Kansas Wrestling Forums General Discussion Kids Folkstyle Participation numbers declining except hockey

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Are the kids alright?

By Bill King, Senior Writer

Published August 10, 2015


Participation in hockey has risen 44 percent among 6- to 17-year-olds in the five years since USA Hockey overhauled its youth programs.
Photo by: USA HOCKEY
When it instituted a trailblazing program that would become a model for athletic development across sports, USA Hockey anticipated a tough go, realizing it was slogging against the cultural current fueled by the emerging youth sports business.

Interstate travel. Year-round play. Single-sport specialization. “Elite” competition, too often defined by time and money invested rather than the actual level of play.

The architects of what would become USA Hockey’s American Development Model considered those trends to be more detrimental than developmental, particularly as they trickled down to the youngest children strapping on skates.


Travel teams and year-round training can limit a child to one sport, which some groups say leads to burnout.
Photo by: Getty Images And so, spurred by an internal study that revealed that 43 percent of children who tried hockey quit by age 9, the national governing body hit the reset button on its affiliated youth programs in 2010.

It pulled the plug on its 12-and-under pee wee national championship, reducing travel for younger players. It banned body-checking, responding to concerns about concussions. Most importantly, it laid out a boilerplate of recommendations — the skeleton of the ADM — adapting the game to make it more accessible and, in what was then an extreme example of zigging while its sports counterparts zagged, encouraging hockey players to play other sports.

Five years later, hockey not only has stemmed its decline, but reversed it, increasing participation 44 percent, from 517,000 to 743,000 among ages 6-17, according to recently released data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. That growth has come even as football, baseball, basketball and soccer all have watched youth participation fall during that same span (see chart).

So admired has been USA Hockey’s approach, the U.S. Olympic Committee adopted its principals for broader use, recommending that its 48 national governing bodies do the same.

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“We’re like a lot of the other [national governing bodies], in that we can see what’s going on from the 30,000-foot level, but it’s hard to get to ice level and have an influence,” said Ken Martel, technical director of USA Hockey’s ADM program, who led both its design and implementation. “The average parent looks around and they go, ‘What we’re doing doesn’t seem right.’ In their gut, they know it’s not right. Why should my 9-year-old in Chicago have to travel to Boston to play in this tournament? All they hear is the loud voice of the youth coach who wants his piece of the glory or the business operation that’s going to take their money because they can convince you that your kid is the next coming.

“What we’re finding in our sport, because we’re preaching this, is that a lot of parents are going, ‘Whew. Thank you. I knew this wasn’t right.’ It’s nice to have someone who is actually saying so.”

As youth sports have taken off as a business, with weekend calendars chock-full of events that fill nearby hotel rooms and coaches of elite travel programs selling the promise of an athletic scholarship, the governing bodies that oversee those sports increasingly voice concern about the byproduct.

The tug for a child to choose one sport over another is a powerful one. The most successful club soccer programs and travel baseball and basketball teams offer year-round training and jam-packed tournament schedules. Some require parents to sign commitment forms that promise not only that the child won’t play for another team in that sport, but that they will prioritize that team’s activities over those in any other sport.

Sport specialization and year-round play long have been linked to burnout in sports such as tennis and figure skating. But doctors now also recognize a physical toll, suggesting that overtraining is behind an increase in injuries.

Even as some kids are playing one sport too much, more kids than ever are playing no sport at all. Inactivity among children 6-17 approached 20 percent last year, continuing a disturbing trend spanning the last six years. While much of the evidence is anecdotal, several national governing body heads said they worry that the push to specialize early weeds out good athletes before they have a chance to emerge. Among 6- to 17-year-olds, the average number of team sports played per participant has fallen 5.9 percent in the last five years, dropping from 2.14 to 2.01, according to the SFIA.

“We have millions of kids playing soccer,” Martel said. “But they’ll lose to Tobago. The last Olympics, we got pounded in the bronze game [in hockey] by Finland. We’ve got more kids playing hockey in the state of Michigan than they do in all of Finland.

