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Was watching monday night football and I noticed a commercial where kids are retiring from sports at an early age. It's basically a sappy commercial where kids blame helicopter parents, bad coaches, and lack of love for the game before quitting followed by a link to this website: https://www.projectplay.us When you look through the website you get a bunch of information on how to train coaches better, how to let kids try out different sports, and how to be better as a parent. But when you start scrolling down you notice this:  ESPN makes sense, same with the major sports leagues and I guess John Hopkins Institute/The ACSM. What makes it bad is Amazon, Under Armor, Target, Nike, and Dick's Sporting Goods all funds the Aspen Institute, a program that does sports research primarily in the field of, you may have guessed it, sports census data. The ad claims that 62% of all female sports players quit by the age of 12. When you look at their data you see this:   Women sports are actually going up. What's going down is Cheerleading, a sport known for its high injury rate that surpasses football. Speaking of football:  It and soccer are the two sports seeing less returning players. Why? They both lead all other sports in concussions. Soccer also happens to rule sporting goods stores, where average shoppers spend more on shin guards, cleats, balls, and uniforms, coming up close to baseball which has almost as many youth participants as the most popular sport in America: basketball. So this is basically a misinformation campaign spread by a conglomeration of sports companies to retain youth numbers in sports that should be fading due to the dangers in playing them (soccer really just needs to ban headers) spread during the most popular time during the week. Dick move, I'd say.
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Sep 10, 2019 05:18
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Good look at the data and yeah headers should be eliminated from soccer. I thought it was dumb as hell as a child and I think its extremely dumb now.
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Sep 10, 2019 05:46
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Hey in middle school I fenced, and I got stabbed in the nuts over and over by two 6’6” lanky high school fucks and I turned out just fine
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Sep 10, 2019 08:59
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It should come as no surprise that the NFL, who systematically tried to suppress concussion data for many years, would engage in spreading a false narrative about sports concussions.
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Sep 10, 2019 11:48
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How long has youth football got? 10 years? 15 years?
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Sep 10, 2019 13:22
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Less. The real issue with youth football isn't youths leaving it's insurance companies. No one wants to cover college sports anymore which is trickling down to no one wanting to cover high school sports. Once that safety net is gone football is gone as an organized government funded sport.
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Sep 10, 2019 16:22
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The precipitous decline in bicycling stands out more to me than the decline in football or soccer.
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Sep 10, 2019 16:23
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Simplex posted:The precipitous decline in bicycling stands out more to me than the decline in football or soccer. that's cause bicycling isn't a sport it's a mode of conveyance Gonna enjoy the NFL while it lasts
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Sep 10, 2019 16:28
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Going to sticky this a while for more visibility
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Sep 11, 2019 16:11
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Where does ice hockey land on the concussion rankings? Participation in it went up, although the numbers are so small compared to football and soccer, so the % increase is misleading. It's another one that is also expensive as hell with all the gear.
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Sep 11, 2019 16:15
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Play posted:that's cause bicycling isn't a sport it's a mode of conveyance The numbers are participation among children aged 6-12. While tackle football shows a major decline, most of that drop is offset by an major increase in flag football. That suggests that local communities are just replacing tackle football with flag football for elementary school aged kids. The decline in tennis or team swimming is larger than the cumulative decrease in football.
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Sep 11, 2019 16:26
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Blowjob Overtime posted:Where does ice hockey land on the concussion rankings? Participation in it went up, although the numbers are so small compared to football and soccer, so the % increase is misleading. It's another one that is also expensive as hell with all the gear. Very high. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2987636/
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Sep 11, 2019 16:34
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So how long until we get a real life version of a dystopic 70s scifi movie and just have felons compete in American football for their freedom
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Sep 11, 2019 16:36
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Simplex posted:The numbers are participation among children aged 6-12. While tackle football shows a major decline, most of that drop is offset by an major increase in flag football. That suggests that local communities are just replacing tackle football with flag football for elementary school aged kids. The decline in tennis or team swimming is larger than the cumulative decrease in football. That seems.... good? I mean seems like it makes sense to teach little kids flag football instead of putting them in helmet and pads and telling them to go run into the other kids and damage their still-forming brains There was an Atlantic article someone posted about how football players (and players of other sports) increasingly come from very wealthy homes, as well as many sports showing declines, I think it goes well here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/meritocracy-killing-high-school-sports/597121/ quote:You might think most of that scholarship money is going to help kids from poor families who couldn’t otherwise afford college. That’s not the case. In 2010, just 28 percent of Division I basketball players were first-generation college students, meaning they likely came from low-income families. Five years later, that figure has fallen by nine percentage points. Today, fewer than one in seven students receiving athletic scholarships across all Division I sports come from families in which neither parent went to college. Farrey calls this the slow-motion “gentrification” of college sports.
