Keep in mind that this report is about public school participation. Private schools enrollment has surged in many places in NC especially Charlotte. Both Will Grier & Daniel Jones played for private schools & Providence Day has several D1 caliber players including 2 top ten 4 star recruits & lost 1 4 star recruit to Myers park

One reason there are fewer boys playing HS football is coaches pressuring kids to play the same sport year round instead of playing multiple sports. "Back in the day", it was a status symbol for good HS athletes to get a varsity letter in 3 sports. Much of the depth on the football team was provided by good all-around athletes whose primary sport was track, baseball, basketball, or something else.

Today, if a good athlete's primary sport is baseball, for example, he's on a travel baseball team with a coach who tells him that if he skips fall ball and goes out for HS football instead, he might lose his place in the starting lineup, and if he's on the bench when he goes back to baseball, college scouts won't see him play and he won't get scholarship offers. Parents who have already invested several thousand dollars in their son's travel team want him to get a college scholarship, so they're on the coach's side in that discussion.

(08-30-2019 12:37 PM)jacksfan29 Wrote:  

(08-29-2019 07:49 PM)CardinalJim Wrote:  I also believe “The Browning of American” has some to do with it. As the immigrant populations increase, interest in the sports they follow will increase.

I think this is something people are missing. My son's HS is 40% Hispanic. We had 90 kids go out for soccer. Only 60 were kept. Our FB program had 48 kids go out, no cuts.

We are not the only school in the area who are seeing this occur.

circumstances are similar and yet different in California. Basketball is huge in LA and the Bay Area and Sac. The youth leagues and AAU are bursting, with gyms nearly impossible to find. Basketball at my son's HS had 90 kids go out for the two Freshman teams (19-24 kids a year depending on the talent line), and that feeds into a dozen for the JV team (basically a Soph team) of 14 (add a top Freshman, and either a Junior held back due to injury or very young age or a transfer). Only about 5 go to Varsity from that 90 going out.

Football is also no cut at all but a very few schools now, less than half as many go out for Freshman football (or JV at public schools). Soccer is competitive but not like Basketball. Volleyball is strong because a lot of Basketball kids switch when they are either bench warmers or they failed to make Freshman or JV. The middle schools long added Volleyball to take handle all the kids cut from Basketball in the 7th grade. It may explain why the Bay Area has a 7 current NBA players, about 4x as many as our population would suggest. And this is an area that is 30% Asian and 35% Hispanic.

Soccer does well at the youth level, but it's generally the 2nd sport of Basketball and other sports players. It very much thins out by middle school. At the younger ages it is dominated by White and Asian kids. But most of them leave the sport in middle school. Hispanic kids take over, but they were not the younger talent. On the Girls side the Whites stay in it and you can see that all the way up to college.

One sport that surprised me about participation level was badminton. It sort of makes sense due to the huge Asian population locally, but it's also big with Hispanic kids (no clue why). I think it's popular because the way they run it is as a rec level in HS, with a select team of a dozen for competition. So you get 100 kids in the program, and it's just playing a game for 90 of them to play for an hour a day, and only the best 6 boys and 6 girls actually compete for the school. My son did this in the Basketball off season, and on sheer athleticism made Varsity having never played the sport before (he and one of his friends knew somebody on the team, who said "hang out with me"). They had on really good Chinese kid who was on the Junior Olympic squad, but the rest of the squad was basically a PE class. Whatever, it got a bunch of kids to play something and run around (beats bowling for a workout). I think also no parents give a crap, so it's more fun, no pressure.

Most of you guys live in areas where urban growth is not removing the open spaces for fields and there are adequate facilities for every sport anyone wants. But in the Bay Area we are transitioning to high density with housing inadequate and sports facilities vanishing as the number of kids increase. Our participation rate dropping has more to do with resource scarcity and rapid urbanization than with anything else. Every program is pretty much filled to capacity and turning kids away. The exception being football, which is in a steep decline of it's own, with no shortage of facilities -- this is documented from Pop Warner to High School.