Where Have All The Teen Athletes Gone?

An alarming number of young teens are quitting sports, and It isn’t a recent phenomenon.

That's a lead from an article that has been bouncing about lately (it even turned up in my local newspaper) by Nadia Tahir (a probably-real freelance writer) and from a site called Wealth of Geeks. WOG seems to be an otherwise unremarkable content farm site, but this article has apparently touched a few nerves, or at least moved a few editors to pick it up. 

A popular headline is "Is Social Media A Major Reason Kids Quit Sports?" But that's not really the thrust of the article. A lot of young teens drop sports, for some reason. Whatever could it be?

Tahir's piece is basically a light rewrite of a PR release about one study. That study cited several causes, but it surveyed 70 current or past athletes from ages 8 to 18, and that is not a sample size I find particularly compelling. But it has moved a lot of ink since it was presented at the fall American Academy of Pediatricians conference. The study was actually conducted by The Nemours Foundation, a foundation funded through the will of Alfred I. du Pont in 1936 and dedicated to children's health. It's the foundation that put out the press release. 

One previous study found that 70% of children quit sports by age 13, and by 14 girls quit at twice the rate of boys. That study was a poll conducted by the National Alliance for Youth Sports back (and cited in article after article in the years since). That study also noted that only 1 in 3 go on to college sports. That study prompted a ton of press with ideas about why the phenomenon was occurring. Here in NW PA, we like our sports, and many observations seem on point. 

Katie Arnold at Outdoor Life observed that Back In Her Day, a student athlete could play several sports a year, but nowadays sports seasons run year round. In my neck of the woods, this may translate into school league, private independent league, "open practices" (which are non-mandatory because there are actual rules about how soon school sports can start practicing; these rules are observed about as closely as the speed limit on your local back road). City leagues, traveling teams are all the rage. My elementary-grade nephew (and his parents) spent a chunk of the year traveling every weekend to some soccer match somewhere, often many hours away. 

A story at CNN Health (2016) cites injuries, Young bodies are growing, muscles and connectors are stretchy and not fully set. Nor do young athletes always make great choices; I cannot count the number of times a student in my class seriously weighed "subject a broken bone to playing stress weeks before my doctor says it would be safe and thereby risk permanent injury" against "my team really needs me for the big game." 

The CNN piece includes an interview with Mark Hyman, a bit of an expert on youth sports, who points out that if Wal-Mart were losing 70% of its customers, changes would be made, "but in youth sports, we seem to be very satisfied with a 70% dropout rate." That matches an observation by Julianna Miner in the Washington Post (2016) that "our culture no longer supports older kids playing for the fun of it." In other words, the 70% departure rate is a feature, not a bug, as sports are aimed at "weeding out" the non-stars. In my community, the regular Little League season is pretty much over at the beginning of summer vacation, because the purpose of the regular season is not so that kids can play ball in the summer, but to sort out who will be selected to play on the All-Star teams--those are the teams that have a summer season and play the Important Games.

As Miner puts it, "It's not fun anymore because it's not designed to be." It's serious business, and children who aren't willing to give 100% are seen as a drag on the team. The demands are constant. As a person who worked in the performing area, I was always envious of coaches who could set the time for practice on the day of practice, with the expectation that athletes will, of course, prioritize practice over anything else in their lives. 

All of this is exacerbated by the decline in teacher-coaches. Back In My Day, coaches were all teachers, and while they could be pretty driven (and who didn't know at least one teacher was only a teacher because he wanted to coach), but they were aware that students had other responsibilities. Civilian coaches, who are much more prevalent now, are much more likely to imagine that students do not have any lives outside the sport. 

And why have so many teachers stopped coaching? In part, it's parents, who have shifted more toward the idea that the team is there to serve the needs of their athlete, and not vice versa. Overhyped parents aren't affecting only coaching; in my neck of the woods, it has become harder to get officials to work games. In our league, some schools must have Saturday football games because there are no longer enough officials to cover all games under Friday night lights.

The other reason for the loss of so many young athletes, I'm betting, is simple burn out. Some sports start out at 5 or 6 years old, and very quickly start talking about commitment and dedication and moving the sport to the center of the child's life. Fun? That's for losers who don't take the game seriously enough. By the time they are 13, they have spent half of their lives playing the sport, and they're done. 

I'm also going to point out that the athletes that they would have interviewed for that 2014 study would have been the first wave of students to grow up under No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, Common Core, and high stakes testing, all of which went a long way toward making school itself less fun and more high-pressure.

Also, we don't seem to have figures on pre-2014 sports drops. But the further back we go, the harder it would be to measure, because the further back we go, the less we see of 5th grade sports and year-round sports. We can't talk about people dropping out of sports by age 13 because for many that was when they started. All of which is in itself a measure of what's different about sports.

The more recent study (of 70 whole students) cited a correlation between screen time and sports involvement, but correlation doesn't tell us much. The three factors that the researchers noted were "coaching issues, poor body image comparison from social media and the competitive pressure of the sport." Are students quitting sports because they don't look as good as sports folks online? Meh. Maybe. But student athletes absolutely quit coaches rather than the sport itself, and the high pressure part goes along with everything we've already noted. 

It's sexy to suggest that this is one more thing we can blame on social media, but I'm not convinced. I can imagine that taking a beating on social media over a poor performance could be a factor, but it seems less likely that potential athletes are quitting basketball so they can spend more time on TikTok.

Nemours suggests "parents need to understand coaches' impact on youth sports participation and ensure that coaches have proper training to foster a positive environment for participation." Which is good advice, although I'd bet that in many cases, the coach hiring interview consists of two questions-- do you have your clearances, and are you willing to do this job.

Back in the original lead, Tahir calls the number of departing athletes "alarming," but I'm not sure who exactly is alarmed. School sports are set up to separate the championship wheat from the unserious chaff, and as such, I'm pretty sure that the system is working just as some folks think it ought to. 

Youth sports are great for so many things. We're just not sure, collectively, which purposes we want to pursue. Build character? Provide fun and activity for as many students as are interested? Grow future champions? Get lots of numbers in the win column? Feed egos? Provide valuable formative experiences for young men and women to carry into other parts of their lives? Foster school spirit? There are lots of possible choices, but I don't think we can pursue them all. The loss of participants tells us something, but it's not clear what, or if anybody really wants to know.