Sho Nakamori offers an alternative to privatized competitive youth sports

“Kids are growing up in this fast, digital-heavy world,” Sho Nakamori told me when we sat down together at Dulzura, a Miami-inspired coffee shop in San Mateo. “But at the end of the day they still just want to run around. They should be active. They should move.”

Nakamori would know. He’s spent his entire life inside the gymnastics ecosystem, starting before he was born when his parents met as gymnasts in Japan. He grew up in the East Bay, chose to train competitively at an early age (much to his parents’ reluctance), eventually joined the junior national team, and by 16 was living at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs — the youngest male gymnast in a room full of veterans preparing for the 2004 Athens Games. He later competed for Stanford as an undergrad.

Sho was part of an earlier and much smaller ecosystem of young elite athletes. Today, the American privatized youth-sports marketplace has ballooned into an economy of its own. We can make the case that increased size has created broader access. But in 2024 alone, youth competitive sports accounted for over $50 billion in direct spend and $115 billion in U.S. economic impact, and is projected to more than double by 2030. At this scale, the youth-sports pipeline has evolved from sportsmanship and passion to a venture-backed and private equity funded business model more focused on outcomes than life lessons.

Modern youth sports claim much more than finances — they also claim evenings, weekends and whatever unstructured childhood used to be. Travel leagues have crowded out local rec programs that once served entire neighborhoods, and the default has shifted from casual play to permanent commitment.

“People get caught in this system of doing what ‘success’ is supposed to look like,” he said. “Check the box, hit the benchmark, follow the path. But life isn’t linear. It doesn’t work like that.”

Sho’s perspective touches on something we need to talk about more. After a lifetime inside the elite machine and watching thousands of kids move through the system, he came to a perhaps unintuitive conclusion.

“I’d rather help a kid feel confident and strong than push them toward medals,” he told me. Not because medals aren’t meaningful, but because they’re not the point.

Nakamori recently opened Infinite Sports, a recreational-focused gymnastics space in San Mateo designed for kids to move without competitive teams, pipelines or pressure to perform. Instead, he built a padded canvas and custom-designed the largest trampoline I have ever seen to support physical literacy: strength, coordination, flexibility, spatial awareness and the deeply underrated importance of falling sans judgment.

It’s really quite radical.

I was part of the last generation that experienced my entire childhood without the risk of being documented into social virality. This overly digital and monitored world gives our kids very few outlets for making mistakes without risk of shame. As I think about the constant barrage of feedback, opinions and algorithms shaping children’ s sense of self, I’m thankful people like Sho are creating intentional spaces where confidence can build organically.

Most gyms today operate as pipelines to competition because it justifies higher fees, more classes and offers a built-in flywheel of new clients. Nakamori instead chose to open a gym where movement is accessible, joyful and developmentally grounded, where the outcomes aren’t rankings but resilience, and where a child’s experience of their own body matters more than getting to the podium.

If this sounds idealistic, it isn’t. The competitive youth-sports pipeline is optimized for the less than 1% who will compete seriously. But over the past few decades, this has become one of the only options for the other 99% who won’t. What started as a solution for building sportsmanship and community has evolved into a system that too often treats childhood like an investment thesis.

When I visit Infinite Sports, I see kids who are being allowed to safely build important life skills, sweat, grow stronger and laugh on their timelines without the risk of judgment and social virality. And our kids need much, much more of this.