Today I sat down with Kelly Kratz to talk about "the beast."
Kelly Kratz is the Vice President of Training for PCA. She oversees the development and quality of our amazing 150+ national workshop trainers. Kelly began as a trainer herself in 2009 and then became the National Lead Trainer for PCA in 2014. Kelly brings a wealth of experience to PCA as a former elementary teacher and guidance counselor. She was a high school three-sport athlete playing field hockey, basketball & lacrosse and an NCAA field hockey, lacrosse, and track and field athlete at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She has 30 years of coaching experience, starting with high school basketball and lacrosse, college basketball, youth soccer, and lacrosse.
Kelly has facilitated almost 400 workshops for PCA. Notably, the NWSL coaches, USA Gymnastics National Team Coaches, the LA Galaxy, Utah Jazz, and the Philadelphia Eagles. She has led corporate workshops for companies like Google, Deloitte, Steptoe & Johnson, and Insperity. She has also spoken at many national conventions, including the United Soccer Coaches, USA Lacrosse, USA Rowing, Little League International, and many State Athletic Director conferences.
Kelly has been the assistant Varsity lacrosse coach at Owen J. Roberts High School since 2019. She also enjoys skiing, volleyball, biking, running, yoga, and spending quality time outdoors with her husband and 4 children in northern Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Kelly Kratz also happens to be my mom. 👩
Today, I sat down with her to talk about how sports have changed over the years, how they've become more commercialized, and why it's important to know who you are amidst so much noise.
Topic Introduction: The Rhetoric of Elite Lacrosse
Grace: Youth sports have become highly corporatized in recent years due to private equity buying and creating elite clubs, All-America teams, and digital recruiting platforms, which now include Instagram. Young athletes are flooded with this content on social media and given the impression that they must cultivate a highly marketable persona. Why? Because the elite athletes they follow must have done everything right to get to UNC, these girls think they must, too.
For example, the girls with these NIL deals are making influencer-style vlogs like "Here's a day in my life as a D1 athlete at UNC." These videos are marketed as a glimpse into real life; however, they are actually being shaped by NIL deals, sponsors, elite clubs, and NCAA programs. Additionally, the physical field can be a place where they constantly feel like they're being watched, to perform, to impress college coaches, and to get along with their teammates.
Kelly: What's the definition of rhetoric here?
Grace: The rhetoric I'm talking about is the different influences that come from here and there. For example, a girl who's scrolling on her social media feeds sees all these professional women's lacrosse players who are perfect girls with perfect training plans. Their entire personality is just lacrosse, lacrosse, lacrosse, because they got to UNC, they got to the national team.
While all this influence they're being fed is highly successful in producing athletes for the college recruiting and NIL machine, it can actually be damaging to the individual. What I said is that the ecosystem leads young women to constantly police their own identities, leading them to believe they cannot pursue multi-dimensional interests outside their sport. The pressure to stick to the status quo fosters anxiety, resulting in athletes who do all the right things to get recruited, but at the cost of losing their authentic selves.
Kelly: Good, got it.
Grace: As I was looking for sources on the subject, I thought, let me just use you.
Kelly: I mean, we do a lot of this talk at work too, with the athlete workshops that we've changed to focus on athlete mental wellness.
The Commercialization of Youth Sports
Grace: Let's talk about the commercialization of sports first. Even compared to when you played in college, there were no club teams, no NIL deals, no social media. It was not so serious that you couldn't be a three-sport athlete in college, and that was normal. Now we're at the point where that's not even a thinkable possibility. Back then, you played lacrosse to get a scholarship, but also just because it was fun. Now there is just so much built up around it, and it diminishes girls' unique personalities because they think they have to fit into that mold. What do you think about that?
Kelly: I definitely agree. When I was a kid, sports were for fun, exercise, and socializing. That was it. When the business of sports came in—in the early to mid-2000s—private companies realized they could make a lot of money doing private training and creating elite clubs. It turned into a pay-to-play model, completely shifting the focus of sports to a transactional one.
When we wanted to play in college back then, you had to have skills. Most of those skills were not built up because we went to club practices year-round; they were built because we were multi-sport athletes. When sports changed to a pay-to-play model, sports specialization started. People were under the impression that they had to get their six-year-olds playing soccer year-round to get them into college. It was literally a bubble.
I think the awareness of the bubble is starting to change. ESPN, for example, has a whole ad campaign right now that we're partnering with called Take Back Sports. It's literally about how we take sports back from the monster. How can parents get back into sports without feeling like they have to spend $10,000 on elite lacrosse teams to get their kids into college?
