Too bad about baseball, but the fact is that it just isn’t the big deal it used to be. And for awhile soccer was the new up and coming sport. So right now at a place like FU it is likely that more students played serious soccer than serious baseball. So soccer wins.
I was gonna say soccer participation is growing while baseball participation is shrinking. But turns out both are shrinking and soccer is shrinking faster. I think soccer peaked a few years back. I hope it doesn’t drop off too much because it is a great way to keep kids running around. Baseball was invented to give exhausted farm hands something to do on Sunday. So there isn’t much running around. Nobody needed exercise.
My theory is that overall participation in a sport suffers when the sport becomes dominated by the year-round travel culture. The kids whose parents can’t or won’t do the travel thing (the vast majority) feel outclassed by the year round players and stop playing. Basketball hasn’t started dropping yet, but it has pretty much plateaued and it has this weird cultural exclusion of 80% of kids. And the quality of AAU basketball is comical and getting worse.
The sports with growing participation? Golf, tennis and other individual sports. No sucking up to a coach. No playing time drama. No phony “making the team” by writing a check. Want to go to tournaments?Fine, there’s a pretty cheap fee and you don’t have to pay for a coach, uniforms etc. You don’t even spend the night unless you are really good. So sports like baseball and soccer have been erecting barriers to exclude people while the old country club sports are tearing their barriers down.
