Caitlin Clark. Artificial intelligence. NIL. Private equity. Pickleball.
What do those national flash points have in common?
All have also become influencers for youth sports participation in recent years, according to the Aspen Institute’s National State of Play 2024 report, which was released Tuesday.
The annual report, put out by Aspen’s Sports & Society Program, also details how girls sports participation is increasing while boys participation is significantly declining; Black children are playing sports far less than they once did; and kids are specializing in one sport even more.
Meanwhile, 39.8% of children aged 6-17 regularly participated in a team sport in 2023, the highest rate since 2015, according to data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), which tracks participation.
But nine of the 16 sports evaluated for the Project Play report experienced lower participation rates in 2023.
Some kids are getting priced out, others edged out by competition to make teams, while overall physical activity among U.S. youths received a D- from the Physical Activity Alliance.
“The purpose of youth sports is not to create the next Tiger Woods,’ Tom Cove, senior advisor for the SFIA, says in the report. ‘It should be to provide a quality experience to the vast number of kids so they enjoy it, and part of that is winning, but not the main goal. If we lose sight of that, we’re doing kids and families a disservice and we’re doing sport in general a disservice.”
Aspen’s Sports & Society Program, which assists leaders in building healthy communities through Project Play, shared the full report with USA TODAY Sports before its release.
The report draws on surveys, interviews with leaders in the youth sports sector, media accounts and additional research.
Here are some highlights, and what youth and adolescent athletes and their parents can learn from them:
Fewer boys are playing sports, while girls participation is rising
Half of boys aged 6 to 17 participated regularly in sports in 2013, but only 41 percent did in 2023, according to SFIA data. Boys participation has sat at 41% or lower for eight straight years.
But girls aged 6 to 12 (34%) and 13-17 (38%) regularly played at higher levels in 2023 than in any recent year dating to at least 2012.
“I would speculate there’s an element to this that making teams has become really hard, and more boys can’t make the team, so they stop playing,” Cove said. “In general, girls aren’t getting cut nearly the way boys are. My sense is youth sports have become a self-fulling prophecy around travel and competition, and there aren’t enough places to play when you get cut.”
Since 2013, the core participation gap between boys and girls had shrunk from 15.4 percentage to 5.4 points.
“The decline in male sports participation could be one more reflection of this widespread decline in boys and men’s achievement,” Linda Flanagan, author of ‘Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports — and Why It Matters’, says in the Project Play report. “We also shouldn’t discount the impact of phones, which became widely available in 2012, coinciding with the start of the teenage mental health crisis.”
Karen Issokson-Silver, vice president of research and education for the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), suggests cost to play might be impacting participation rates for boys.
According to WSF research, women surveyed in their 20s reported the highest barrier to play sports as a child was due to costs.
“It would not be surprising that this would show up in participation rates, and perhaps more so for boys where the cost of play could be considerably higher given a more competitive level of play available to them and the transportation, equipment and coaching costs associated with that,” Issokson-Silver said.
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Black children are playing sports less than they once did, while Hispanic participation is on the rise
According to SFIA data, 35% of Black youth aged 6-17 regularly participated in sports during 2023, down from 45% in 2013. That year, they played at a higher rate than their white peers. White, Hispanic and Asian American children played sports more frequently in 2023 than Black youth.
“In connection to the plight of Black communities more broadly, Black youth sport involvement is integrally connected to socio-ecological conditions that are rooted in historical, political, economic, and cultural complexities,” authors of the National Black Sport Participation and Physical Activity Report wrote in 2024. “For example, despite only constituting 13.5% of the U.S. population, Black people represent 20.1% of those who live in poverty.”
Joseph Cooper, co-author of the Black sports participation and activity report, said the COVID pandemic, much lower participation rates by Black girls than boys, school closings, unemployment rates, health disparities, family compositions and Black youth interest in other activities like music, arts, dance, esports and multimedia could be impacting the decline in sports participation.
“It’s hard to understate the impact of COVID on the Black community,” Cooper, director of the Sport Leadership and Administration Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said in the Project Play report. “There was medical mistrust within communities of when it was safe to play, the opportunity structure financially to play was impacted, and a number of programs simply closed.”
SFIA data finds that regular sports participation for Hispanic children aged 6-12 increased 14% from 2022 to 2023, the highest since 2016.
“The increased sports participation is due to parents’ increased knowledge and understanding of the value sports provides to children, which has been a recent change in the Hispanic community,” Patty Godoy, co-founder of the ELLA Sports Foundation, which empowers leadership in Latina athletes, said in the report.
“For Hispanics, investing in youth sports is now seen as an investment on social capital. Sports is seen as a vehicle to attend university and break the cycle of economic challenges and social/cultural disconformities, thus opening doors for more lucrative futures.”
However, children from the lowest-income homes in some states (New Mexico, Mississippi, Louisiana) with low youth sports participation rates and large minority populations play sports at up to half the rate of those from the highest-income group.
