What’s behind a statistic?
Think of the most common stats you know, depending on your interests and expertise.
If you follow youth sports, it’s probably this one: 70% of kids drop out before the age of 13.
It turns out the statistic is inaccurate, and completely outdated. How outdated? Thanks to the research and analysis of Marty Fox of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program, and Joseph Janosky of Lasell University, ittraces back nearly four decades.
“One of the most repeated statistics in youth sports may not have a clear primary source. And that should stop us in our tracks,” Janosky, a Boston-based professor, scientist and researcher who examines athletes’ health, wrote in arecent LinkedIn post. “What I found instead was a chain of secondary sources. Each one pointing to another. None clearly anchored to a transparent, verifiable study.“There’s a term for this: Citation drift. A number gets repeated. Then cited. Then normalized. Then accepted. … This matters because the numbers we repeat shape how we define the problem, how we prioritize solutions, and how we measure progress.”
Findings from multiple studies across many years are inconsistent with a 70% dropout rate. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Youth Risk Behavior Survey,shared with USA TODAY Sports by sports medicine physician Michele LaBotz, participation in organized sports among U.S. high school students has consistently been greater than 50% since 2000 (except during COVID).
Still, many of us within the youth sports industryhave cited the 70% stat, and delved into it.
Attrition from sports is still a taxing issue within the youth landscape, but we can concentrate our focus on it with fresh data and perspective.
“What we can say, based on our youth surveys, is that the average age in which a child quits sports is 12,” says Tom Farrey, founder ofProject Play, the national initiative to give every kid a healthy opportunity to play sports.
What steps can we take as parents to blunt attrition? Here are a few solutions I have thought about in our world that sometimes seems to push back at them continuing to play.
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Think outside the box: Play sports for sports themselves, especially when we're young
We have a tendency to look at youth sports as a pipeline we enter at an early age and progress toward a “top.”
From a parents’ perspective, we can adopt this mindset whether we don’t reach high school or college sports ourselves, or whether we become NFL Pro Bowlers. One of the latter group,Greg Olsen, is now a father of three kids. He launched a youth sports platform,Youth Inc., because he didn’t have many answers about what to do with his kids’ sports experiences.
“It’s so easy to be creatures of the moment and get caught up in the moment in time,”Olsen told USA TODAY Sports in an interview last August. “And it's a snapshot of a really long journey in process. And I think for young kids, mine being in this group, they all view themselves where they are right now at this second. They think they're really good, and they're really not as good as they are. They think they're not good; they're actually better than they think they are.
“Everyone is so worried about comparing to your peers in this moment in time, and especially for the young kids, what they don't realize is it's not a level playing field. Maturity and development and all of that stuff happens at very different paces for different kids, boys, girls, and then obviously within all of those divisions and ages. So if everyone can just keep the idea to get better. The idea is to be challenged, to be coached, to be developed, to be pushed, to be pulled. The idea is to make you better for whatever the next phase is.
“Everyone's doing whatever they can to make that all-star, that showcase, that Instagram reel. Whatever that moment in time of success or failure becomes, it becomes almost an indictment of labeling these kids of who they're going to be the rest of their life. And what we know is it's not a race to 12. It's not a race to who's the best sixth grader.”
What if we view it, at least up to that magic age of 12 or 13, as not a race at all? We know from extensive studies and research, as noted by Farrey of Project Playin a TED talk last fall, that active kids do better in life. He points out they have less anxiety, they go to college more often and they have more active parents.
A goal of Project Play is to create a minimum set of conditions under which children should be engaged: AChildren's Bill of Rights in Sports. Every child, it states, regardless of background or ability, should have the opportunity to play sports. And when in the care of adults, they have a right to safe and healthful environments.
Itmodels what is done in Norway, a home of Olympic champions where kids 12 and under areencouraged to try multiple sports, and play as much or as little as they want.
Fun, as we know from the work of sport scientist Amanda Visek, issomething much more than a frivolous activity, but something intentional and engaging that challenges and sustains us.
'Is it worth it':Red flags to watch with youth sports programs
Sports is also about changing and re-engaging. Find a balance.
Project Play’s goal by 2030 is tohave 63% youth sports participation nationwide.We are around 55% right now.
But keeping them playing requires persistence, saysJanosky, the Boston-based athlete health strategist.
“The promise of youth sports (is) the ability to stay engaged long enough to benefit from everything sports can offer,” he told USA TODAY Sports in an email. “It’s sustained participation in an environment that promotes health, development, and a positive relationship with physical activity across time.”
Like Janosky, Fox, a youth sports consumer advocate at the Aspen Institute, took a deep dive to the source behind “70% of kids quit before age 13,” and never really found one. Instead, he recast the issue based on his findings: “What if the story isn’t ‘most kids quit sports by age 13’ - it’s ‘kids quit most sports by age 13?’ ”
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Fox’s question gets at thespecialization conundrum, as well as the heart of another issue that young athletes confront when they are around middle school age. A former co-coach of mine liked to quote his fatherBob Tallent, once a Division I basketball coach and player, about how youth sports is like a pyramid. As competition grows stiffer, it gets narrower at the top, and kids drop off.