A lot of it also is that once something is on social media, it blows up. All these NIL deals are just business—how is Maybelline gonna make money? They're gonna get a WLL player to wear their mascara and talk about how great it is. It's all advertising and money.
So one of the things we're doing at PCA is raising parents' awareness that college sports are now more professional. Your kid is a transaction, your kid's a commodity, it's a business. They're making money off of your child. If you want to play college sports at a high level for the growth and all that, you go to a D2 or D3 school. Or you play club.
The "Lacrosse Girl" Stereotype and NIL Deals
Grace: Say there's a young, impressionable middle school girl scrolling on her feed. Pretty much every WLL player right now has NIL brand deals. She's seeing this very specific type of girl being marketed as a UNC lacrosse player or a Team USA lacrosse player. As she gets older, she molds herself into the expectation of who she thinks she has to be, rather than figuring out who she wants to be for herself, because of the influence she's been fed by lax girl culture.
Kelly: Can I give you a little insight on something I learned? I work with people who really pushed for Title IX. When NIL deals started, only males were getting them. So the Title IX people pushed for women to have equal rights for NIL.
But Feffie Barnhill and others talked about how this actually backfired. The only women getting NIL deals were the beautiful ones. It took the idea of elevating women's sports and turned it into: "We can only give out NIL deals if you're beautiful and perfect and can buy my lipstick." It literally blew up all the superficiality they didn't want to happen. There are incredible athletes out there who do not have NIL deals because they're not marketable.
Grace: Right.
Kelly: Consider exceptional athletes who, despite being among the best in the country, do not maintain a high-profile social media presence or focus on brand endorsements. On a team of 30 college lacrosse girls, there might be 5 that are pretty enough to be able to sell a product.
Grace: In addition to selling products, a lot of them are just becoming content creators. They post videos like, "Come do wall ball with me," and it's these perfect, cutesy workout routines with no misses and cute music. What they're not showing are their failures on the field. People have been saying social media is a highlight reel for years. When you're scrolling through 5-second highlight videos, you suddenly think you suck.
Kelly: Exactly. These girls don't think they can make mistakes because none of the people they watch make mistakes. I remember when we went to the NCAA game at Maryland, and you were watching Kenzie Kent from Boston College. You were like, "What? She dropped the ball twice!" I'm like, they're not perfect! Anytime you watch a full NCAA game, they're dropping it all the time. But high school girls get terrified of not being able to catch a ball. It's not if you drop it, it's who picks it up the fastest.
Kelly: You're absolutely right. Highlight reels and social media are messing up not only players' identities but also the psychology of resilience, grit, and bouncing back from mistakes.
Identifying the Beast
Grace: I'm writing about this Name, Image, and Likeness rhetoric that influences young girls into believing they must be perfect, pretty, and a cookie-cutter lacrosse girl. They lose their own identity.
Kelly: Do you remember when we went to that eighth-grade lacrosse practice? There was a clear difference between the girls who played for [a certain club] and those who didn't. The coach said the biggest issue was the club girls yelling at the other girls every time they dropped a ball. They had that attitude of, "Wait, I play for [certain club], I have to be perfect." It was toxic.
Grace: As soon as they're told they made the A-team of an elite club, they think they're elite. Anybody can start a club, call it the "Elite Team," and call them "All-Americans." It doesn't mean anything; it's just great marketing.
Kelly: Since sports is a business, if my friend Dave starts a team with an A, B, and C team, he has to charge $5,000 to $10,000. To get customers to pay, there'd better be a return on investment—they'd better win. So if he goes to a tournament and knows he's gonna get his butt kicked, he drops his team into the lower bracket just so they can win the Champion Cup.
Grace: I remember playing against teams that dropped themselves down just so they could crush everyone. Clubs that used to have a great model—one team per class, always in the top bracket—now have four teams per club, and they've been bought out by private equity.
If you're asking me, that girl has to be confident and disciplined enough to know what the coaches are looking for, rather than believing all the crap she hears externally and sees online. You have to drown out the noise and lock in.
Kelly: My friend told me that when my daughter was six years old, she had to start playing club soccer or she would never make the high school team. When she was six!
At PCA, we believe this issue is programmatic and systemic. The programmatic piece is the clubs. The systemic problem is educating parents to listen to college coaches instead of the beast. The beast is the business of sports—companies paying athletes because they have followers, keeping the snowball going.
Grace: It's your brand. You either have to have looks or personality. A bookworm who is a star athlete, unfortunately, isn't going to make money off their name, image, and likeness, so younger bookworms don't see themselves represented.
Thank you, Kelly (mom), for sitting down with me! You can learn more at: