Pyramid
Scheme
How sport became an empire, why it is collapsing, and how we rebuild the game.
The top is intact. The base is already gone.
For a hundred and sixty years we built organized sport into an empire — with its own rulers, its own rituals, and its own priesthood. This is the sourced, unsentimental story of how that empire is collapsing from the base up, who profits when it does, and how we rebuild the game around the only people who were ever the point: the kids in the gym before practice.
A story about money is the one everybody tells. These are the numbers behind the other one.
Not opinions. Reported, sourced figures — the kind that describe an institution coming apart in plain sight.
Every figure in the book is sourced and listed at the back.
This is not a book about kids these days. It is a book about the machine they are leaving.
When a child sleeps in the wrong hotel and is barred from a game. When a volunteer parent has to buy a number before they are allowed to coach. When a family logs more weekly hours in organized sport than the child has years on earth. Each looks like a local complaint. Line them up and they are the shape of a system in decline.
Pyramid Scheme reads that system the way you would read a society: a founding empire, a set of rulers who slowly captured it, and a base of ordinary participants who are quietly walking away. The collapse is not coming. In the places that matter most, it has already happened — it just looked like nothing.
The comfortable version blames screens, or soft kids, or the weather. The honest version follows the money and the power: who was handed control of a child's permission to play, and who profits when the base finally gives way.
And then it does the harder thing. It lays out how we rebuild — how to uncage the game, give people their voice back, and restore the thing every one of us actually fell in love with. Not nostalgia. A plan, drawn from twenty years on the floor and a back catalogue of receipts.
Four parts. Eighteen chapters. One argument you won't un-see.
The Society
How a game became a 160-year empire — with its own territory, its own authority, and its own priesthood handing out permission.
The Curse
The slow capture: how the people running sport quietly turned a child's access into an asset — and taught everyone to stay quiet about it.
The Ruins
What collapse actually looks like — not a crash, but a division that quietly can't be filled — and who is perfectly happy to see it happen.
The Rebuild
The part that matters: a concrete plan to give the game back to the people who play it, and a way to measure whether it's working.
“I blew that whistle several thousand times. It took me about a decade to notice I was interrupting something better than what I was about to run.”From the epilogue — The Game After the Pyramid
For everyone who still believes the game is worth saving.
Choose your format.
The Kindle edition is available to pre-order right now. Hardcover and audiobook are on the way — drop your email and we'll tell you the day each one goes live.
Kindle Edition
Read it the moment it releases. Pre-order now and it lands on your device automatically on launch day.
Pre-order on AmazonHardcover
The one for the shelf, the coach's office, and the association boardroom. Pre-order opens shortly.
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Audiobook
For the drive to the rink and the walk around the block. Narrated edition in production.
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Ken King has coached for twenty years. This is the book that argument was building toward.
Based in Calgary, Ken writes about performance, sport, and the systems people build around them. Pyramid Scheme turns a coach's-eye view into a full reckoning with the institution itself — grounded in reported facts rather than feelings.
His rule for this book was simple: nothing here asks you to take a feeling as evidence. The feelings are his. The evidence is at the back — a vote that happened on a date, a rule that exists in writing, a number that was reported.
“For the kids in the gym before practice.”
Frequently asked
What is Pyramid Scheme about?
It argues that organized sport is a 160-year-old institution now collapsing at the grassroots. Using fully sourced numbers, it explains how the empire was built, why it is failing from the base up, who profits when it collapses, and how we rebuild the game around the kids it was meant to serve.
Is it only about hockey, or only about Canada?
It draws heavily on Canadian data — hockey registration, the Calgary Olympic vote — because that is where the evidence is clearest. But the pattern it describes, from elite capture to rising costs to kids quietly leaving, shows up across sports and across countries.
When is it released, and in what formats?
The Kindle edition is available to pre-order now on Amazon. Hardcover and audiobook editions are on the way — add your email in the format section above and we'll notify you the day each one goes live.
Is this an anti-sport book?
The opposite. It is written by a coach of twenty years, for people who love the game, about protecting the thing that made them fall in love with it in the first place.
Are the claims actually sourced?
Yes. Every figure is sourced, and the sources are listed at the back. Where a chapter opens inside a scene, the scene is built from documented facts — nothing invented to carry an argument.
Who should read it?
Parents, coaches, volunteers, board members, administrators, policy makers, journalists — and anyone tired of watching the game get more expensive and less fun.
The base is already gone. The rebuild starts with reading it clearly.
Pre-order the Kindle edition today, and be first to know when the hardcover and audiobook land.