In which sports do you see a decline and in which do you see a rise?
For example, golf. I know in our area 2 golf courses have closed while at the same time a Top Golf facility has opened and is doing great business. I think the issue there is regular golf just takes too darn long to play (4-5 hours a game for 18 holes) while a player can go out to Top Golf and be done in an hour or less.
Tennis - seems to be on the rise.
Football - keeps declining
Lacrosse - is growing and most of our high schools have added it.
Soccer - keeps growing
Extreme marathons - like the Tuff Mudder seem to be growing.
I agree we’ve probably hit peak golf, or at least the sport is headed for a serious reorganization. Local courses are competing very desperately for money, and in large urban areas like this one (Toronto) the land dedicated to a course in the urban or suburban sprawl had better produce money of the pressure to build something on it will sweep it away. Golf is a very expensive sport and median salaries aren’t rising like they used to.
I think in general we’re seeing a movement towards more fitness-oriented and physically demanding sports. Bowling peaked decades ago, golf peaked, IMHO, about eight years ago. Stuff like rock climbing and long distance running is zooming upwards in popularity. That is where the REAL sports growth is; pushing the body to its limit. The idea of a 10K mud run being something a lot of people would pay to do would have seemed insane 30 years ago, and now it’s a growth industry. Tennis peaked years ago, and I suspect it’s going to stay about as popular as it is now.
Among team sports, I really don’t think, in North America, much is going to change anytime soon. The top pro sports are all insanely profitable and make it difficult for anyone else to break through. People keep saying football is on the decline but the NFL is rolling in money and fans keep watching, so if football’s declining it’s doing it remarkably slowly.
It’s the bottom of football that’s the problem. The NFL is doing just fine, but there are youth level programs being shuttered for lack of participation. There are more alternatives for kids to play, and even with rules changes intended to help player safety about every year I’ve been reffing, it still isn’t a safe sport. Some of the big high schools in the area that I ref are having low turnout that would have shocked people a while ago. At some point, schools will start dropping it in favor of sports that are cheaper to staff, equip, and insure. It isn’t imminent, but it’s coming.
My curling club is at capacity and has a waiting list of people wanting to join. Our open houses fill up fast and there have been a few new clubs (Portland and Denver that I know of) in recent years.
It may not be a massive groundswell of support, but it’s on a gradual rise.
Yeah, it’s easy for people to just take football injuries for granted, when it’s professional players getting hurt. It’s a lot harder when it’s your own son, and word is spreading about those injuries. My nephew is on a team now that had to extend its age of eligibility by a year, and still only managed to come up with 14 players (with the predictable result that, since their players are younger, and they can’t rotate them out, they’re getting creamed).
I live in a pretty whitebread and well-educated community and football is declining rapidly. Parents realize that their kids are 100% more likely to have a good life by using their brains rather than their brawn. The poorer minority community (such as it is) is Hispanic, and they don’t produce many football players. Also, one former player from the local University is a poster child for post-NFL brain injury.
Golf is definitely declining. It’s a sport from a different era that just doesn’t fit the modern lifestyle.
Wrestling, for whatever reason, is declining. My kid’s school was a wrestling powerhouse until around 2000, but now they have trouble filling their weightclasses. (MMA, maybe?)
No data, but to me skiing and snowboarding are declining, especially among those over 30. It used to be a family friendly activity, but it is much rarer to see middle aged parents on the slopes. Like golf, it is an expensive, all-day activity plus the risk of injury is high.
Soccer and especially lacrosse are growing.
Don’t know about the trends in cycling and running - they’ve always been huge around here. They did just build an outdoor velodrome near me, though. Never seen one of those before. I told a friend of mine during construction that a rich religious guy was building an Ark after some major flooding hit us two years ago. He totally bought it.
Other major sports seem to be maintaining their status quo.
Depends a little on what we mean by rise and decline. TV viewership or youth participation?
They’re interconnected, of course, but in terms of viewership, when I was growing up the three broadcast networks had some combination of football, golf and tennis, and that was about it.
Now, we have four broadcast networks, three or four different ESPNs, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, the regional Fox networks, Universal sports, and something like a dozen networks for individual colleges or college conferences. So a lot of sports are getting a chance simply because they had hours to fill.
