by Shelby Evans, Cronkite News
June 17, 2026
SCOTTSDALE – “Seven.”
“Eight.”
“One.”
“Two.”
Forty adults gather in a circle around a sand volleyball court at Indian School Park. They count off to divide into eight teams for the volleyball matches.
The camaraderie of recess sports persists among the group. Play for the joy of playing.
“It is a stressful time to be an adult, right?” said Phoenix Fray city commissioner Hilary Neste. “So we want to encourage people to play. That is our mission.”
Adult social leagues have grown in number and size as more adults turn to them as a way to find community and stay active.
According to a 2025 report from Morning Consult, 58% of adults work out or play sports at least once a week.
The Valley has options for those majority of adults, Municipalities, like the City of Phoenix, offer community leagues, Arizona Sports League offers divisions of play for eight sports in locations spread across the metropolitan area and OutLoud Sports offers LGBTQ+ inclusive year-round options.
Fray Phoenix is a private adult social sport league provider. As dusk brings relief to the Arizona summer air, players begin gathering at the four sand volleyball courts every Sunday night at 7 p.m.
Pete Sanchez, a 55-year-old dad of three, participates in three Fray Leagues a week.
“Sundays is sand volleyball,” Sanchez said. “Then Mondays is flag football, Tuesdays is adult kickball.
“I enjoy the competition. I make a lot of friends, and friends where we actually hang out and go out.”
Each league has a pay-for-play model. Six weeks of indoor volleyball starting in August at a social or athletic level costs non-members between $75-$85.
Privately owned social sports leagues are growing in size across the country. Organizing the leagues became such a large undertaking that the Sport & Social Industry Association has been connecting member organizations with resources since 2010.
Chris Giebner, a founding member of SSIA, has owned and operated Tampa Bay Club Sport since 2002.
“It’s not an industry for the faint of heart,” Giebner said. “The raw truth of it is we’re in a business where half your customers lose every night.”
He first participated in a social league when he moved to Florida from Cincinnati in 1996.
“I Joined a start up, fledgling soccer league as a free agent,” Giebner said, “then on that first day, I ended up meeting who became my wife.”
It is a story that Giebner has seen repeated in the 30 years since.
“We have tracked, probably hundreds of marriages,” Giebner said. “I’ve probably been to dozens of weddings of people I met through Club Sport. We’ve seen dozens of on-field marriage proposals.”
Romances put the social in social sports in Phoenix as well. Jordyn Graham joined a Fray volleyball league when she moved to Phoenix from Texas. Michael Donovan moved to the area from New Hampshire.
“I would just show up at my game and leave,” Graham said. “He was like ‘hey, you should start coming to free play.’ And I was like ‘hmmm, maybe’ and then he was like ‘well here’s my number. I’ll text you.’”
Since then, the couple has dated and are now engaged.
“With us being together, it brought me out more,” Graham said. “Meet more people, made new friends and other connections.”
Tampa Bay Sports Club Sport has expanded into six cities in Florida and employs 15 full-time people with 80 part-time employees. They have about 80,000 players a year across their leagues, Giebner said He associates the growth to Gen Zs and Millennials moving away from a drinking culture.
“Those generations aren’t drinking as much as Gen X, and my generation,” Giebner said. “More of those generations are looking for something active to do, and I think our industry and our product is right up that alley.”
Fray United is headquartered in Washington D.C. and has leagues based out of Jacksonville, Florida, and Phoenix. Neste is the only full-time employee in Arizona and operates as the city commissioner. Sports options are available across the Valley spanning from Avondale, Glendale, Scottsdale and Gilbert.
“We always have new players joining us, which is so great,” Neste said. “You meet people that you wouldn’t meet in other areas, like going out to a bar.”
Phoenix Fray offers two divisions on Sunday nights: a social and an athletic. Athletic includes a higher level of play for a bit more competition.
“We want to be in the Athletic league,” Sanchez said. “Our team is pretty good but we just can’t seem to win when it comes to the playoffs.
“Everybody’s always asking when are you guys going to athletic and I’m like “no, we need to win social before we deserve to move up.’”
The sport still prioritizes socialization and Neste highlighted the access social leagues offer to players who are new to the sport.
“The way youth sports is going is everyone is specializing,” Neste said. “I think more adults are going to want to try new things because they never got to try it when they were children.”
At Indian School Park, the athletic and social leagues compete for the first two scheduled hours. By 9 p.m., the teams gather in a circle and count off into new teams that combine the levels of play.
“We stay after and we mix the teams up,” Neste said. “It’s a lot harder to yell at someone during the game if you know them on a personal level, right? So, we encourage them to interact with each other instead of just their own team.”
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2026/06/17/social-sport-leagues-adults-arizona/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org”>Cronkite News</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/cronkitenews.azpbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/favicon1.png?resize=85%2C85&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=104222″ style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2026/06/17/social-sport-leagues-adults-arizona/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/cronkitenews.azpbs.org/p.js”></script>