But how do we keep them if they still want to play? They need a connection to playing that goes beyond how good they are.
Ask your kids: Why do they play sports?
Farrey, Project Play’s director, says we can periodically ask our kids this simple question.
“You might be surprised by the answer,” he said during his TED talk. “All kids are wired differently. Our surveys tell us that playing with your friends and just playing for fun (are) the top two reasons. Winning matters but it barely cracks the top five. Chasing a scholarship, not even close. So, maybe you don't need to keep writing checks to that elite club that's dangling a college scholarship or preferential admission to some selective university. Maybe there's a casual sport option in your community that you can connect your kid with (that’s) actually going to meet their needs.”
Statistics tell usthat less than 7% of high school athletes play collegiately (a lower percentage play Division I). We also see, though, that playing high school sports tends to increase engagement with school.
A newstudyby the American Enterprise Institute looked at 262,000 Indiana high school students in 2023-24 and found a “double bump” effect of varsity sports participation on attendance. Varsity athletes, the study found, had better attendance outside their sports seasons than their peers and lower absence rates during their sports seasons.
Athletes, it found, also showed substantially lower rates of chronic absenteeism.
As we know from high school sports, where that pyramid moves toward a tight squeeze, everyone doesn’t regularly play. But sports, at whatever level, makes us feel like we are a part of something, whether we are cheering a teammate from the dugout or running alongside them in practice. We also hear those cheers for us, too.
Appreciate your kids' value to the team instead of telling them what's wrong with their situation
Aspen’s 2025 State of Play report, citing its parent survey, found that only 23% of parents with kids ages 6-10 say equal playing time is the right policy for their child’s age and competitive level. That’s nearly the same rate as parents of children ages 11-14 (19%) and 15-18 (17%).
We want them measured against the best from the earliest of ages, perhaps as some sort of self-validation. Within our kids’ sports, our temptation is to protect them and tell them when we think they are getting a raw deal. The next time you feel it, resist it.
Instead, give your son or daughter more autonomy to advocate for themselves with their coach for playing time. Perhaps more importantly, allow them to find their own value to the team, whether it’s a small role, a big role, or just being part of it.
I was on a collegiate crew and was one of our weaker rowers. My fondest memories from that period are, yes, the handful of races I contributed to winning, but also just hanging out with my teammates. We would go directly to the cafeteria after early-morning practice and enjoy one another’s company and the satisfaction we had survived another workout.
As we become adults, the games and practices might get easier, but the camaraderie lasts a lifetime.
“Youth sports (is) the foundation upon which everything else sits: college sports, pro sports, Olympic andParalympic sports,” Farrey said in his TED talk, “and, of course, beer league, one of the few institutions in our society that bring citizens from all backgrounds together, to work together, to solve real problems. Like trying to score a goal on a really tough defense, right? It can be a beautiful thing. Democracy in action, our capitalist kumbaya. And then we go to our kids' games, and all civility goes out the door.All hell breaks loose.”
We need to coach and parent our kids more for life than for wins and losses
We try to win, but we canemphasize the big picture with our kids, especially when they are young. For example, a hard loss when you try hard and play well is better than an easy win.
We tend to look at our kids with blinders. Sometimes, we think they are better than they really are. But why should that thought matter at all?
If they’re not playing, they’re still learning, and it’s a mindset coaches and parents can adopt, no matter what level, or league.
“Nothing against the other sports or nothing against travel and all that, but you can't beat high school football,” says Olsen, the former NFL tight end and youth sports advocate who hascoached his sons’ middle school football team. “It's just a very special culture, the interest of the hometown, the camaraderie, the brotherhood. It's football at its absolute purest. So the version we're trying to run of the middle school is a watered down version of that.
“We're doing summer workouts. We're doing pregame meals. We're teaching these kids big boy football. Like the days of what you've done in the past are done. We're doing big boy football, we're teaching you how to play the game. We're teaching you how to support each other. We're teaching you what it's like to be tired and committed to something that's difficult. It's all those principles, not just how to run and tackle and catch, but everything that comes with it. So we love it. We take it very serious, we pour a lot of time and energy into it, and it's something that we really take a lot of pride and joy in.”
Intrepid researchers have determined we don't have clear evidence that 70% of children quit organized sports by age 13. Instead, Janosky says, we have “a statistic that was built, repeated, and accepted until it no longer had to prove itself.”
Like looking at stats, the meaning of sports can’t just be superficially stated. We must mine them, engage in them, explore them, to find a true source that explains what they do for us.
“Along with protecting enjoyment, we should be asking how youth sport can better support long-term health and continued participation,” Janosky says. “That includes coaching practices, sport structure, parental expectations, cost, early specialization pressures, athlete autonomy, and the way success is defined. If the goal is persistence, then the environments we create have to make staying in sport both realistic and worthwhile.”
Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly.For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him atsborelli@usatoday.com
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:70% of kids drop out of youth sports by 13? Why the stat is wrong
What’s behind a statistic? Think of the most common stats you know, depending on your interests and expertise. If you follow yout...
