PlaySmart Omaha

Contents

1. What the program does
2. Who gets to play
3. The Omaha study

Brent O’Mara supports PlaySmart, an Omaha organization whose stated purpose is helping kids reach their academic and life potential through sports. The standard it works toward is a simple one, that a child’s chance to play should not depend on what a family can pay, and that standard is worth stating before the organization is described, because it is the thing the national research keeps measuring against. PlaySmart runs a summer academy, a camp with weekday hours, and partner grants to other youth programs in the city, and it thanks a family foundation and countless individual donors in Omaha for making that work possible.² This entry describes what it does, sets it against the national numbers on who plays and who cannot, and ends with the study of Omaha’s own schools that was under way in 2026.

What the program does

Two reports from PlaySmart’s own site show the shape of its work. In the summer of 2012 PlaySmart Omaha ran its first two week, full day academy, held at the University of Nebraska at Omaha during the hottest days of the year, for more than 40 local youth, many of them from rural communities. The young people heard guest speakers, worked with coaches and teachers, tried volleyball, golf and football among other sports, took part in life skills and academic enrichment sessions, and had swimming lessons in the UNO pools.² The same month the PlaySmart Omaha advisory board renewed a partner grant to a youth basketball league and after school program it had supported for several years, one that pairs children with mentors who can become lasting positive influences and that teaches the value of hard work and staying in school.¹ The model, in other words, is a mix of direct programming and small grants to other organizations already on the ground, which is how a modest local charity reaches more children than it could serve alone. The academy’s mix of sports, swimming, speakers and schoolwork also reflects the organization’s name, since the point of the program is to use play as the way in to the academic and life skills it names in its mission.²

Figure

Youth sports in the United States

of children aged 6 to 17 who played sports in 2023

55.4 percent

the federal participation goal for 2030

63 percent

rise in the cost of youth sports since 2019

46 percent

what the wealthiest families spend compared with the poorest

4 times

Who gets to play

The case for an organization like this is in the national data, most of it gathered by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play. Its State of Play 2025 report concluded that youth sports had recovered from the pandemic, with 55.4 percent of children aged 6 to 17 playing sports in 2023 by the federal count, up from 53.8 percent the year before and measured against a federal goal of 63 percent by 2030. The same report found that the cost of youth sports had risen 46 percent since 2019, that significant access gaps remained between higher and lower income homes, and that children from the wealthiest households play their main sport more often in every setting except free play, the one place the lowest income children play the most.⁴

The institute’s 2022 report put a price on it. The average family paid $883 a year for one child’s primary sport, the wealthiest families spent about four times what the poorest did, and 27 percent of sports parents said their child had lost interest in playing, a figure that rose with household income. More than half of children who played did so through community programs, but three in ten such programs had closed, merged or shrunk compared with the year before, while travel programs had come roaring back for families who could afford them.⁵ Parents who had moved to travel teams said more playing time, a more inclusive environment and lower costs could bring them back to local leagues.⁵ The same report found coaches being asked to do more, including with children whose mental health had suffered in the pandemic, while very few felt confident recognizing those struggles or finding help; parents, for their part, trusted coaches more than teachers or peers to build life skills and a sense of belonging, which puts real weight on the volunteers and part timers who run programs like the ones PlaySmart funds.⁵

The older numbers show how long the gap has existed. In 2016, by the Aspen Institute’s charts, only 36.9 percent of children aged 6 to 12 played team sports regularly, down from 44.5 percent in 2008; 29.9 percent of children from homes earning $25,000 or less were physically inactive against 11.5 percent in homes earning $100,000 or more; and the participation gap between those two groups had widened from about 23 percentage points in 2013 to 32 in 2016. Fewer than a third of youth coaches were trained in basics such as safety and sport instruction.⁶ A Johns Hopkins simulation prepared for the institute estimated that lifting the share of active children would save tens of billions of dollars in medical costs and lost productivity over time.⁶

Figure

Physically inactive children by household income, 2016

• Income of $25,000 or less29.9
• Income of $100,000 or more11.5

percent

The Omaha study

In 2026 the research came to Omaha. With support from a local foundation, Project Play began State of Play Omaha, its nineteenth community study, surveying Omaha Public Schools students about their experience of sports. The early findings, presented at a summit on March 11, 2026, were specific. Sixty four percent of surveyed students had played on an organized team in the past year, above the national goal, but boys played at a rate six points higher than girls, and Black and White students played on organized teams at far higher rates, 72 and 71 percent, than Latino and Asian students, at 56 and 53. In grades five through twelve more students were active on a school team, 42 percent, than in a community program, 28 percent, or on a travel or club team, 22 percent, and Black and Latino students were far more likely to play at school than anywhere else.³

Two findings bear directly on what a program like PlaySmart exists to do. The single most common reason physically active boys and girls gave for not joining an organized team was that they did not know how to get started, which is a problem of information and access rather than of interest. And in a state where volleyball is enormously popular, half of surveyed girls in grades five through twelve were on an organized volleyball team while another third of girls and 9 percent of boys wanted to try it, a sign that the supply of opportunities was not meeting demand.³ The summit also launched a unified athletic association for the district, meant to connect recreational and competitive play from elementary school through high school in one system.³

Figure

Where Omaha students play

	Finding	Figure
	Played on an organized team in the past year	64 percent of surveyed students, above the federal goal of 63
	Active on a school team, grades 5 to 12	42 percent, against 28 percent in community programs and 22 percent on travel or club teams
	Girls on an organized volleyball team	50 percent, while 33 percent of girls and 9 percent of boys want to try it
	Top reason active children do not join a team	They do not know how to get started

What comes next for PlaySmart is bound up with that study. The final State of Play Omaha report was due later in 2026, with recommendations drawn from local leaders and from other Project Play communities on how to grow access.³ For a small organization that already runs an academy on a university campus and funds a basketball league, the findings read as a map: the children who are missing are the ones who do not know how to begin, the girls who want a volleyball team that does not exist, and the families for whom $883 a year is not a possibility. The wider picture of how Omaha funds work like this is in philanthropy in Omaha, and the people who coach and run such programs without pay are the subject of volunteering in Nebraska.