Talking with a coach this morning and I had a thought. I'm curious to know if other schools are noticing less and less kids participating in sports or if I'm just making this up? We were just talking football but the schools we were discussing both have less than half of the boys in high school coming out for football.
Are other schools seeing this same thing? Has it always been that way and I didn't realize it? I guess I always thought, especially in the small 1A schools, that a majority of kids played a majority of sports.
It is definitely happening more and more. This is where culture plays a huge part. For example, we have 65 kids in HS. Out of that, we have 29 boys. Out of those 29 boys, 26 are in athletics, and 5 of them have a condition that won't allow them to play football. That puts us at 21, and out of those 21, 8 choose not to play football. Now we are at 13 that play football. This is actually a good number for us, and I attribute it to the culture at ACS. In the past, ACS was a part of TCAF, and won several TCAF State Championships in football, and were part of several others. The same for basketball and baseball. Athletics has always been an important priority at ACS, not the number one priority (Honoring God), but a priority none the less.
The programs that have high numbers are the same programs who have established culture. You all know who that are, and people can throw accusations around about recruiting, but the fact of the matter the culture from those schools do the recruiting.
With that said, I've been doing this thing for 18 years. In the past 10 years, I've noticed a huge swing in athletics not becoming a priority to certain schools, both public and private. Instead, they offer the kids more options like technology driven things, like E-Sports. As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for our Head Basketball / Baseball, we probably wouldn't have the numbers we currently have, even with the culture. They would be significantly less. He does a fantastic job getting the kids to understand that football will not only make our program more relevant, but also participating will make them better at basketball / baseball.
The bottom line is football is a true blue collar sport. It is hard. It is hot. You will be in some sort of pain for 3+ months, or longer, if you are lucky to be still playing in December. At the risk of sounding like an old codger, kids aren't expected to be "blue collar" anymore. Hence the programs like shop, ag, trade classes, etc have been cut from the budget of many school districts. Blue collar seems to be beneath the majority of the last two generations in my opinion (Millennials & Generation Z).
Kids just don't get outside and play anymore either. Technology has taken the place of going outside and playing football for 2 hours, then hit the gym and shoot around for couple more hours, and then go throw the baseball around for a few hours. It's now all done with the thumbs. I'm teaching kids that are in HS, many times seniors, general football knowledge that we used to have by the 3rd grade back in the day. I'm being dead serious, too.