So how much is “I liked it, but it was never on,” and how much is “Hey, this is new and cool, I’ll keep watching more?”
I think the era of huge TV contracts for sports-focused networks is limited. Fights between content carriers and Networks are getting more frequent and nastier. ESPN charges a fortune for their programming, and while 25% of TV viewers can’t live without it, the other 75% don’t watch it at all or infrequently. ESPN could start a dedicated 24 hour channel showing only Yak racing and force carriers to pay for it under threat of pulling their access to football.
College conferences should sock away the huge $$ they are getting right now because the contracts won’t last very long. Football is responsible for about 70% of their viewership, men’s basketball 25% and everything else shares the 5%. Just because water polo is on TV doesn’t mean anyone watches it.
Netflix or someone else will figure out the economics of a la carte sports programming and it will change everything.
In terms of participation I’ve no doubt football is on the decline. I would never let my kids play football. In terms of the popularity of it as a spectator sport, it’s not.
Participation and viewership aren’t especially well correlated in sports.
With the Hunger Games movies I’m seeing more interest in archery.
Paintball is still big but I’ve heard its peaked out but declining.
Airsoft seems to be growing.
Lacrosse - is growing and in our area only limited by a lack of coaches and officials. Lots of boys come out of soccer and want something more “violent” so to speak and thats either hockey or lacrosse.
Hockey though, is always limited by ice time. It’s big in Chicago and St. Louis I know. The NHL should put out some money to build more ice rinks. Inline hockey is growing.
Is high school hockey still big in Minnesota?
High school football in our area is declining and in the small towns often its 2 or more schools combining to make a team now.
The distance running craze is incredibly reminiscent of the poker craze of the early 2000s. In fact, the same friends I started playing poker with in 2003 are all now running 5Ks every weekend (I’m not, because weekends are for bacon).
What I can’t figure out is where the trigger was. The poker craze was clearly related to the pocket cam which allowed you to see players’ hole cards during televised games. Nothing like that has popped up in distance running, as far as I can recall.
The poker craze was also kicked off by not only the televised poker games but the Chris Moneymaker thing, “Rounders,” and a few other things.
Long distance running is, I think, not at all the same thing, even if it seems coincidental. I think we are seeing a movement in North America towards greater emphasis on physical fitness and nutrition. 5K runs are part of the same trend that have brought us more people biking, going to rock climbing gyms, and staying away from McDonald’s (McDonald’s has never been less profitable in the USA than it is now, really.) The 5K run is just an easy, cheap way to get into fitness.
Golf saw a huge bump (both in interest and participation) during Tiger Woods’ era of dominance, and back then, there was a lot of talk about the sport’s renaissance among younger players. When Tiger no longer dominated the game, and was making headlines for his private life, I think that casual interest in the sport waned.
Plus, Woods’ decline coincided with the economic downturn of 2008, and more U.S. golf courses have closed than opened every year since 2006 – and most of those closures have been in public courses, which are comparatively cheaper to play on. It became more difficult to play the game inexpensively, and this Forbes article suggests that the decline of the middle class is one of the prime factors in the sport’s recent decline.
Disc golf seems to be still gaining traction. We have a ton of courses and they all seem to stay busy all summer long. Even the pay-to-play courses stay busy.
I’ve met a few guys on the course that used to play traditional gold that have swithed over to disc golf.
Their reasons are pretty much the same as mine. It’s cheaper, doesn’t take as much time, you don’t need reservations, you can play solo if you like, equipment is cheaper, etc.
Just the fact that there are disk golf courses at all is a sign that the sport is taking off. It’s played a ton on college campuses, but usually just using convenient trees and flagpoles and the like as the “holes”.
A course was created in a park near where I grew up. When I was back in the neighborhood a few years ago, I wanted to give it a try. Looked up the park’s website, and the game seemed a little more involved than I expected (at least to do it properly). It would have been nice to have someone to show me the ropes.
That’s pretty much how I got started. Saw a local course I wanted to try with my kid.
Bought a starter set of 3 discs for about $25, liked it but realized I didn’t know what I was doing. Went to some websites of the major disc makers (Innova, Discraft) to read up on it, watched some instructional youtube videos, bought some more discs, then found all the courses in my area on DGCourseReview.com.