How Can We Restore Influence of Athletic Sports for Our Kids?
Young children and adolescents have had to adjust to so much from COVID-19, losing prolonged access to in-person education, social events, connecting with friends and acquaintances, and much more. They have lived in isolation for the better part of a year and have settled into the digital world by utilizing remote learning tools, virtual communication, socially distanced meetups, and online gaming, the latter of which has created a seismic shift in the sports world and the opportunities available for kids to achieve their dreams.
Excluding the top sporting organizations with massive budgets to support regular testing and contact tracing to hold safe physical athletic competitions (like the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, NCAA Football & Basketball), less profitable sporting entities have suffered tremendously. Outside of the two big money-makers in NCAA football and basketball, Division I universities have had to significantly reduce their budgets and cut hundreds of prominent sports programs, from soccer to wrestling to track-and-field and many others.
Most of these programs represent opportunities and life dreams for many aspiring youngsters to pursue athletic scholarships, a message the NCAA has made loud and clear over the decades of having “over 360,000 student-athletes and most of them will go pro in something other than sports.”
If a billion-dollar entity like the NCAA (and the lucrative universities under this governing body) has to endure enormous struggles to operate at a base level, all junior sporting organizations face that much greater of a challenge. Governors all over the country have had to interfere with prohibiting high school and youth sports due to virus risks, as 16 states postponed all high school sports activity from 2020 into 2021; those who did allow for sports grappled with a constant stream of postponements and cancellations. Independent youth sporting leagues have shut down all over the nation —with no viable path to resume even when society returns to normal.
Without the ability to physically connect with each other, children have resorted to virtual gaming, as OVER half of all U.S. kids under the age of 16 currently playing games on Roblox. E-sports as a whole have absolutely skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic, and virtual gaming has shown no signs of letting up even as society will gradually open back up.
While e-sports provide quality strategic, analytical, and gameplay skills and methodologies for kids, they do not offer the complete value-added package that organized physical sports offer children. The benefits of interpersonal social skills, mind and body development, establishing genuine friendships, and overall body coordination are greatly enhanced through the participation of physical sports. This isolation-heavy culture brought from the pandemic has contributed to a precipitous drop in youth physical activity, with lower cardiorespiratory fitness levels that would predispose them to cardiometabolic disease and other health consequences.
Daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity is essential to the physical, social, emotional, and mental well-being of children. It presents a necessary break to the hyperconnected digital world, teaching children to remain present and engaged without electronic distractions to better connect with their surroundings. A lack of connection severely damages the emotional well-being of the youth. Children’s mental health have taken a turn for the worse; teen suicide rates have increased every year from 2007, as high school athletes all over country have committed suicides at an alarming rate as a result of the lockdowns.
Sports at all levels matter to the well-being and connectedness of individuals and communities. With technology and digital trends only growing at an accelerated rate, how can we encourage our youth to participate in physical interpersonal activities?
