, and the strategic decision about what kind of organization you're building? That sits at the top.
Boards and executive directors are increasingly being held accountable for the safety culture of their programs — not just the outcomes, but the systems. The legal framework is clear: claims can be filed against leagues, camps, or clubs — not just the abuser. Organizations can be named as defendants when negligent hiring, failure to conduct background checks, or ignoring red flags are factors.
The programs that weather safety incidents with their reputation intact share a common trait: leadership made a deliberate decision to treat compliance as a governance priority, not a box-checking exercise. They built systems before they needed them.
The programs that didn't tend to find out the hard way that trust, once lost, is almost impossible to rebuild. Among young people who experienced violence from coaching staff, only 26.8% disclosed their experience to an adult — meaning that the absence of reported incidents is not evidence of a safe program. It is often evidence of a culture where kids don't feel safe reporting.
Spring is the right moment to ask honest questions about where your program actually stands. Work through this list:
☑ Audit your real-time visibility Do you have live data on who has completed what — and who hasn't? Not a spreadsheet that was updated a couple weeks ago. If you can't answer a compliance question in under 60 seconds, you don't have a system.
☑ Document your process If something went wrong today, could you produce a clear record of your compliance history? Could it withstand legal scrutiny? An audit trail isn't bureaucracy — it's your organization's first line of defense.
☑ Assess whether you're proactive or reactive Are reminders going out automatically before certifications lapse, or are you finding out about gaps after the fact? Every compliance gap that surfaces during a season is one that should have been caught before it started.
☑ Elevate the conversation to leadership Is compliance on the agenda at the board level, or does it live only in the operations team? The liability, the reputational exposure, and the decision about what kind of organization you're building — those belong at the top.
☑ Verify you're current with state law With more than 30 states now legislating youth sports screening requirements — and new laws taking effect in 2025 in Florida, Colorado, Utah, and others — the legal floor is rising. Knowing what your state required last year is not the same as knowing what it requires today.
Not sure where your state stands? Use Ankored's free Compliance Checker to see the requirements for your state in minutes. → compliancechecker.ankored.com
Most organizations, when they're honest, find at least one of these is shakier than they'd like.
The good news: organizations taking this seriously right now — before the incident, before the headline, before the lawsuit — are the ones that will be in the best position when the landscape tightens further. And it will.
Compliance isn't a burden your program carries. It's the foundation your program's trust is built on.