This research aims to reflect on the role of the media in facilitating access and encouraging the practice of youth sports in Brazil. When it comes the time for new editions of the Olympic Games, the Brazilian media tends to highlight the importance of supporting youth sports, however, it does not sustain this position with effective actions throughout the years that succeed them. I also argue that the media, or media visibility, has a very important role in major political, cultural and social projects that, consequently, affect specific projects of individuals or particular social groups; by taking part in collective actions that involve other social actors, media visibility is vital for building a favorable context for obtaining positive results in terms of institutional recognition, funding, incentives and opportunities in general coming from the public authorities, from the private sector, and from society as a whole; so, media representation and social representativeness are here considered as closely intertwined topics. The research problem was identified from a preliminary fieldwork carried out on daily basis in Rio de Janeiro s youth swim teams practices and meets, besides an analysis of different types of media, among mass communication, websites and social media of swimming federations, and communication materials inherent to such teams - all will be described throughout this text, which also aims to emphasize: (a) its theoretical approaches considering youth studies and the mediatization of the concept of youth (Groppo, 2000; Pais, 2003; Rocha e Pereira, 2009), and also on what I refer to as the cultural politics of sports (Carrington, 2009), (b) its possible contributions in the task of expanding the Brazilian field of academic studies dedicated to the relations between communication and sports (Helal e Mostaro, 2020), and (c) its potential to collaborate, through media studies, with public and private policies meant to encourage and expand the practice of competitive sports - and swimming, in particular - by young athletes, in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil as a whole. The methodology is inspired by the ideas of (auto)ethnography proposed by Carrington (2008) and Pereira (2019) and based on the notion of intellectual craft described by Mills (1975). The idea of carrying out a complementary research in the United States arose from the aforementioned preliminary fieldwork, where the country was unanimously mentioned, in interviews and informal conversations with members of the Brazilian competitive swimming scene (coaches, athletes of all ages and their family members) as a reference when it comes to youth sports, and youth swimming in particular. The research findings point to the media s contribution in three main spheres: 1) to facilitate the access of young people to competitive sports practice; 2) to encourage young athletes to invest in the sport; and 3) to publicize and improve the environment of its meets and tournaments.