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Sep 11, 2019 16:43
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super dumb question but would wearing those padded rugby helmets help with soccer's concussion problem? I know micro-trauma is a big part of CTE, but considering the trauma comes mostly from headers could some semi-decent padding stop it?
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Sep 11, 2019 16:47
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No, helmets don't prevent concussions that well, even the fancy new ones the NFL is employing. Concussions also don't happen just due to force, type of force matters more. Most concussions aren't head on hits but wrenching hits. Think someone slapping their head onto the ground after a big hit or catching a knee to the side of the head. That's why concussions from headers happen so much. The kid is jumping up into the air meeting the ball in a wrenching motion because he's swinging his neck to head it on an angle. Really people just need to stop hitting their heads into things.
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Sep 11, 2019 16:50
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Thought this was going to be about rich NFL owners getting blood transfusions from young boys in some horrible attempt to live forever. So at least it’s not that bad. Read something recently that even the NFL has an insurance problem. They’re down to one carrier in the entire nation covering them. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a massive die off of high school, JUCO, and other small schools playing football in the next 5 years.
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Sep 11, 2019 16:57
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Play posted:That seems.... good? I mean seems like it makes sense to teach little kids flag football instead of putting them in helmet and pads and telling them to go run into the other kids and damage their still-forming brains Yeah it's a good thing as there is no earthly reason for 8-year-olds to play organized tackle football. It doesn't really say much about the health of the game of football was my point, as parents are largely switching one form of football for another.
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Sep 11, 2019 17:12
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I'll say it right now the health of football is on life support and it all has to do with this:Bird in a Blender posted:Read something recently that even the NFL has an insurance problem. They’re down to one carrier in the entire nation covering them. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a massive die off of high school, JUCO, and other small schools playing football in the next 5 years.
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Sep 11, 2019 17:15
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Football will rise again in the climate change-altered postapocalyptic united states as a way to settle disputes between slaver factions. You guys worry too much
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Sep 11, 2019 17:20
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I don’t play my switch enough but I like it. Mario, Zelda, and mega man alone made the purchase worth it.
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Sep 11, 2019 17:27
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Play posted:Football will rise again in the climate change-altered postapocalyptic united states as a way to settle disputes between slaver factions. You guys worry too much
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Sep 11, 2019 17:38
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:I don’t play my switch enough but I like it. Mario, Zelda, and mega man alone made the purchase worth it. I don't think the switch is why youth football is dying
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Sep 11, 2019 17:38
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I don't think the switch is why youth football is dying It doesn’t help. Why submit yourself to the tragedy of youth football when you can experience the ecstasy of cooking in Zelda; Breath of the Wild?
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Sep 11, 2019 17:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:So how long until we get a real life version of a dystopic 70s scifi movie and just have felons compete in American football for their freedom We’re kind of doing the reverse now, where the ones who don’t make it to the next level go to prison
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Sep 11, 2019 18:08
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Is there anything to the drops in swimming and tennis, or just popularity ebbing and flowing there?
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Sep 11, 2019 18:48
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Won't know unless you ask the kids. I suspect it's because less schools can afford swimming pools and that tennis is boring to a lot of kids. The issue with research groups is that they have limited ways to gather data. The Aspen Insitute's research showed a drop in sports but didn't send out questionnaires to every kid in america asking why they quit. We just have to assume.
