Youth Basketball: an overview | 5 min read

Youth Basketball: an overview

According to Deborah Slaner Larkin, former CEO of Women's Sports Foundation, girls have 1,3 million fewer opportunities to play sports than boys do in high school and about 63,000 fewer participation slots at the college level.

Azzi Fudd, player of the year, All-USA girls basketball team Source: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY 

That being said, basketball is the most popular team sports for high school students, and the popularity of college basketball is growing.

organized team sports participation

It is a common recommendation for a child to start "sport specialization" - that is, playing just one sport that they aspire to become professional in, at the age of 13. However, from the graph above it can be observed that participation in sports drops in high school. Why is that?

The obvious reason #1 is I was not having fun for both boys and girls. However, 36% of girls also quit because they have decided to concentrate on their grades. Among other things, this tells you that they don't see a future connected with playing sports professionally, and thus they choose an academic path for their careers.

Well, you can not want to be what you can't see, right. This is why it is so important that women's sports, WNBA as well as women's college basketball, receive more media attention. Money will flow to women's basketball as soon as the audience wants to watch. So the best way to support women athletes is to attend and watch the game.

Consider salary motivation. What high school students can easily find online is that the average salary of a WNBA player is $72 000 compared to NBA player's average of $5 000 000 or about 70 times what a woman makes.

In her article, Kelly Wallace of CNN describes a day she brought her daughters to watch a women's basketball game at Columbia University. They'd already visited a man's game earlier, so she was excited to watch a women's team with her kids, one of whom also played basketball. When they walked in there were only a handful of people there - a striking contrast to the men's game. 

It's a slow process but the stereotype of women's sports being less of a show or less of a professional game should be eventually destroyed. 

participation in schools basketball teams

Perhaps a good way to start is to make sure more girls participate in the school teams. According to data, it's the suburban and rural population that takes advantage of this opportunity, and the urban kids lag behind.