A child can play a sport through their school for about seventy dollars a year. The same sport, through a club, costs eleven hundred and twenty two.

Same child. Same game. Same gym. And the family pays it, because the free door has quietly been closed.

Listen to what else is happening at the same time. A dozen cities have refused the Olympics by public vote. Officials are quitting everywhere, and not for the reason you think. Kids leave sport in a wave at thirteen, and we call it dropout, as if the failure were theirs. And on one Saturday morning in April, a free volunteer event moved 438,526 people, more than Canada's national sport registers in a year.

Seven committees would call that seven problems. Pyramid Scheme calls it one system, and the system is 160 years old.

Ken King spent twenty years inside Canadian sport as a coach and administrator. Then he went looking for the numbers, and none of the explanations survived. What did survive came from an unlikely place: the study of how large, confident hierarchies come apart. Organized sport is younger than the telephone, and it shows every symptom that appears before the end.

Two thirds of the book is the diagnosis, told through the people inside it: the boy asleep against the car window on the fourth hour to a tournament.

The last third is the rebuild, and none of it needs permission. A clause any board can adopt in one meeting. A thirteen indicator scorecard you can run this season.

The game is not dying. It was here first and will be here after. What is dying is the machine we built on top of it.

You cannot fix a hundred and sixty years of anything. You can fix one hour on a Tuesday.

Narrated in the author's voice. Free companion PDF with all eighteen figures and the toolkit: justkenking.com/toolkit