Lorena Llamas’ teenage son is obsessed with football. In Nevada, that means suffering through practices in direct sunlight and on scalding-hot turf.

“The heat is killer,” said Llamas, a mom of two in North Las Vegas. Her son, a high school senior, has seen teammates throw up during some practices. “He’ll always say, ‘Mom, my feet feel like they’re on fire.’”

Parents and experts told The Indy that heat is just one reason that Nevada consistently ranks last nationwide for participation in youth sports. High costs and complicated scheduling issues also play a big part. 

Nevada has had the lowest or second-lowest rate of children on sports teams every year since 2017 except 2019, according to data collected through the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a project of the Census Bureau, and analyzed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

Although standalone data for 2024 is not yet available, new data shared with The Nevada Independent on the last two years combined again shows Nevada coming last in sports participation, even as its rate ticked up slightly. 

Nationwide, in 2023-2024 nearly 57 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 17 were part of a sports team or club. In Nevada, it was just 46 percent.

“Nevada was always a state that was never thought of for sports,” said Llamas. She attributed the lack of a robust sports culture to Nevada’s heat and smaller number of higher education institutions or major sports teams. Llamas has noticed more young people getting excited about playing football since the Raiders came to Las Vegas in 2020.

“Our players do not get enough attention here,” she said. “There is so much talent in Nevada.” 

Below, we dive into some of the factors that contribute to Nevada’s lagging sports participation and break down the data.

Increasing costs

Most states, including Nevada, have seen sports participation rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, when most schools canceled programming for at least a season. 

But even before the pandemic, Nevada’s participation rate was consistently lower than the nation’s. 

Data from the National Federation of State High School Associations shows the number of student-athletes in Nevada high schools has been relatively stable, going from approximately 45,200 student-athletes in 2015-2016 to approximately 44,800 in 2024-2025. During the same period, Nevada’s high schools added more than 16,000 students. 

Richard Rosenkranz, a UNLV professor who studies interventions to boost nutrition and exercise, attributed Nevada’s low participation rates to high costs.

In 2022, his family moved from Kansas City to Las Vegas, where his son enrolled in a public school and joined the school’s cross-country team.

Rosenkranz said he and his wife were “shocked” by the team’s sticker price. They had to pay almost $500 for their son to run cross-country, a one-season sport. Sports were free at his son’s public school in Kansas.

“Immediately, a lot of Nevada families just cannot afford that,” he told The Nevada Independent. 

Sports costs are rising fast nationwide. Project Play, an initiative of the Aspen Institute think tank, found American families spent an average of $1,000 on their child’s primary sport in 2024, a jump of 46 percent, or about $300, since 2019. 

Llamas estimated her family spends about $500 each football season, mostly on required expenses for the team and for traveling to games. 

She said her family was lucky they could afford these costs. 

Statewide, there are wide income disparities in sports participation. According to the national survey’s data, from 2022 to 2023 nearly three times as many students from high-income families (at or above 400 percent of the federal poverty line) played sports than students from low-income families (at or below the poverty level).

Nevada does not waive sports fees for low-income students, as a handful of states do. California outright bans fees for all students.

Rosenkranz blames rising expenses on cultural shifts, which have transformed youth sports from a more casual form of fun into a high-pressure industry oriented toward college recruitment. 

“We’ve essentially professionalized a lot of sports,” he said. To remain competitive, Rosenkranz said, academic and extracurricular sports programs need to hire full-time coaches, upgrade facilities and equipment, and travel to tournaments. 

Programs pass some of those costs onto families, or families find themselves spending more in private lessons or new gear.

In its 2024 report, Project Play also blamed the post-pandemic shift to kids focusing on single sports, making competition even more intense and expensive. 

Unique “burden” in Nevada

Experts say Nevada’s reliance on shift work and shorter-term labor further complicates access to sports.

“It poses more of a financial burden in a state where … so many parents have multiple jobs in the service industry, where kids have higher shares of parents who can’t afford it,” said Rosenkranz. 

Many parents work in the state’s 24/7 hospitality industry, where work shifts are longer or later than other jobs and where families cycle in and out of the state more often. Census data also shows that Nevada has a higher share of households where every parent works, at 59 percent in 2024. 

That makes it harder for parents to bring kids to practice, Rosenkranz said, especially in a state with limited public transportation.

“Obviously, Vegas is a very transient town where people work all kinds of jobs. It’s a 24 hour city,” said Scott Blackford, director of programs at Nevada Youth Sports (NYS), an organization that runs recreational and club sports in Southern Nevada and manages charter schools’ sports leagues.

To accommodate scheduling issues, “We try to offer different programs, whether recreational leagues or competitive leagues, or camps, clinics, all the different programs you can offer, to fit individual families,” he said. 

Although NYS usually doesn’t work in traditional public schools, he said the group has run some pilot programs so that “a child can stay after for an hourlong practice, in case mom and dad couldn’t take them to practice that night.” 

NYS also offers shorter-term programs where families commit to sports only for eight weeks. Programs such as these expand the group’s demographic reach, Blackford said, even as costs rise. 

“We pride ourselves on trying to not raise prices,” Blackford explained. “But, you know, everything is going up across the world.”

Other factors

Nevada’s intense heat creates further problems.

Synthetic turf fields are increasingly popular for field-based sports due to their lower maintenance costs than grass. But research has shown such fields can be 50 degrees hotter than grass.

“The shade infrastructure is horrible; the weather is hot all summer. There’s an immediate lack of enjoyment,” said Rosenkranz.

But Blackford said Nevada’s temperatures could be a plus by enabling yearlong sports programming. 

“Summer is going to be a little tough, but if you’re born and raised in Arizona or Nevada, you’re kind of used to it. … We’re fortunate to have four seasons of sports a year,” Blackford said, while admitting that finding air-conditioned facilities can be a struggle.

Rosenkranz said Nevada’s low sports participation reflects the state’s generally poor mental and physical health outcomes.

Earlier this year, a bill mandating daily recess in Nevada’s public and charter schools — which is required in only 13 states — failed in the Legislature.

“Are there places where they can play before school? Or in the classroom, at recess, at physical education — all of the activities that happen during the school day?” Rosenkranz asked. “Or are we just asking kids to sit quietly in a lunch room?”

In 2024, only 9.1 percent of Nevada’s 12-through-17-year-olds were physically active for an hour every day. The nationwide rate was 14.9 percent.

Nevada also reports higher rates of depression, suicide and substance use disorder among youth. It ranked last among states in the 2025 and 2024 surveys of youth mental health by the nonprofit Mental Health America. 

Boosting sports participation could help address these issues, Rosenkranz said, adding that sports lower the risk of chronic disease and improve mental health by giving kids a chance to socialize, resolve disagreements and challenge themselves.

“Also, sports are fun,” he said. “And people should be having fun.”