Team Insight

Even with some challenges, football is now in full swing and dealers are eagerly tackling the category. By Judy Leand TEAM FOOTBALL BACK ON THE GRIDIRON The NFL Connection To help rebuild participation in high school football, the NFHS partnered with the NFL two years ago to launch "is is High School Football" and the effort will continue through 2024. e initiative uses social media – pri- marily Facebook and Twitter – to highlight the lasting benefits that high school football provides to students. e three main goals are to promote the value of participating in football in middle school and high school, improve the perception of football at those levels and to restore confi- dence that the sport is more focused on player protection than ever before. e campaign includes a website – thisishighschoolfootball. com – and encourages coaches and schools to help spread the word about football's many attributes and to create their own content and tag it with #isIsHSFootball. "We go to followers on social media via coaches, teammates and school administra- tors who explain the many benefits of high school football, such as friends that you meet, mentorships between coaches and players and the diversity of teams," says Mark Koski, chief marketing officer for NFHS. "While the program is aimed at coaches and schools, the true target is a middle school parent. ere are 19,500 high schools. Football brings the community together on Friday nights and that's why it's so important." us far, the program has been successful and has spurred significant engagement via social media, notes Koski. "We're all about teaching and creating lifelong positive citizens. We want to build back to one million participants." e stakes in the team business are obviously very high. Total spending on football products in 2022 totaled $662.5 million, a 6.5 percent increase from 2021 to 2022, and a jump of 15.4 percent from 2019 to 2022, reveals SFIA's newly released 2023 Manufacturers' Sales by Category Report. Sales of balls in 2022 reached $114.8 million, protectives hit $418.4 million, and other/accessories were $129.4 million. Also in 2022, sales of football team uniforms climbed to $384.2 million, up 14.5 percent from 2021. Meanwhile, team football athletic footwear ticked up to $178 million in 2022, a 9.1 percent rise from the prior year, but a drop of 3.7 percent from 2019 to 2022. Dealers Weigh In With numbers like that trending in the right direction, team dealers are upbeat, but are also quick to point out that the post-pandemic path to recovery has by no means a smooth N ow that the darkest days of the pandemic are in the rearview mirror, tackle football, the bread and butter of team dealers for generations, is back with a full playbook. e proof is in the numbers: In the 2021-22 school year, 11-player football was the most popular boys' high school sport, boasting 973,792 participants, according to the 2021-22 NFHS Athletics Participation Summary. But not all is first-and-goal for football. Even with numbers ticking up yard by yard, the sport did experience a drop of about 11 percent – or about 122,000 students – from a decade earlier. In the broader scheme, the SFIA's Top Line Participation Report 2022 reveals that from 2019-2021 tackle football participation ticked up 2.4 percent and in 2021 it attracted 5.2 million participants, a 33 percent decrease from the 14-year high set in 2008. e decline came primarily by the shedding of 800,000 core participants (-23 percent) from 2016-2021, including 429,000 (-17 percent) players age 6-17. So there is still work to be done to keep the sport on top of the heap. And there is a lot of that work already being done. 18 • Team Insight ~ May/June 2023 teaminsightmag.com

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