Interesting Article About #'s Participating in HS Sports

I'm not going to get into reading the article. Does the article take into account the US is going through a cycle where there are less kids than the last generation? We've passed through the kids of boomers in school. Does the article go by percentage of kids in sports or the actual numbers. If the numbers are equal to ten years ago participation is way up.

Most interesting part to me is soccer closing in.  Amazingly the number of schools playing soccer to basketball is still on 2/3 with 12K playing soccer to 18K playing basketball.  I would have thought it was higher.  

Numbers of girls participating has exploded since the 70's so no surprise there from 300k in 1972 to over 3MM by 2015.  Boys have grown by about 33% - mostly due to population expansion I would guess being fairly proportional to the 250mm in early 70's to about 350MM today.

The up and coming sport of lacrosse is almost absent from anywhere not on the Atlantic seaboard and in a small pocket in the Rust Belt with California being an exception.

I live part time in Maine. Portland has a population of 65,000. There are two LL's with a total of twelve teams. It's not due to travel baseball. It's due to lacrosse and spring soccer. In the summer there's also basketball leagues and football camps. Do you think the three high school baseball coaches are looking into the future and wondering how they're going to maintain competitive programs?

Our youth sport association starts soccer at four years old. I coached. It was like herding cats. I sometimes stood on the field holding a player's hand so they would leave.

Tee ball starts at five. Basketball starts at six. Inline hockey starts at six. Field hockey stars at six. Football starts at a certain weight. Independent organizations run youth lacrosse, hockey and track.

Soccer gets a head start. Many of the kids who like it and are athletic move on to community travel by age eight. This head start keeps people in soccer. Some of the best athletes at our high school are soccer players. This is a large classification high school that is typically competitive in the conference in almost every sport.

1290 girls playing baseball.  1468 boys playing fast pitch.

490,000 playing baseball overall.

That caught my eye also.Anyone ever heard of/know any HS that have girls baseball? I have never heard of it.

RJM posted:

I'm not going to get into reading the article. Does the article take into account the US is going through a cycle where there are less kids than the last generation? We've passed through the kids of boomers in school. Does the article go by percentage of kids in sports or the actual numbers. If the numbers are equal to ten years ago participation is way up.

Actual Numbers.

I believe one driver is the trend towards single-sport athletes. It increases the total number of kids participating in sports.

High school enrollment should approach or perhaps even reach all time peaks within the next 6 or 7 years -- the peak year ever for births in the U.S. was 2007 (higher even than the peak of the baby boom) -- especially considering that drop-out rates are far lower than they were for the baby boom kids.

None of this is a mystery. The folks coming into this country over the last half century are not inclined to play baseball. The segment of the population that loves baseball the most is in decline due to smaller family sizes. Simple.  

proudhesmine posted:

That caught my eye also.Anyone ever heard of/know any HS that have girls baseball? I have never heard of it.

Several of the smaller schools around where I live have girls playing high school varsity baseball. High School softball in Colorado is a fall sport. They actually had to change the rules here a couple of years ago to allow girls to play both softball and baseball. Before that, they couldn't play both. It became necessary for the small schools. Several of the high schools in my area have total enrollments under 50 students.