The decline of team sports is bad for schools, sports, and society
Will Collins
For years, basketball obsessives have followed the exploits of Bronny James, the oldest son of NBA star LeBron James and an impressive athlete in his own right. LeBron has said he wants to end his career playing next to his son, a somewhat far-fetched idea that has nevertheless fueled speculation that teams will draft Bronny to recruit his still formidable father. As a high school player, Bronny was the subject of YouTube highlight reels, ESPN coverage, and endless media speculation about his professional future. His decision to play college basketball at the University of Southern California garnered national headlines, as did his frightening July collapse during a practice session.
The amount of attention devoted to one teenage basketball celebrity suggests that youth sports culture is alive and well. The truth is very much the opposite. In fact, Bronny James’s nascent career highlights many of the problems that have contributed to declining youth participation in team sports, from a social media landscape that encourages passivity to a sports-industrial complex increasingly geared toward grooming elite athletes.
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The rise of the participation trophy is a common conservative gripe, but handing out a few more blue ribbons may actually be in order. Youth involvement in team sports has been on the decline since at least the late 2000s. This gradual slide was accelerated by the pandemic, which severely curtailed or even halted youth athletics. A truly perverse outcome, given what we know about the benefits of regular exercise, the relative imperviousness of the young to COVID-19, and the psychological costs of prolonged isolation.
If COVID-19 was the only problem, we might look forward to a post-pandemic youth sports renaissance, but declining participation was happening even before the lockdowns. Over the past few years, a growing body of evidence has linked smartphones and social media to rising rates of teenage depression and related mental health concerns. Perhaps the best evidence for this linkage is the fact that widespread smartphone adoption coincides with an abrupt spike in mental health problems among young people. The spread of smartphones also mirrors the decline in youth sports participation. Ubiquitous social media, with its infinite array of distractions and diversions, has almost certainly contributed to a decline in team sports, to say nothing of pickup games and other less structured physical activities.
Sports and teenage culture have long been intertwined, and the enduring popularity of Air Jordans, Nike T-shirts, and team logos suggests that this is unlikely to change. However, the way children relate to sports seems to have fundamentally shifted. Football, soccer, and basketball are no longer things you do — they’re things you watch, probably in short five- or 10-second bursts on a smartphone.
The perverse dynamics of social media, which favor astounding highlights or embarrassing failures, likely encourage the development of a spectator mentality among young people. Most children are not destined for athletic greatness, and if your idea of basketball is shaped by a video of Bronny James dunking followed by a clip of someone tripping over his shoelaces, you might reasonably conclude that actually playing is a bad idea unless you’re already really good. More quotidian team experiences — going to practice, gradually building skills and stamina, competing but not dominating — are mostly absent from social media.
Other forms of digital entertainment deserve a share of the blame. As video games become more immersive, more complex, and more addictive, the share of time young people spend on a console or a computer has increased steadily. The pandemic era of remote work, remote school, and enforced isolation saw a particularly dramatic increase in time devoted to video games among young men, but this was merely an extension of pre-pandemic trends.
Adults are also culpable, and not just because we’ve taken a remarkably laissez faire approach to digital distractions. A combination of economic and institutional pressures, from a desire to groom elite athletes to an increasingly cutthroat college admissions process, has shifted resources and attention away from the “middle class” of modestly talented athletes and toward selective training programs and boutique activities.
As sports are increasingly seen as a ticket to a professional future or a selective university, practice has become a year-round proposition. Talented children are enrolled early in travel teams and other supplementary training activities. A generation ago, a gifted (or simply enthusiastic) high school athlete might have played two or three different sports over the course of the year. Now, students are encouraged to pick one sport and focus on it relentlessly. The ultracompetitive nature of these training regimes is a formidable barrier to entry for those who simply want to play ball — or lack the financial resources to invest in year-round training.
Meanwhile, many affluent families have embraced boutique sports that require specialized, and expensive, equipment and facilities, often as a way of burnishing college resumes. As the now-infamous Varsity Blues sting operation revealed, activities such as water polo, rowing, and sailing have become back doors into prestigious universities. No offense to sailing enthusiasts, but a sport that requires access to a boat is unlikely to foster a broad culture of athletic participation.
Colleges are more than happy to play along with these developments because they promote an aura of campus exclusivity. George Washington University, once a modest commuter school, decided in 2002 that it needed a varsity squash team. Not coincidentally, the only other schools in the country with varsity squash programs were all members of the Ivy League. An admissions officer was quite frank about the logic behind this decision, explaining it as part of the university’s strategy to attract a better class of applicants. By investing in obscure sports with high barriers to entry, universities are sending a clear message about what they value to prospective applicants.
Declining participation risks hollowing out a distinctly American tradition of high school and collegiate athletics that doesn’t really exist in other parts of the world. In most European countries, sports are a peripheral or nonexistent part of the high school experience. Talented athletes get funneled into sports academies or intensive training programs outside of school at a young age. American youth sports paraphernalia — varsity jackets, team jerseys, faded practice T-shirts — are enthusiastically copied the world over, but the institutions that produce these items are rare outside the United States.
