When it comes to the future of sports the most important aspect to take into account is actually their current trends. If one were to make an attempt, they couldn't make a legitimate determination of what the future of sport might hold. And even then, to make an honest determination of where the trends current sport are headed, there are still many, many aspects to take into consideration. The aspects that come to the front of the conversation would definitely have to start with youth sports and club sports. Next we may look at high school sport and of cOurse, intercollegiate sport. And finally, we must direct our attention to the importance of professional sport, sport as experienced through different genders, and through different generations.
Looking at trends a little closer now, we can begin with youth sport. Observing purely participation statistics from surveys compiled in 2005, the increasing levels of our youth participating in organized team sport is promising, with kids aged six to seventeen having a 54% participation rate. While this does put a positive spin on things, the percentage of kids who stop participating is an astonishing 70%. This typically happens along the way to high school and is thought to be an effect of multiple aspects of youth sport. Overemphasis on winning, specialization in one sport over an elongated period of time, increased injuries, and expenses are some of the many reasons that youth sport, especially club sports, have become more and more difficult to keep up with. All of these individual parts of youth sport will undoubtedly affect us,who will be the ones who ultimately affect the sports themselves for future generations.
Our next focus will turn to high school sports. As mentioned earlier, youth cease participation in organized sport at an alarming rate somewhere before high school. The advancement of new technology and the idolization of super star athletes in professional leagues have made coaching any team at any level a highly demanding job. Parents and coaches alike demand high levels of intensity in practice and competition, which almost definitely attributes to high burn out rates in younger athletes. This could attribute majorly to sports in a number of ways. It may be more taxing on our bodies, but pay off in more intense and elongated competitive careers, it might turn more and more of our youth and ultimately, adults, away from competing seriously in sports, or it could follow the trend most would agree sports in our country has been following for a number of years: a little of both. With high school sports becoming more competitive, this only enables even the least athletic or coordinated children to excel at any sport if they put the hours and work into it. In turn, this is why professional athletes are younger,stronger, and better than their predecessors as a collective generation. Unfortunately, this is also the reason the retention rate of organized sports has declined dramatically. We simply push athletes to0 hard, at too young of an age. As an athletic society, we cannot expect every young basketball player to become the next Kobe Bryant, or every pee-wee football player to be on the field four or five hours a day and running 4.5 second 40 yard dashes before they're even in high school. The physical endurance will find a way to be healed with advances in medical technology. The mental implications however, might prove to be difficult to keep children in sports later on if we continue to push the envelope ne and more.
Finally, all these current trends starting from the youngest stages possible will affect professional sports and how we look at and interact with them one way or another. As I mentioned earlier, the need to excel at sports has become absurd. While performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) is a hot button issue, it is still a fairly common practice. The worst part of all the PEDs is definitely the reasons behind them. They aren't even to excel at the sport simply for the sake of being exceptional. These athletes are so enamored with the idea of being hyper popular that they'll do anything to perpetuate that image of godliness. This is where past trends and current trends have come to light. Sports have become primarily geared toward making them enjoyable for spectators, changing the entire goal of sports, which is now to entertain rather than compete. Other unfortunate trends are a direct result of the aforementioned issue: injuries and how we go about them. Being hyper competitive as we push our super stars to be has cost them physically in the long run. And because of that, all types of new legal and medical precedents are being set as we speak.
As one can clearly see from the information gathered here, there are tons of things affect current trends in our sports today, and it's almost impossible to discuss and compare every single one. This is why we must pin point the most demanding and immediate trends. As a society we may cultivate the positive trends and see that they are at the forefront of our debates, or we can focus on the negative, as it is so easy to do.
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