Two Wins in Washington
Two major wins: the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Trey's Law, and the U.S. House sent Lulu's Law to President Trump's desk for his signature.
September 17, 2026
Alabama has been a national leader in youth sports for as long as I can remember. Friday night football in every corner of the state, legendary coaches, athletes who went on to do remarkable things. Sports are woven into the fabric of who we are.
In 2018, we backed that up with something concrete. Alabama became the first state in the nation to require injury recognition safety training for volunteer youth coaches working with children 14 and under on public property. That was the Coach Safely Act. I carried it in the House, Senator Jabo Waggoner carried it in the Senate, and it has since been enacted or introduced in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Texas. Alabama led. Other states followed.
Now there is a next step, and it did not come from the legislature. It came from the people who have spent their careers around this issue.
Here is what we are actually dealing with in this state. An estimated 400,000 Alabama children play organized sports. Their families spend somewhere around $600 million a year on it. About 60,000 volunteer coaches run the programs. And the fields and gyms they play on are public property, in all 67 counties.
That is an industry. Right now, nobody owns it.
Safety sits with public health. Events sit with tourism. The money sits with revenue. The parks sit with cities and counties. No one is responsible for the whole thing. Every other industry that size in Alabama has a home in state government. Youth sports does not.
I made this point in a meeting this week and I will make it again here, because it is the clearest way I know to say it. People who serve hot dogs have to have a stamp behind them showing they have gone through the Department of Public Health in order to serve that hot dog. But our coaches don't have anything.
This is not a small business anymore. Nationally, families spend more than $40 billion a year on their children's sports. The total economic impact of amateur youth sports tourism reached $91.8 billion in 2021, generating 635,000 jobs and $12.9 billion in tax revenue.
Private equity has noticed. There are funds putting billions of dollars into youth sports around the country. I am not here to say that money is good or bad. But it is coming into our state, it is organizing programs on our public fields, it is charging our parents fees, and in a lot of cases the profit is leaving Alabama. We do not always know who is training those coaches. In some cases we do not know whether they are trained at all.
We are proposing the Alabama Commission on Youth Sports.
I support this mission, but I want the credit to go where it needs to, because it did not come from me originally. This is the baby of the Coach Safely Foundation and the Center for Sports Analytics and Sports Industry Program at Samford University, led by Dr. Darin White. They are the ones who saw the gap, did the work, and built the case. My job has been to help carry it.
I also want to be clear about what it is not. It is not a new agency. No staff, no standing budget, no regulatory enforcement power. Members would serve unpaid. It is advisory, and its job is to gather the data and tell us what we are actually dealing with.
It has four goals:
This applies to children 14 and under. It does not touch the AHSAA, which governs ninth grade and above. There is no overlap and no competition for resources. If anything, keeping kids healthy and keeping it fun before ninth grade is how you make sure they are still playing when they get there.
This week I was in Washington with a group that tells you how seriously this is being taken.
Dr. Darin White of Samford, whose center would take the commission's data and turn it into findings we can act on. Coach Bill Clark, formerly of UAB, who runs the Coach Safely Foundation. Dr. James Andrews, who founded Andrews Sports Medicine and now leads the Andrews Research and Education Foundation. Coach Jack Crowe, who coached at Arkansas and Jacksonville State. Senator Jabo Waggoner, who passed Coach Safely in the Senate. Senate President Pro Tem Garland Gudger.
We also met with U.S. Senator Katie Britt, who has worked with me on several bills protecting children. Coach Safely started in Alabama and spread to a dozen states. There is no reason a commission that works here could not do the same.
The details of how the commission would be structured are still being worked out, and I will have more to share as that comes together.
What is not in question is the goal. Youth sports in Alabama are too big and too important for nobody to be paying attention. Kids playing. Kids having fun. Kids staying safe. And the benefit of all of it staying right here in Alabama.
Two major wins: the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Trey's Law, and the U.S. House sent Lulu's Law to President Trump's desk for his signature.
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Organizing for Action: We’re the people who don’t just support
Organizing for Action: We’re the people who don’t just support
Organizing for Action: We’re the people who don’t just support