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Sep 11, 2019 18:53
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A portion of it certainly has to do with the assault on public schools and the government support of those school. Sports and Arts are often the first things cut from a budget when there simply isn't enough money
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Sep 11, 2019 19:03
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Sports budgets don't necessarily get cut but they do rely heavily on alumni as capital projects for sports are a little bit more ridiculous in cost than arts programs. For instance the track at my old high school got replaced for about 250k dollars and a clubhouse at a high school near my university was given a new clubhouse for 4 million dollars. Both were alumni donations that weren't going to be made for several years without them. Typically schools sock away cash for these big investments which is why their budgets seem smaller year to year. Sports budgets also typically get sacrificed for lesser sports. Examples of this are softball, lacrosse, and field hockey fields often all sharing the same field. The bigger sports get their own bigger field, IE football and soccer. You'll also see lesser sports get moved away to club sports funded by the town and parents instead. This is often swimming, hockey, gymnastics, and track and field. Football and soccer are both kings in various parts of the country as well. Their budgets never get tampered with.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:10
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The main grocery store in our town lets groups and clubs bag groceries for tips, and they are almost exclusively smaller sports teams like the ones you mentioned. Sometimes it is the band, but usually it is swimming, gymnastics, track, and softball. 70-80% of them are girls teams. I don't think I've ever seen hockey there, but this is Minnesota, so hockey is with football and above soccer for the sacred sports that will never get funding cut.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:15
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JPrime posted:Is there anything to the drops in swimming and tennis, or just popularity ebbing and flowing there? could be olympics
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Sep 11, 2019 19:18
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Doltos posted:Sports budgets don't necessarily get cut but they do rely heavily on alumni as capital projects for sports are a little bit more ridiculous in cost than arts programs. For instance the track at my old high school got replaced for about 250k dollars and a clubhouse at a high school near my university was given a new clubhouse for 4 million dollars. Both were alumni donations that weren't going to be made for several years without them. Typically schools sock away cash for these big investments which is why their budgets seem smaller year to year. Interesting. Shifting to a club-team based model instead of a public school one is a great way to cut off access to the sport for certain low income students, as well. I played on some "select" soccer teams as a kid and I believe the fee for the year was somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand dollars per player, this is at around twelve years old. A ton of parents are not going to be able to make that kind of sacrifice without the mostly-free public school option
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Sep 11, 2019 19:30
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hifi posted:could be olympics Oh that makes sense, coming off an olympic year (I think the stats were 2016 to 2017).
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Sep 11, 2019 19:41
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Play posted:Interesting. Shifting to a club-team based model instead of a public school one is a great way to cut off access to the sport for certain low income students, as well. I played on some "select" soccer teams as a kid and I believe the fee for the year was somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand dollars per player, this is at around twelve years old. A ton of parents are not going to be able to make that kind of sacrifice without the mostly-free public school option Yea, the Atlantic article above essentially explains the same thing. Rich parents can afford to spend money on their kid's sports training, getting them onto better travel teams, getting them more/better instructors, etc. Ideally, I think I'd rather see struggling sports get funded directly by the town budget, not the school budget. It would consolidate quite a bit of teams, but would still mean most sports are free or low cost. I guess that's how it works a lot with youth sports already, as they are run through the town park district, and this shifts as kids get into middle school and high school.
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Sep 11, 2019 19:58
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Play posted:Interesting. Shifting to a club-team based model instead of a public school one is a great way to cut off access to the sport for certain low income students, as well. I played on some "select" soccer teams as a kid and I believe the fee for the year was somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand dollars per player, this is at around twelve years old. A ton of parents are not going to be able to make that kind of sacrifice without the mostly-free public school option Yep. That's why the most popular club teams in many areas are AAU basketball teams. They have cheap entry fees and you only need to have your kid show up half the time. Something people don't mention when looking at AAU teams is how many kids play in oversized shorts or tennis shoes. Hell one time I saw a kid in jeans. These are people who can barely afford to cloth their kids in gym attire much less afford football pads. Athletic directors know this too, that's why a ton of budget goes into maintenance costs for equipment. Equipment is the #1 cost of entry to any sport which is why basketball and soccer are popular worldwide.
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Sep 11, 2019 20:03
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JPrime posted:Is there anything to the drops in swimming and tennis, or just popularity ebbing and flowing there? both swimming and tennis hit their peak popularity in the 70s and 80s when all the new subdivisions were being built. All the new ones had nice tennis and pool facilities to try to attract new people. So you had huge tennis leagues and big summer swim leagues for everyone. To this day, the largest sports organization in the United States is the USTA. The second largest? ALTA, which is just the Atlanta version. It's impossible to describe how big tennis leagues used to be. With population shift and the lack of people having kids/moving to the suburbs, all these are going unused and falling into disrepair. People moving into the cities don't have the time to commit to a tennis schedule, and large lap pools aren't readily available. Swimming and Tennis are becoming more niche sports for the wealthy that can afford the competitive schedule/training/travel to get their kids more competitive for college. Also tennis specifically has become incredibly regionalized. It's still a huge deal in florida, texas, and california, but its dying a slow death everywhere else. People in the southeast just aren't building new courts anymore, and all those old courts from the 70s and 80s need to be demolished. You can guess how many HOAs have that kind of scratch lying around. To put this into perspective, out of college i worked off and on at the biggest tennis court construction company on the east coast. Five crews working 5 days a week six months of the year. We did basically everything there was to do. At the end of my time there, we were selling more squash conversions than actual new tennis courts. meaning we were going to retirement communities and restriping and surfacing their tennis courts to make it for the boomers to keep playing something. The villages in florida? We built something like 80 of them.
