My post above was somehow truncated. I wanted to say that youth sports in general have seen a decrease in participation over recent years. You might expect that in football with safety concerns, but it’s true in baseball and basketball, too. Even soccer participation is down since 2008. Ice hockey and lacrosse have seen growth, but they’re still far behind the other sports.
Personally, I think the big 3 (baseball, basketball, football) have gotten to a point at the youth level where if the sport is not your top priority, you’re in danger of falling far behind. It seems harder these days for kids to play multiple sports throughout the year.
I think the problem there is a kid pretty much has to pick a sport by around age 12 because after that, teams get pretty selective. There are few “rec” teams out there where a kid can suck at a sport but still get to play.
And then after about age 12 if they find they just arent good enough at a sport to be a starter they realize they wont be good enough tend to drop out.
If you look at the high school level (or even jr high) a school with over 1,000 students might only have 2-3 teams for each sport (say basketball or soccer) so most kids wont get to play and they dont have say an intramural league.
Participation in Little League Baseball has hovered between 2.5 million and 3 million kids every year for the last 25 years. I know that there are non-affiliated leagues that may rise and fall in participation levels, but “youth baseball” is extremely stable and probably not in any danger of going anywhere.
In terms of the NFL, ESPN is not a gateway to your local NFL team. And as a general rule, ESPN MNF is rarely a prestige game.
Everyone in the United States is able to watch their home team(s) play every week on free, over-the-air broadcasts. The only exception is if the game is blacked out due to poor ticket sales.
The next time your local NFL team is playing a game that’s being broadcast on ESPN or NFL Network, check your free channels. It’s also being simulcast on one of them. (Often on the channels formerly known as the WB and UPN.)
You don’t even need cable or satellite. If you have an antenna, you can watch every game your local team(s) play completely free.
Up here in the frozen north, it’s still hockey, hockey, hockey, although at the kids level soccer is big and growing. And in western Canada curling is still huge. The first televised tournament starts the day after Labour Day! Not so big in Quebec, though.
When I moved here 47 years ago, horse racing was big. Then it started to decline and the big race track two miles away was demolished a couple decades and shopping centers have replaced it. Football still gets a nice turnout, but I think pro soccer is prospering.
That data only goes up to 2007 and includes global official Little League organizations. It also actually shows a drop of 1% - 3% each year. However, I agree youth baseball isn’t going anywhere. Not anytime soon. But from 2008 to 2012 baseball participation was down over 7% in the US among kids age 6 - 18. That’s from this WSJ article. There are still millions of kids playing, though.
So maybe as kids get older, around age 12 as Urbanredneck said, they start weeding out players who aren’t very serious.
Another cite while looking for a list of recent blackouts:
[quoteThe NFL is the only sports league that televises every one of its games in local markets on free, over-the-air television.[/quote]
Video gaming is now a scholarship activity at some colleges and the national tournaments are fairly big deals with substantial prize money involved. Maybe that’s the forerunner of my feeling that the sport which will reign at the top of the pyramid a few decades from now hasn’t been invented yet.
The biggest trends I’ve seen locally (Southern California) are a rapid growth in lacrosse and a big decline in anything (except football) that could cause injuries that could increase liability premiums.
The high school I went to has eliminated both boys and girls gymnastics. They also recently demolished the old aquatic center and built a new pool facility. When it opened, the first thing everyone said was “what happened to the diving boards?” Gone. Fear of lawsuits.
Along the beach, upright paddleboarding is getting big. Whether it will continue to grow or is just a temporary fad remains to be seen.
Rising or falling in terms of… what? Participation or spectator interest or both?
Lacrosse is definitely booming as a high school sport, but I don’t see any indication at all of growing demand for a professional lacrosse league, or even major increases in attendance at college lacrosse games.
One thing about high school sports is that almost every sport except football is played at a higher level in the club circuit. The coaching is better and you can build a team of the best players from 3 or 4 or more high schools.
Soccer, volleyball, basketball (most recently, with AAU) and almost every individual sport (golf, tennis, swimming, track and field, etc.) are no longer associated with high school, except in small towns. It is a rare occasion to see a college coach at a HS soccer game, but they are thick as flies at a club tournament. A number of club coaches discourage their best players from playing in HS because they are more likely to get injured playing against less skilled players than highly skilled ones. (I am mostly talking about soccer since that is what I am personally familiar with.) Maybe non-contact sports are different. Still, a decent top level club team would wipe the floor with the State Champion school team almost all the time.
I don’t see this changing in the future. I could easily see an AAU program start up say, a winter basketball league that would compete directly with HS ball. Hell, in basketball it sort of already exists. Some schools are really basketball teams with a school attached. One better known one is the Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. They have games in TN, MO, NC, KY, DC, NY, Hawaii, CA, MA, and Nebraska this season. To be fair, Oak Hill is a legit school, unlike some (many) others. Their basketball players are mostly on scholarship, though.
A lot of people have said golf, but I think it’s at it’s low point. When Tiger was popular it brought a lot of young people into the spot and people thought they would be golfers for life. The reality is that golf is not a sport for 20 and 30 year olds with families. It takes too long and it costs too much. Those people are still fans, they know the rules, and they probably have a set of clubs in the garage. In the coming years, when their kids are older and they are better off financially they will start to golf again.
I think Tiger gave a lot of people the idea that golf was booming, and led to the construction of a lot of new courses at a time when demand was actually starting to dwindle.
There’s no question that Tiger popularized the sport of golf, but to attribute the new course boom and bust to him gives him too much credit/blame. The new course construction boom started in the late 80’s, long before Tiger was ever heard of, and ended in the early 200’s when Tiger was at his peak. In 2006, when the number of course closings first exceeded new courses being built, was one of Tiger’s best years and well before his game/life went to hell. He won eight times in '06 including two Majors.
If someone is to blame, it is the real estate business for the oversupply. A golf course is actually a cheap way to sell a large number of expensive homes quickly. There are some great horror stories of Florida golf communities where the courses were abandoned and people have $1M homes surrounded by weedy overgrown ex-fairways full of poisonous and huge snakes (pythons) and gators. Good luck selling those homes.