INSIGHTS NOW

First-Time Participation for Team Sports During 2021

By Nick Rigitano

NSGA Director of Insights and Analysis

NSGA’s 2022 Editions of the Sports Participation in the US reports released earlier this year revealed which sports rebounded and which ones may have reset during 2021, the first year after the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020. Further analysis of study results also shed light on which sports people were most likely to try for the first time during 2021 for the segment of team sports. According to NSGA’s participation study, basketball had 3 million first-time participants during 2021, the most among the 11 team sports tracked by NSGA (Figure 1). The next two spots on the list were volleyball (2.4 million) and soccer (2.3 million). All forms of football (flag, tackle and touch), along with baseball, softball and ice hockey, had between 1 and 1.9 million newcomers. The last two spots on the list were lacrosse and cheerleading which were tried by 900,000 people. Because there are large differences in terms of overall participation numbers among each of the team sports (basketball had 22.5 million total participants in 2021, whereas lacrosse had 2.6 million and cheerleading had 3 million), it is also important to examine first-time participation by looking at the concentration of first-time participants for a given sport. As illustrated in Figure 2, study results show lacrosse having the highest percentage of first-time participants with 37 percent. Cheerleading and ice hockey were next on the list with 31 percent of participants trying the respective sports for the first time last year. All three forms of football (flag, tackle and touch) had between 20 and 25 percent of total participants identify as newcomers along with volleyball which had 22 percent. Soccer (16 percent), softball (15 percent), basketball (13 percent) and baseball (12 percent) rounded out the last four spots on the list and represented the team sports with the smallest percentages of first-time participants. As part of NSGA’s study, participants were also asked if they planned to continue to participate in their respective sport(s) during 2022. Figure 3 represents the percentages of participants for a given sport who planned to continue participating in 2022. It is important to note, however, that this line of questioning often results in survey respondents overestimating their likelihood of participating. Certain insights can still be gleaned from the data, though. Directionally speaking, the team sports of basketball, baseball and football (touch) appear to be the least at risk of losing their participants than compared to cheerleading and lacrosse, which have much lower percentages of people planning to participate. While it is always important to gain as many first-time participants as possible for a given sport, it can become problematic if a given sport is always reliant on a high number of newcomers year after year in effort to keep the status quo for overall participation. For the sports that saw a significant amount of first-time participation during the past year, it is the hope that the exposure to these new sports can lead to continued interest in participating for years to come.