High School Sports Participation Rates 1970-2018

The story from the New York Times in 2018 is behind a pay wall, but it's headlined as "youth soccer" and being understood that way by others discussing it online, so I was probably wrong in limiting it to AYSO rather than that it's affected all of youth soccer in the USA where there are registration data.  We don't know about kids playing pickup games, but anecdotes are that "pickup culture" is way down these days, due to both demographics and suburbanization.

First, I can't truly make out the numbers here, but does it show a noteworthy absolute decline, or is the decline mostly relative to other sports? 

As far as the discussion, isn't that trying to figure out what is causing the bleeding?  I mean if football participation is declining because the athletes hate alternative uniforms then aren't we all in for a big shock  
I will be honest, I think the coolest thing about this graph is you can see the impact of Title IX.  

I honestly don’t think the concussion stuff is the main driver.


We now require so much more time with it being year round and the style of the game has changed to being played in more space.

That’s a double edged sword to those not really talented. We’re wanting more of your time while it’s also harder to find a spot for you on the field.

There is no limit to how much I disagree with this.

disagreeing with the fact that kickoffs will be phased out, or disagreeing that getting rid of full speed collisions is a good thing. 

You were making solid points and your last paragraph kind of went off the rails, it’s a loose collection of personal anecdote, conjecture, and tenuous links between them.

It’s hard to use raw participation numbers to draw too many conclusions. How do we control for demographic population growth, or the increased access to football? Football may have been huge 40 years ago for schools that had it but a lot of schools may simply not have had teams. The failure to include participation in non-scholastic sports is another problem.

Participation rates would definitely have been higher fifteen years ago because there were more teenagers at the time. For a simple explanation of why and how there can be more total population but fewer teenagers, imagine the baby boomers who were the product of an explosion of baby making after the war. Then do the quick math and figure out when they would have been having kids. After the baby boom was the “bust,” because babymaking st that rate was always unsustainable and was also the result of many people’s family planning being postponed. “Millennials” are often called the “echo” of the boom, so now we’re seeing the echo of the bust.

Still, there’s not necessarily cause for panic in football, the numbers look pretty good if you ballpark the adjustments, and there’s not much non-scholastic football being played. It looks like kids are just generally involved in a lot more activities than they were, which is anecdotally supported.

This doesn’t mean that football should sit on its laurels. There are problems with the game, some are very sensational and require careful consideration, others are more fundamental - the rule book is a nightmare, for one, and a lot of it is from people trying to legislate edge cases into a platonic ideal of the game they feel it should be, instead of laying out a framework and letting the game be played within it. Just read through the rules section here to get a sense of how the rule book eliminates edge cases and in doing so creates corner cases, where exceptions to rules interact in weird ways. Poor technical writing, the politicization of rule changes, and constantly tweaking small parts of the rule book without ever taking a global view are big parts of the problem. This makes the game way harder to understand than it really should be. Football is hardly alone in this, many sports try to patch over their problems with one-off rules, but when your sport is already complex you shouldn’t make it complicated.

Professionalizing the game is another problem but it’s part of an arms race. It make all sports less fun, and I don’t see any politically acceptable solution here, I don’t exactly see the Norwegian Solution being implemented, grownups are far too emotionally invested in the, ultimately irrelevant, accomplishments of children. It’s something many coaches exacerbate by pushing for more liberal rules about offseason activities, because 90% of coaches think they’re in the top 10% of coaches and if they had unlimited practice time they could turn their players into perfect little toy soldiers. Unfortunately solving it is going to require a lot of adults to start acting like the grownups in the room, will and will probably require the collective collaboration of every other major sport at the same time.

So while the game is doing well, it needs to be careful to stay relevant. For a good example see cricket’s recent changes.