New York Times: Youth Soccer Participation Declining

“If year after year, at every decision point, U.S. Soccer continues to alienate Latinos and blacks, we are going to sit on the sidelines and watch the rest of the world get better,” Mr. Rothenberg said.

Don't know if I agree with that. Latinos and blacks are very well represented on US National teams at the different age groups. It's lack of proper youth coaching and player selection why we have been failing lately.

 

Births hit a 30 year low recently...that would indicate it would be difficult to maintain or increase participation.

Lacrosse has ‘popped’ in many regions where it used to be a more regional sport.

The aforementioned migration to smartphones and tablets as child care surrogates won’t help participation in sports.

I don’t think concussions would be a concern at the youngest ages but it could impact as the players age.

The increase in focus on development academies will separate kids into two categories...and one of them will get a message that their future in the sport is limited. At age 10? That won’t help retention of players.

 

Reasons for a decline in participation will vary based on local issues, but the last point you cite is certainly something I see in my area. When an 8 or 9 year old is cut or told he or she is a B or C team player, parents will often take that as a sign to play football/fall baseball/club lacrosse, etc. I'm not sure increasing participation is actually a goal of US Soccer. I mean, they'll say it is but a lot of their actions end up having the opposite result.

 

If participation numbers equated to more world class soccer players, the US would have already won a World Cup. We have as many registered youth soccer players as Croatia has total citizens and they just made a final.

 

That is just the first exodus…

The 2nd occur just slightly later when kids forced to focus on or choose one sport over others….many boys and rarely, if ever, in my experience, do the truly gifted athletes choose to stick with soccer, if equally talent in other sports…the opportunities in those other sports are far greater and more immediate…

 

Sorry, I screwed up my reply to this above. I agree that participation numbers in and of themselves will not guarantee success going forward. But I do think that high participation numbers and engagement will help create a soccer culture that produces better players. It's the foundation we don't currently have.

 

As the WC demonstrated, large population isn't the only way to produce soccer talent...we've been a huge country for years and it hasn't helped very much. Some would say our size hurts us but I don't think that is a primary factor. Just during our youngest's path have we gone from parent coaches to "no parent coaches"...

The training today is so much better than it was < 10 years ago.

That could also scare away kids...this isn't the sport where kids do it a few months a year and are still the best player...there are kids out there who do specialize and they won't all be great but many will.

Many of us are fortunate to have seen a lot of the youth soccer landscape. It was probably a dozen years ago that a college coach described the process as he saw it and I dubbed it " the meat grinder"... We need to put enough raw material into the right process to get a small amount of success. The "problem" is the number of players it takes to produce one good one...it is hard, thre are a lot of cuts, a lot of kids who used to play together and then can't, lots of kids who have to change clubs, drive distances etc.

If the process improves we don't need millions of players, maybe fewer will improve the output...I don't know.

 

Watch the Concrete Football documentary on Netflix. That explains why we cannot compete on the national level. Its just that simple in my opinion. Instead of basketball courts in their inner city "hoods" (their term not mine) they have futsal courts all over the place in Paris and kids play pickup soccer all day every day.

 

I have nothing to back this up other than what I see around me, but I wonder if that second one is as prevalent as it used to be. Football participation is low at my oldest son's high school, and only a small handful of kids are good enough to make the basketball teams. On the other hand, his school has a lot of strong athletes in baseball and soccer on the boys' side and, to a lesser degree, soccer and softball on the girls' side.

A couple of other quick thoughts: The article doesn't mention it, but I've seen Aspen Sports Institute officials quoted elsewhere on this dropoff attributing some of it to US Soccer's switch to using birth years to group kids, claiming that many kids left the sport when they were no longer being teamed up with kids in the same class at school. No idea if that's the case, but I do recall a lot of unhappiness at the time.

The "street soccer" aspect of this is frustrating. There's no doubt in my mind that the more kids just go play soccer (or any other sport) outside of a structured practice or game environment, the better and more interested they'll be. But I get the sense that a lot of kids have no idea how to do this. My younger son's club has an informal summer "street soccer" program for kids to turn up and play, but what I've seen of it just winds up looking like a loosely organized practice scrimmage. It isn't playing on their own at all. Another dad and I used to run something similar on our own, and the kids had fun, but if we weren't organizing it, it wasn't happening.

And, honestly, most of my son's soccer friends (most of these kids are 2005s) seem to have little or no interest in playing on their own -- he does, and works on his own in our yard, but he's almost entirely given up on trying to get friends from the neighborhood to just knock a ball around (the exception being a couple of friends from elsewhere in town who'll go play pickup with him). Almost all of these kids play club soccer at varying levels, but if they didn't have organized practices and games I doubt most would ever touch a ball. Given their ages, I'm curious to see how many fall away from the sports in the next year or two.

 

Thats just the thing, once its organized by parents or a club it is really just informal "street soccer" in name only. Kids have to want to go out and play on their own ala the move The Sandlot or from what i witnessed in Concrete Football. Once parents are driving kids and dropping kids off to an informal "street soccer" event, its no longer informal. Yes a ton of kids play club soccer and some are pretty decent but how many of these kids are playing on their own when given a choice of what to do. Very few. Most would rather play Fortnite, swim and do nothing.

 

The pros and cons of the birth year switch have been beaten to death elsewhere so I'm not looking to rehash that whole argument. But there are large swaths of the country that have a school cutoff date sometime in the Fall so this would effect many kids born in the last 3-4 months of the year. At best, it would have no impact on participation but it's safe to assume any impact would be negative. Little League Baseball switched to birth year for a short spell then switched back to July 31 because it had an effect on participation. No reason to think it would be different for soccer.

 

Definitely a horse that's been well beaten. I wasn't aware of the Little League switch and then switch back, though. That's interesting.