“We have all these resources. We have 100,000 8-year-olds playing hockey. But we burn them up and turn them around. Not only is it not what’s best for the kids, it’s not what’s best for the sport.”

With those trends as a backdrop, youth participation became a key item on the agenda at the most recent meeting of the Association of Chief Executives for Sport, which brought together the heads of the nonprofit NGBs in Detroit in June.

Galvanized by a presentation by Skip Gilbert, the U.S. Tennis Association’s managing director of professional tennis operations, they agreed to work together more closely to address common problems.

“We’re each in our own little silos, worried about what we’re doing about these similar problems,” Martel said. “We seem to be replicating the same effort. We’re fighting the culture in our society. You talk to each other, and you realize it’s not just about any one sport.”

“We’re starting to come together around this, and that’s a step in the right direction,” said Jim Tooley, CEO and executive director of USA Basketball. “It’s hard to legislate an unlegislatable space. It’s really free rein out there.
What we’re trying to do is educate people — coaches and parents and everyone involved — to get kids going in the right direction at a younger age.

“Until you can solve greed, it’s a tough problem to put to bed. But getting the right information out there is the start.”

Next month at the U.S. Open, the USTA will join other pro leagues at a press event meant to tell the story of elite athletes who played multiple sports as children. Perhaps more significantly, the U.S. Open also will serve as the venue for two days of meetings organized by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, bringing together representatives from about a dozen NGBs and most of the major pro leagues to discuss ways they can work together to address concerns about youth sports.
TRACKING THE CHANGES IN YOUTH SPORTS PARTICIPATION
Participants by ages 6-17
2009 (000S) 2014 (000S) PCT. CHANGE
Baseball 7,012 6,711 -4.3%
Basketball 10,404 9,694 -6.8%
Field hockey 438 370 -15.5%
Football (tackle) 3,962 3,254 -17.9%
Football (touch) 3,005 2,032 -32.4%
Gymnastics 2,510 2,809 11.9%
Ice hockey 517 743 43.7%
Lacrosse 624 804 28.8%
Rugby 150 301 100.7%
Soccer (indoor) 2,456 2,172 -11.6%
Soccer (outdoor) 8,360 7,656 -8.4%
Softball (fast-pitch) 988 1,004 1.6%
Softball (slow-pitch) 1,827 1,622 -11.2%
Track and field 2,697 2,417 -10.4%
Volleyball (court) 3,420 2,680 -21.6%
Volleyball (sand/beach) 532 652 22.6%
Wrestling 1,385 805 -41.9%
Source: 2015 SFIA U.S. Trends in Team Sports Report


“It’d be terrific if, collectively, the [National Federation of State High School Associations], the NCAA and the professional leagues were all saying the same thing,” said Scott Hallenbeck, executive director of USA Football.
“When that happens, that becomes a powerful message. Parents have gotten consumed by the almighty scholarship and the notion that if my kid is showing some promise I’ve got to get him in this pipeline. I don’t know that there’s evidence that works. And there may be evidence that they’re better off if they don’t do that. So we need to tell them that.

“Parents want to do well by their kids and help them. What they need is information and guidance.”

Not all the NGBs are in step on the issue of sport specialization. Even the experts who warn against the detriments of it concede that it may be necessary in some sports, such as gymnastics and swimming. Many of the world’s premier soccer players came up through youth systems that identified them before they turned 10 and plugged them into club development pipelines.

While that may be the direction that U.S. Soccer takes as it develops its national team, the sport’s youth umbrella is in step with its counterparts in spreading the word about the benefits of playing more than one sport.

“We have so much evidence out there that says that the multisport athlete is both more likely to succeed and less likely to get hurt, and that’s the message that we need to send to families who are trying to navigate all this,” said Chris Moore, who joined U.S. Youth Soccer as its CEO in January. “Don’t get me wrong. I want kids playing soccer. But it shouldn’t be all or nothing.”

Business pressures

There are financial considerations here, even for organizations that operate as nonprofits, and especially for the facilities that serve them.