Kids are specializing in one sports even more
The average number of sports kids aged 6-17 regularly played in 2023 was 1.63, down 13% since 2019, according to SFIA data. More than 10 years ago, children averaged more than two sports.
According to the Project Play report, the number started decreasing amid the increased commercialization of youth sports and pressure to pick one sport at younger ages.
Such commercialization, overtraining and burnout within youth sports have been contributors to 70% of kids quitting sports by age 13.
Michele LaBotz, the medical director of the athletic training program at the University of New England and a TrueSport Expert Advisory Panel member, told USA TODAY Sports that we’re moving toward individual recommendations regarding an athlete’s possible specialization.
“When counseling athletes/families, a strengths-based approach focusing on what athletes can/should be doing to optimize their development rather than emphasizing what they should not be doing seems to be more effective,” LaBotz wrote in an email after speaking last week at a National Athletic Trainers’ Association media briefing on emerging trends in youth sports specialization.
“There is currently a great deal of information on injury prevention,’ she says, ‘but very little practical information helping families and athletes decide if/when sports specialization is appropriate, and determining any impacts that specialized training/competition (beneficial or not) may be having on their athlete.”
Tying the Caitlin Clark effect — and other ‘disruption’ — to youth sports
Among the report’s top youth sports trend to watch: Clark, the transcendent basketball star, might be helping shape the youth landscape in the near future.
Sports participation rates for girls have gone up during Clark’s time at Iowa and the WNBA. Cove, of the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, believes she plays a role in the rise and compares it with the participation increases among girls that also occurred in the 1990s when Mia Hamm was a national soccer star.
Unlike those days, though, youth sports has become a multibillion dollar industry. The vast majority of the country allows high school athletes to monetize their name, image and likeness (NIL). NIL is another ‘disruption’ to the youth sports landscape, according the Project Play.
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According to Project Play, the analytics that dominate pro and college sports are now trickling down to youth sports. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) can now be used by many platforms to create virtually instant highlight clips without spending hours going through game footage.
“Technology could create a new arms race and increase the unhealthy aspects of youth sports as children and parents fight for attention from recruiters and on social media,’ Jon Solomon, the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program Community impact director, writes in the report. ‘The data is now here for families with means to chase certain athletic metrics. How we use it is up to us. There’s a real risk it will ramp up even more the pressure on children and the costs to play.”
Another danger of driving up the cost of youth sports is the encroachment of private equity into the multibillion industry.
Billionaires David Blitzer and Josh Harris paid $116 million in 2021 for an 80% share of the Cooperstown All Star Village, a wildly popular venue for kids’ baseball tournaments, and have since acquired more than a dozen companies built around youth sports.
Pickleball, flag football and traditional sports thrive. Some decline in participation.
Pickleball, the feel-good paddle sport enjoyed around the country, became a varsity high school sport in 2024. Montgomery County (Maryland) launched it as part of its corollary sports program that provides increased access and participation opportunities for students with disabilities.
According the Project Play Report, students with and without disabilities participate, and some schools had to turn away students because of the popularity of the program.
Flag football, backed by the NFL and some of its former stars, is a girls high school varsity sport in 13 states and became the fastest growing sport in the U.S. between from 2019 to 2023.
The rise in core youth sports participation is largely due to the popularity of the most popular sports. Basketball, baseball and soccer have the most participants, although soccer (along with wrestling) participation declined.
“Soccer is the sport that kids most often play first,” said Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program executive director. “But immediately, soccer starts losing them, as travel teams form and community leagues begin to wither, denying a sustained experience from late bloomers and kids whose families can’t afford the youth sports arms race. We’ve got to find a way to bring back in-town leagues.”
The states that have led the way among youth sports participation — Vermont (69%), Iowa (68%), North Dakota (67%), Wyoming (64%), Maine (64%), South Dakota (64%) and New Hampshire (64%) — are mostly rural and less populated. There are fewer kids, and fewer cuts.
Physical activity among half of U.S. youth barely gets a passing grade
Only 20 to 28 percent of youth aged 6-17 meet the 60 minutes of daily physical activity guideline, according to The Physical Activity Alliance’s latest U.S. Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth.
Other grades: Overall physical activity: (D-); organization sports participation (C-); active transportation or whether kids bike or walk to school (D-); sedentary behavier (D).
A ‘C’ grade indicates the United States is succeeding with about half of children.
Solomon, who authored the Project Play report, says it’s challenging to make overarching takeaways about the state of youth sports because the data often is lagging and tells only part of the story and no one experience summarizes every child.
But he says we’re seeing positive trends of children returning to sports at pre-pandemic levels, reflecting the value parents and their kids place in it.
“Unfortunately, there are also some children playing sports less, whether due to rising costs, transportation barriers, lack of quality programming or any programming in their community, or lack of interest by children,” Solomon tells USA TODAY Sports. “There continues to be a need for more affordable, local, quality sports programming that meets the needs and interests of young people.
‘We need to do a better job of asking kids what they want from sports and then listening to them. After all, it’s their experience, not ours as adults.”
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.