Team Insight

11 • Team Insight ~ November/December 2023 teaminsightmag.com to supporting girls' high school flag football in California. The move added California to a growing list of states that have included varsity girls' flag football in high school athletic programs, including Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Nevada. New York supports flag football, too. Soon aer the CIF decision, New York State's public high school athletic association ap- proved plans to stage its first state high school championship for girls' flag football in the spring of 2024. Pre vious;y, in late 2022 the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA) had approved girls' high school football as an official sport, which means that the sport moved from the spring to the fall in 2023. "This is an opportunity to showcase the skills of our girls in our high schools," explained David Hines, AIA executive director. "This is not the old powder-puff football. ese kids can play. ey can run. ey can catch." 7 Girls Take it to the Mat Speaking of girls' sports, the numbers certainly told the story behind the impressive and wel- come growth in girls' wrestling across the country. • Since 1994, the number of women who are wrestling in high school has grown from 804 to more than 31,000 and in 2022 the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) adopted women's wrestling as its 28th championship sport. • In 2020, the National Junior Collegiate Athletic Association (NJCAA) announced that it would recognize women's wres- tling as an emerging sport. • More than 100 colleges/univer- sities in the U.S. now sponsor a varsity girls' wrestling program. • Since 2004, women's wrestling has been a recognized Olympic sport. 6 Sports, Inc. Moves Fall Show Aer years of a happy – if some- what costly for some gambling members – annual existence in Las Vegas at the start of anksgiving week, Sports, Inc. announced it would be moving its Fall Team Dealers Show be- ginning next year because the high-priced Formula 1 race was moving into the group's tradi- tional time slot – and bringing with it huge influx of auto racing fans and the accompanying hotel and transportation crunch. The schedule now calls for the show to relocate to Phoenix, AZ, in 2024 (November 18-20) and then to Tampa, FL, in 2025 (November 10-12). e 2023 Fall Team Dealers Show had already been moved up by one week, to November 14-16, to accommo- date the F1 crowd. 5 Youth Sports Rebound ... Aer suffering – and surviving – more than two years of pan- demic-fueled disruptions, team sports began to see a return to pre-COVID participation num- bers. e takeaway from a Sports & Fitness Industry Association's (SFIA) 2022 U.S. Trends in Team Sports Report released in early 2023: Team sports participation trends in the U.S. are solid, but not spectacular, but at least they are improving. The SFIA data reveals that while team sports participation numbers are increasing, they are not quite back to pre-pandemic levels — yet. e number of team sports participants increased by just 1.8 percent from 2020 to 2021. In 2020, there were 67 million team sports participants in the U.S. and that number grew to 68.3 million in 2021. While that still lags behind the 70.8 million U.S. team sports par- ticipants back in 2019, fortunately, there are positive signs for the future of team sports participation in the U.S. Tops among them is that the number of participants in the 6-to-12 age group increased from 17 million in 2020 to 17.6 million in 2021. They are the future of team sports. "e number of 6-to-12-year olds playing (team) sports not only increased in 2021, but it is the highest we have seen in the last five years," pointed out Tom Cove, SFIA president and CEO. "Aer free play and recess, team sports are oen the first regular physical activity in which children participate and the experience can be the foundational connection to a lifetime of sports and fitness participation." e numbers tell the story of the state of team sports as we head into 2024. • As has been the case for many years, basketball is still the most- played team sport in the U.S., with 27.1 million participants in 2021. • Outdoor soccer has overtaken basketball as the top sport for 6-year-olds in 2021. • Among 23 team sports, the biggest year-over-year changes in participation on a percentage basis belonged to fast-pitch so- ball (+15.3 percent), gymnastics (+10.9 percent), court volleyball (+8.1 percent) and swimming on a team (+8.0 percent). • Five team sports – flag football, grass volleyball, fast-pitch soball, court volleyball and basketball – had increases in core participation over a five-year average for 6-to- 17-year-olds. Eleven other sports had increases in total participa- tion over a five-year average for 6-to-17-year-olds, as well. 4 … And School Sports, Too! Continuing the positive par- ticipation news, team dealers and their vendors looking for some good news as the 2023-24 school year kicked off needed look no further than an upli- ing late-summer report from the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). e bottom line: Participation in high school sports eclipsed TEAM TRENDS Photo: FatCamera/istock

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