I don't say that for effect. I say it because it's true.
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Where I grew up, the odds didn't bend in my favor. I've thought a lot about the two futures that felt most available to me, the cemetery or a cell, and how close I came to both. What stood between me and those outcomes wasn't luck, and it wasn't that I was special. It was a field. A whistle. A team that expected me to show up. A game that gave me somewhere to be and someone to become.
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I had a coach named Fredrick Ward, who saw something in me before I could see it in myself and refused to let me settle for less than it. I had a mother who sold cookies in the stands at my football games, dollar by dollar, so our team could have what it needed to play. I didn't have much proof around me that a kid like me could make it out. But I had them. I had teammates. I had Saturday mornings that gave me a reason to keep going. Sports handed me a different picture of my own
future, and I have spent my life trying to be worthy of that gift.
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That is why the research we are releasing today breaks my heart.
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We call it the Sports Desert Index. It maps, city by city, the places in America where kids have lost access to sports. Not because they lack talent or desire, but because of when they were born, where they were born, and into what circumstances. We studied 55 cities across all 50 states and scored each one on six weighted measures of cost, poverty, family structure, participation, and the slow disappearance of the fields, rec centers, and leagues that once held communities together.

The hardest truth in this study is also the most hopeful one: these deserts are not accidents of nature. They were made. Bankruptcies closed rec centers. Budget cuts ended school teams. Disinvestment hollowed out the places where kids used to become themselves. Gary. East St. Louis. Camden. Detroit. Flint. Cities that once produced Olympians and Hall of Famers now reach only a fraction of their own children. But if these deserts were built by human choices, then they can be
reversed by human choices, too.

More than 60 million children play youth sports in this country. Every one of them is learning something that will outlast the final whistle: how to lose and get back up, how to trust a teammate, how to be counted on. Those lessons become the adults they grow into. When a community loses access to sports, it isn't just losing games. It's losing the coaches, the mentors, the belonging, and the second chances that turn a life around. I know, because those are the exact things that saved
mine.

I want you to see this for yourself. The Sports Desert Index is fully interactive. You can click into any city and see what's driving the access gap, and just as importantly, what it would take to close it. Please don't look away from it. Sit with it. Let it move you the way it moved me.

Then join us. The Players Health Foundation exists to be a catalyst for change, to make youth sports both accessible and safe, so that every kid, in every zip code, has the same door held open for them that was held open for me. We can restore fields. We can protect the leagues that are barely hanging on. We can make sure the next kid who needs a game to play actually finds one.

I got my shot because people who didn't have to care, cared. Now it's our turn.

With hope and gratitude,

TYRRE BURKS

Founder & CEO, Players Health · Founder, Players Health Foundation