Martel is not naïve about the business realities of youth hockey. Ice time is expensive. So part of his approach toward youth programs and facility operators is to make a business case for adopting the ADM recommendations.

He anticipated resistance when they recommended that all players in the younger divisions play cross-ice — shrinking the playing surface by putting pads and other barriers down to create a child-sized rink.

That would be an incredible waste of an expensive plot of frozen real estate. So USA Hockey suggested that rink owners take that same practice slot that they once rented to a team of 15 players to four or five teams that could play at the same time.

Not only did that increase facilities’ revenue — freeing up slots to bring in more programs — it also brought down the cost to families in a sport that traditionally has been seen as the most expensive of any to play.

“We’re making the sport more accessible,” Martel said. “And at the same time, from the business angle, you’ve got 50 people in the facility instead of 15. Even if they’re splitting the same cost, you’ve got more people at the concessions stands and more in the pro shop.

“We do have some authority and some control over those organizations under our umbrella. There are levers you can pull to get them to move in certain directions. Especially if you can show them how to make their money.”

Often, it is a matter of getting messages from the top of the organization, which traditionally has dealt mostly with U.S. teams and national championship tournaments, down to parents trying to make the decisions that are best for their children.

The pressing issue facing youth football is the increased awareness of long-term damage caused by concussions, which has figured heavily in the largest youth participation decline of any of the major team sports.

To address that concern, USA Football instituted a program called Heads Up Football, which requires that coaches

Soccer often requires big commitments because of jammed-packed tournament schedules.
Photo by: Getty Images be certified in proper blocking and tackling techniques (see related story, Page 16). Each program must send one coach to a daylong training session sanctioned by USA Football. That coach then instructs other coaches in the techniques.

About 6,500 of the 9,500 USA Football affiliated leagues have implemented the Heads Up program, Hallenbeck said. But the reality is, there is little that USA Football can do to make an organization comply.

“We don’t run youth football leagues,” Hallenbeck said. “We reach out and say Mr. or Mrs. Commissioner, it’s important that you embrace a better, safer game so you can look parents in the eye and tell them you’re addressing their concerns.

“If all of a sudden you hear from the top coaches that this is the best way to do things, parents pay attention and leagues pay attention. What we say to the NFL is, ‘You’re an amazing promotional and communications platform.
We’ll be the grassroots organization that implements. But we need you to be that voice box that says Heads Up Football is important.’ I can scream it all day long. As soon as they say it, it resonates.”

Over the last decade, Little League Baseball has worked more closely with Major League Baseball, never evidenced more clearly than last summer, when newly elected Commissioner Rob Manfred went to Williamsport, Pa., for the Little League World Series.

Through both that relationship and the pulpit that its jewel event gets on ESPN, Little League has worked to communicate directly with parents who may receive a conflicting message from their child’s travel team coach or the former junior college player offering lessons at the nearby batting cages.

“I would hesitate to be critical of a parent trying to do their best for their child, which is where a lot of this comes from,” said Little League International CEO Steve Keener. “It’s well-intended and their hearts are in the right place.
The big job is to explain to them that it doesn’t have to be so intense at such a young age.

“We just need to not give up. We have to keep at it, and bring as much information as we can to parents to make them understand that playing year-round and specializing may work for a handful of kids, but for the vast majority it has negative outcomes.”

Between 2009 and 2014 wrestling in this age group has seen some of the highest attrition rates. That is not good for the sport as well as the year round wrestlers. Developing our novice, freshman, JV, and other not as developed (lesser skilled) wrestlers is crucial to the long term survival of the sport. Having ALL wrestlers and their parents involved many years after their competition years has to be part of our goal as an organization.

Times are changing and if wrestling continues along the current path there won't be traveling national teams, multiple different state championship tournaments, multiple high school state tournaments, etc. - it takes man power (volunteers), money, and participants and a growing participation numbers. That volunteer base comes from keeping All people in the sport for years to come.