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Sep 11, 2019 20:06
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Funny thing you mention that too. Before football and baseball the most popular sports in America were wrestling, boxing, swimming, hunting, equine sports, golf, and various racquet sports. Tennis as we know it now is an entirely different sport but basically the various lawn tennises and racquetballs were similar enough to consider it valid for this argument. Swimming, wrestling, and boxing were all seen as poorer person sports as those who swam in England were usually poor people looking for salmon or clams, and wrestling and boxing were both rooted in popularity of slavers forcing their slaves to fight for the entertainment of others. Wrestling had a unique position in high society as well, specifically in the founding universities, as did swimming in some cases. Hunting was specifically landed gentry only as was horse racing. When Americans started getting more land and freedom they rushed to use this as a status symbol as well. Hunting was diffused into the general public due to more lax poaching laws but horse racing remained a barrier of entry to the poor. It was seen as the noblemans sport because horses were expensive to maintain and wasting them on racing was a privilege farmers typically didn't have. Tennis was the same as it came from the landed gentry wasting arable land in England on lawn sports such as forms of bocci ball, croquet, and racquet sports. Although it took a while for Tennis to take off in America, sometime in the mid 1800s I think, Americans still associated lawn sports with nobility. Just like today the barrier to sports is cost of equipment. In these cases wasting land was the cost of entry. When the big surge of popularity in suburbia occurred the developers of these areas still associated wasting land with prestige. Swimming pools, which were originally an immense sign of wealth stretching all the way back to the Roman empire, and tennis courts filled the need for advertising your wealth in suburbia perfectly. I believe that swimming and tennis are both dropping off because the prestige of enrolling your children in these sports isn't as significant as it was back in the 50s to the 80s. Cardio sports in general aren't as much fun as objective sports either, but the point that Fiz was making was that the original big numbers of tennis and swimming do seemed to be linked to a newly wealthy class of Americans. There's also a really great read on American sports history if this topic interests anyone. https://www.si.com/vault/1962/01/08/590449/the-bizarre-history-of-american-sport
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Sep 11, 2019 20:34
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This may be answered in the article, but is there a geographical/historical reason soccer is so unpopular in the US compared to pretty much every other country on Earth?
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Sep 11, 2019 20:40
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Blowjob Overtime posted:This may be answered in the article, but is there a geographical/historical reason soccer is so unpopular in the US compared to pretty much every other country on Earth? Soccer is insanely popular in America it's one of the most played sports. The issue is that the original major league soccer crumbled during the Great Depression and didn't catch back on after. Meanwhile the MLB and the NFL both weathered the storm. While both still had huge popularity in college, they both branched beyond that into the professional atmosphere. During this time soccer and basketball were completely college based. In fact the only reason basketball didn't end up like soccer was because of a group of Canadian investors that owned hockey franchises took a risk on a new sport in order to draw some of that yankee money up north.
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Sep 11, 2019 20:48
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Blowjob Overtime posted:This may be answered in the article, but is there a geographical/historical reason soccer is so unpopular in the US compared to pretty much every other country on Earth? It's very popular, it's just not our main sports. We have tens of millions of people playing soccer in some form or the other in the United States. the main difference with us is we like Football and Basketball more. And basketball, interestingly enough, is the fastest growing global sport. The reason we don't like it as much as others is, in my opinion, we know we're not as good at it as everyone else. Why are we not as good at it? That's easy; it lacks the infrastructural support it has in Europe, they have the money and prestige to claim all our best players, and US Soccer is a complete poo poo show. As long as all the best players go europe, and all your best athletes play other sports, it'll never take off as a television/cash cow sport like it is in europe. As football dies off and those athletes start transitioning to soccer, I guarantee we'll start making GBS threads all over the world. Like imagine if all the DBs and WRs had just been playing soccer their whole lives, with the intensity they put into football training.
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Sep 11, 2019 20:51
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