Emblematic of this changing sports landscape is the AirPod, a relatively new technology that has lately become a ubiquitous teenage accessory. This device is optimized for shutting out the world, staring at your phone, or training in solitude. While the AirPods are in, you won’t hear a coach barking instructions or a teammate telling you to pass the ball. No wonder social media is increasingly dominated by solitary fitness pursuits such as bodybuilding, powerlifting, and calisthenics. Worthy activities, to be sure, but notably lacking in the cooperative, tactical, and competitive elements of sports such as soccer, basketball, and baseball. There’s also something vaguely perverse about a jacked teenager who can’t catch a ball.
The consequences of this decline are likely to be profound and long-lasting. Children who never play on a team will be less active for the rest of their lives and less comfortable navigating physical spaces. The recent spike in pedestrian deaths suggests that this could have deadly consequences, to say nothing of the U.S.’s struggles with obesity, which contributes to everything from declining life expectancy to reduced military readiness.
Meanwhile, team sports impart valuable lessons about skill development, practice, and teamwork, lessons that are particularly valuable for boys and young men. Playing on a team is at once an empowering and a humbling experience: empowering because you experience real improvement through practice and hard work, humbling because you’re overwhelmingly likely to play with or against someone who is simply faster, stronger, better. These are important lessons for young men that carry over into the classroom and their personal lives. As male loneliness climbs and boys struggle more than ever in school, we are abandoning a proven method of fostering camaraderie, skill development, and personal growth that is particularly well suited to the male psyche.
Declining youth sports also pose serious problems for professional leagues, which supposedly benefit the most from intensively grooming young athletes. If you’ve ever tried to explain football to a befuddled wife or girlfriend, you know that playing a sport at any level enhances spectators’ appreciation for what they’re watching. As youth athletics wane, Generation Z’s interest in watching professional sports has diminished sharply. This is almost certainly not a coincidence.
Meanwhile, relentless overtraining poses health risks to even the most talented athletes. Professional leagues have lately been plagued by high-profile injuries and stars who sit for extended periods just to stay healthy. Some of this is a consequence of competing against bigger, stronger, and faster players, but physical therapists and sports scientists have long warned of the dangers of repetitive overtraining. A boy who runs track in the fall, swims in winter, and plays baseball in the spring is likely to be fitter and more physically resilient than someone who plays one sport year-round. If that same boy ever goes pro, his body will have less wear and tear and more capacity to absorb punishment.
There is also a less quantifiable but still compelling case that varied training programs produce better and more exciting athletes. Hakeem Olajuwon famously dominated the NBA with footwork he learned as a young soccer player. Last year’s NBA champion Denver Nuggets were led by the Serbian-born Nikola Jokic, another unconventional big man known for his water polo-inspired passing game. Narrowly focusing on one sport deprives young athletes of chances to exercise their creativity, and professional leagues attract more fans when they showcase different styles of play.
Reviving team sports for young people is a difficult proposition in an age of digital distractions, but schools and parents have certain tools at their disposal to contain the damage. Schools should consider strictly enforced bans on smartphones, which offer few educational benefits and are linked to teenage depression, loneliness, and declining interest in sports and other extracurricular activities. Some schools have already experimented with this idea, but getting rid of phones should be standard policy, not a measure reserved for private academies and high-achieving public schools.
High schools should also make an effort to recruit male teachers, who are more likely to volunteer as coaches or referees or otherwise get involved in youth sports programs. Education will likely be a female-dominated profession for the foreseeable future, but the disparity between men and women in the classroom is quietly astonishing: As of 2018, over three-quarters of teachers were women. A bit of affirmative action for men, or at least a hiring process that recognizes the benefits of male role models, would help revive high school sports programs.
Since the end of racial admissions preferences, college sports have been in the media’s crosshairs for supposedly offering an unfair way into selective institutions. However, it is entirely reasonable for schools to recruit students who have succeeded at demanding activities, from mastering an instrument to winning a state championship. Instead of getting rid of preferences for student-athletes altogether, colleges and universities should prefer applicants who succeed on a team. Even mediocre athletes benefit from playing soccer or basketball with a talented, college-bound player. Elite fencers are unlikely to have similar spillover effects. To quote an Ivy League admissions coach and former Dartmouth College water polo player, “Sports like basketball and football inspire passion. They bring a student body together. They motivate the alumni base. … But let’s be real. Squash, golf, water polo, crew, and other country club sports don’t exactly bring a college community together.” The same logic applies with equal force to high school athletics.
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Youth sports in the 1990s and early 2000s were no panacea, and less sympathetic readers may cite hazing, overcompetitive parents and coaches, and the obnoxious behavior sometimes fostered by jock culture as reasons not to lament their decline. But the real question is whether the pre-2010 youth sports landscape is preferable to our predicament. From rising rates of teenage depression to worrying trends in health and obesity, it’s clear that the status quo is bad for young people’s physical and psychological well-being. The question is what to do about it.
If trends continue, activities that were once a common rite of passage risk becoming the preserve of the affluent and ultratalented. Youth from wealthier backgrounds are already more likely to play sports than their poorer counterparts. This mirrors broader trends in digital culture, as private schools experiment with smartphone bans and affluent parents take active measures to limit their children’s screen time. If public institutions don’t make a concerted effort to foster team sports, activities that once thrived on broad participation will become status markers for the children of the elite. Bronny James, an athlete who benefits from hereditary gifts and the best training money can buy, is not just an object of public fascination. He’s a harbinger of the bifurcated youth sports landscape to come.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.