I'm a little puzzled over where the numbers came from that were used in the article that showed a large decline in wrestling participation in the 6-17 age group. While not all wrestlers are members of USA Wrestling, I would expect that USAW's experience in membership would be roughly representative of overall participation in the sport. Here are the athlete membership numbers at USAW for the past few years:

2010-11 ... 153776
2011-12 ... 156559
2012-13 ... 166258
2013-14 ... 174890
2014-15 ... 194469

One thing that changed during this period was the high school team membership option that would have brought in additional members who would not have typically bought USAW cards. However, in 2014-15 there were 23985 high school team members, some of whom would have been USAW members in any event. Even if you subtract all of the high school team members, there still has been a solid increase in USAW athlete members during the past five years.

Not sure where they got their numbers maybe US Dept of Education. I did notice on the NWCA website - that total number of HS wrestlers has declined during that period while the number of HS teams has increased. Fewer wrestlers on more teams might explain unfilled weight classes.

The number of participants per high school team is the lowest number ever since 1970. Source - NWCA

The number of participants per high school team is the lowest number ever since 1970. That is not good if we have more weight classes now.

My two cents:

I'm going with Mike Juby's numbers since they have a source and are validated with a purchased card.

As far as unfilled weights, there is an easy explanation for that. We have way too many weight classes. There are only 8 weight classes in International Competition, 10 classes in College, but 14 in High School. 12 Weight Classes are more than enough for High School. Basically we have watered down the upper weights, and now have 2 Heavy weight Divisions. The three weight classes from 160-182 could easily be filtered down to two weight classes. Watering it down is having the opposite effect of what I believe was intended. That was to increase participation.

I do not doubt the USA Wrestlng numbers. But I do not doubt the NWCA numbers either. If there is an attrition problem - we USA Wrestling Kansas needs to be part of the solution. Some teams and clubs may not see it - but my guess/hunch/fact based data says there is a loss of wrestlers to soon - before they get a chance to develop. Times are changing - but are we looking at the long term process and future of the sport. Source: NWCA - National Wrestling Coaches Association - provided the high school data

At the risk of sounding ignorant, where are you finding your numbers? I went to the NWCA website and looked up participation numbers. I found data from 1970-2010 and the numbers are not showing an attrition problem. It is showing the exact opposite, numbers are improving.

http://www.nwcaonline.com/nwcawebsite/do...on.pdf?sfvrsn=0

1970 226,681

2015 269,514

An Increase of 42,833

Look at the same table of data far right column - number of wrestlers per team lowest ever

Considering there were 355,000 (peak) high school wrestlers in 1976 that 1970 number you use is not as impressive. From what I can see from Mikes data a growing youth data and declining high school data - that is attrition. Admitting there is a problem is the first step and then figuring out goals and solutions is the next step. Just my 3 cents.

HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Come on Smokey, you are better and smarter than that. The number of wrestlers is solid and the number of teams has increased by 3,000 teams. Wrestling numbers are not suffering, you are comparing apples to oranges. I can honestly say I am a little disappointed, and your tactics will now make me question and double check all of your stats. Plain and Simple those are scare tactics that politicians use.

That 1970 number is the number you used. Lets not make a mountain out of a mole hill. There are several factors for youth numbers to be higher than High School Numbers.

1. Wrestling is tough and not all will continue through High School.

2. Athletes will go to just one sport, baseball, football, basketball will take over.

3. Kids start hanging with the wrong crowd and quit sports all together.

4. Family Life-Kids getting jobs.

5. Social Life

Sometime life happens and extra activities fall by the way side.

I will refuse to walk around with blinders on - as long as I am a USAWKS and NWCA card carrying/paid member. The only dogs in the fight that I have are past, present and future USAWKS wrestlers and parents that help with all sorts of wrestling functions and activities around the state. Please check my data and get the bigger picture of the sport.

Happy New Year!

Smokey, I have never doubted your goodwill or intent. You truly love the sport of wrestling and everything that is involved with it. Numbers can say whatever you want them to, and can be manipulated for either side. I'm not saying things can not be made better or need improving. In fact, wheels are in motion to improve Kansas Wrestling as we speak. That is a good thing.

Have a Very Happy New Year as well.