Are kids as attached to sports as they were a generation ago? Unlike their parents, most kids today spend an inordinate amount of time with sedentary activities, especially technology. Instead of playing pickup games, kids today often get comfortable with their cell phone or gaming device — often for hours on end! Yes, kids still follow their favorite teams, but even there we see a decline in how few kids wear their favorite team’s merchandise, buy sports trading cards, or don a high school Letterman’s jacket. Sports used to be an experience most kids not only played, but developed personal identities around their role on a specific team. Today, however, many kids need encouraged to join a team, become bored quite quickly if they aren’t playing, and are far less patient and tolerant toward coaches who push them and hold them accountable.
Kids today
The life of a kid today is very different compared to when you were a kid. One of the biggest differences is with technology, and how omnipresent technology is for kids at every turn. From the time kids wake up until they go to sleep, much of their day is spent in comfortable, sedentary, and virtual environments, constantly connected to phones, tablets, and gaming systems. Sports, by comparison, forces kids to leave those comfy conditions and practice hard, often outside in hot, cold, rainy, and/or cold conditions. Chill with my friends playing Fortnite in an atmospherically controlled environment, or practice hard outside in uncomfortable conditions? For many kids, chilling takes precedence over practicing sports.
When we forecast the future, there do not appear to be many indicators that show kids pulling away from technology, but leaning more into it by means of artificial intelligence and other new virtual discoveries. Beyond the shrinking number of kids who are still deeply invested in playing sports, more kids each day turn their focus to non-sport activities over the rigors and commitment that come with sports (i.e. daily practices, physical exhaustion, tough coaches, etc.).
Will this trend reverse on its own, where we see kids begin to go back to emphasizing sport participation over other distractions? That seems doubtful, especially as we see new and exciting advancements with technology with every week that passes. With only 24 hours in a day, the more a kid spends scrolling YouTube, Tik Tok, and Snapchat, the less time there is to focus on the challenges that come with being on a team (i.e. actively attending practices, hitting the weight room, and doing additional training on their own). Parents can help, of course, but there may be a need for an even bigger course correction by means of how schools can proactively help.
What can schools do?
First, it is important to understand research findings and best practices for kids to thrive by means of a holistic education. Schools across America provide for interscholastic sports teams, and consider athletics an important part of the educational curriculum. We also know that kids who participate in sports tend to have many great things happen as a result, including improved mental and physical health, positive emotional development, learning life skills, refraining from drugs and alcohol, and keeping good grades. Additionally, a healthy athletic department lends to a positive school and community culture, which in turn promotes future generations of kids to continue participating in sports. All of this is great when kids voluntarily play sports, but what happens when schools relax, kids turn their attention elsewhere, and athletic participation declines? That’s when its time to proactively help.
With fewer numbers of kids excited to commit and play sports for their school, new strategies may need to be considered to help reverse this trend. Today’s coaches will likely need to continue with emphasis on education, growth, and mental health benefits to attract families back to sports as a starting point, but there’s more to it than that. Coaches will need to re-calibrate if they want to push kids exclusively to win, or if there are bigger, more broad ways to draw kids back? The focus of intensity toward championships may need to be tweaked to keeping an eye on winning, but also making the experience more inclusive for all kids, keeping things fun, and more regularly processing with kids the benefits of playing sports beyond the scoreboard. With surveys still consistently showing the #1 reason why kids play sports is to have fun, it may be wise to continue to emphasize to kids how fun sports are!
Revisiting interscholastic sports and related strategies to attract kids does not mean participation trophies for everyone and streamers from the ceiling, but instead keeping up with modern times relating to kids today, and the means in which they spend their days. Is school pride from their team still important? Do kids still desire to build an athletic personal identity around their role on a team? Are there new ways to get kids excited about school sports that invites them to put down the technology, and get fired up about their team? These are some of the important questions that will need to be asked by school leaders to help keep up with the changing times.
Final thoughts
As times change, so do the ways in which kids view their involvement with youth and interscholastic sports. Unlike the old days, kids today have countless technological distractions around them at all times, from phones to pads to gaming systems. Each of these new distractions steals the attention of kids, and shrinks the number of hours each day that kids have left over to play sports. This kind of sedentary lifestyle, while comfortable for many kids, steers them away from the many physical, emotional, and social growth components experienced playing sports.
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