Report · S14–S26

Retention Study: Opportunity-Adjusted

How many boys could return — and what keeps a team alive. Headline: opportunity-adjusted retention is 54.0%, versus a crude 28.8% that counts boys who never had a team to return to. Data through Spring 2026; next update December 2026, adding Fall 2026.

Let Me Run · Retention Study

Boy Retention: Opportunity-Adjusted

Spring 2014 – Spring 2026 · 31,151 boys, 43,752 enrollments, matched across seasons by name and date of birth. A boy is retained if he enrolls in a later LMR season before aging out of his site's grades — returns need not be consecutive. We start with the crude rate — the share of all boys who ever come back — then adjust for whether a boy actually had a team to return to, which tells a very different story.

Opportunity-adjusted figures exclude boy-seasons without usable grade information and recent ones that have not yet had a complete chance to return.

Crude Retention

28.8%

share of all boys who ever re-enroll — counts everyone, even those who never had the chance to return

Opportunity-Adjusted Retention

54.0%

of boys who had a team available to return to (10,735/19,893)

How We Measure Opportunity-Adjusted Retention

Reading down: we start with every boy-season, remove those who aged out, then those whose site had no team for their grade. What remains had a real chance — and just over half came back.

Reading the cascade

Of 38,277 boy-seasons, 6,699 advanced past their site's top grade and 11,685 had no team to return to. That leaves 19,893 with a real chance — of whom 10,735 returned and 9,158 did not: an opportunity-adjusted rate of 54.0%, versus a crude 28.8% that counts every boy regardless of whether a team existed.

Boys come back

Once boys return, they tend to stay

Among boys who had a team to return to, the return rate jumps after a boy's first season and then stays high — the first return is the hardest; once a boy is in, he tends to stay. So the real question isn't whether boys are willing, it's whether a team is there for them.

Retention by number of seasons already completed

Opportunity-adjusted; each bar counts only boys who had a team available (count shown below). First-season boys return at 50.0%; boys with at least one prior season return at roughly 63–69% (the last bars are small samples). An association with prior tenure, not proof that one season causes the next.

The opportunity, defined

What creates an opportunity to return?

A boy has a real chance to come back only when three things line up.

1 · Still eligible

The boy has not advanced beyond the grades his site serves.

2 · Site returns

His school or community site operates an LMR team again.

3 · Grade is available

That returning team serves the boy's next eligible grade.

The biggest preventable loss of opportunity happens when a site stops operating while boys are still eligible. Aging out is expected; a site going dark is not. That is the lever this report focuses on next.

What keeps the opportunity available

Keeping teams alive keeps the door open for boys

When a site disappears, every eligible boy there loses a clear path back into the program. Boy retention is therefore partly a team-continuity challenge — and team continuity rests on the adults who run the teams.

Boys who lost their team

6,218

still eligible when their site stopped operating

Tied to short-lived sites

81%

of those boys were at sites that ran four seasons or fewer

Coaches who serve once

61.2%

3,892 of 6,355 coach a single season and never return

Coach longevity — most serve a single season

Of 6,355 coaches, the share by total seasons coached (role ignored). Coach recruitment must continually replenish the large number of one-season coaches.

The payoff of continuity

Opportunity-adjusted retention by how many seasons the site has run. The longer a site survives, the better it retains — a young site's lower rate is expected, not failure. The dividend comes from helping a site past its fragile early seasons, where coach continuity is hardest to hold.

The staff takeaway

Boy retention is partly a team-continuity challenge: when a site disappears, every eligible boy there loses a clear path back into the program. Coaches are the engine of that continuity — and most serve only a single season — so coach turnover is one of the clearest operational risks to site continuity.

The operational response is succession planning: flagging coaches likely to step away — especially parent-coaches whose own sons are aging out of the program — and recruiting a replacement before the team goes dark. Those departures are often predictable a season or more ahead.

Supporting detail

Correlated, not causal

The patterns below are real but the data cannot separate cause from circumstance. We include them for context — not as levers to pull.

SoulFisher sites — an early signal

SoulFisher Ministries runs after-school programs at 7 St. Louis sites (audience already gathered, program co-funded). Caveat: all began Fall 2023–Spring 2026, so none can be scored on the opportunity-adjusted basis yet; this is the crude return rate (any later season), and SF sites have run every season since launch, which itself inflates the gap. Read as directional, not conclusive.

Recommendations

What should we do with this?

Two places the data points to action: protect the teams boys return to, and win the first return.

Protect team continuity

Identify successor coaches early
Flag teams dependent on one coach
Provide extra support to newer sites

Focus on the first return

Prioritize first-season families
Begin re-registration communication before the season ends
Follow up with eligible boys who do not return

How we measured this (matching, definitions, caveats — click to expand)

Matching boys

A boy is keyed by normalized first name + last name + exact date of birth (whitespace collapsed, lowercased). DOB is present on every record (0 blank). 43,775 registration rows resolve to 43,752 boy-seasons and 31,151 boys; multiple rows for one boy in a season collapse to one boy-season. Two different boys sharing an identical name and DOB would merge — rare, and would if anything slightly raise measured retention.

Matching coaches

Coaches are threaded by PersonID (never blank), with email and region+school name as backups; coaches are linked to sites on region + season + school name (matched on 99.4% of site-seasons). Role (head/assistant) is ignored — any appearance counts as coaching that season — and coach tenure is total seasons coaching anywhere in LMR. Coaches rarely move: all but 8 of 2,463 multi-season coaches stayed in one region.

What the 97.8% check means

Our reconstructed season count aligns within one season of Pinwheel's “P-Seasons” counter for 97.8% of boys. It matches exactly for 7.6%, while 90.2% differ by one—expected because Pinwheel counts prior seasons beginning at zero.

Opportunity adjustment

Grade advances one level per school year (fall starts a new grade; that fall and the following spring share a grade). Each site's graduation grade is the highest grade it has ever enrolled, so a boy is set aside as a graduate only when he would advance past what his site offers; 242 sites enroll 6th grade or higher, keeping about 2,520 fifth-grade boy-seasons eligible that a flat “5th grade = done” rule would drop. A boy “had an opportunity” if his site offered his advanced grade in a later eligible season, and is “retained” if he enrolled at any LMR team in any later eligible season. Boy-seasons whose eligibility extends past Spring 2026 are excluded; 768 boy-seasons without a grade are excluded from the adjusted analysis.

Source: LMR Participants & Coaches S14–S26 (Pinwheel exports). Gaps in percentage points (pp). Focus regions = Charlotte (incl. Gaston County & Upper Palmetto), Columbus, St. Louis, Seattle; Expansion = all other markets. Data through Spring 2026; prepared June 2026. Financial-assistance section removed September 2026. Next update December 2026, adding Fall 2026.