In This Version

• The Inactive Childhood of American Youth
• Sports Go “Extreme”
• Leisure-Learning Connection
• Drug Abuse Update
• Boomers – NOT Old Yet
• Policies to Check Out
• Summer Reading Suggestion

Childhood: Indoors and Inactive

The lifestyle of today’s children is cause for great concern. Youth are living and growing up with fewer opportunities for physical activity and more time spent indoors and physically inactive. A recent USA Today article (7/12/05), “Childhood pastimes are increasingly moving indoors”, by Dennis Cauchon focused on these concerns and included a wealth of useful information for our field. The information from a variety of credible sources included some of the following:

• In a typical week, 27% of youth ages 9 to 13 play organized baseball and only 6% play on their own (Centers for Disease Control)
• A child is six times more likely to play a video game than ride a bike on a typical day (Kaiser Family Foundation)
• Little League participation has declined to 2.4 million children, a 14% decrease since its peak in 1997 (NSGA survey)
• Rates of less structured sports forms such as pick up games, catch, and pickle ball have declined nearly twice as fast as Little League (NSGA survey)
• Sales of children’s bikes have declined 21% from 2000 to 2004 (Bicycle Industry and Retailers News)
• Use of skateboards and scooters, today’s possible replacement for the bicycle,
  reached their peak in 2001 and 2002 and have declined since that time (NSGA survey)

A USA Today analysis of information from the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) made the following comparisons in activity participation by 7 to 11 year olds between 1995 and 2004 for the following traditional sports:

(Lewis, Adrienne, USA Today, Activity in decline, July 12, 2005, 1A)

Further information and fuel for thought from this article:

• In the 1960s, 4% of youth were overweight. That rate is currently 16% (CDC)
• Studies suggest that children who spend more time outdoors have longer attention spans than children who watch a great deal of television and play video games (Frances Kuo, Director of the Human Environment Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

The availability of all forms of multimedia makes a child’s bedroom a potential outpost for indoor inactivity. The Kaiser Foundation Study on this issue indicated the following percentages of youth ages 8 to 18 with media and technology in their bedroom included:

• 68% have TV in their bedrooms
• 54% have VCR or DVD
• 49% with video-game player in bedroom
• 31% with computers

Extreme Sports – Extremely Attractive

Who are Karin Huttany, Janna Meyer, Hannah Teter, and Sofia Mulanovich? What major sports happening returns to Los Angeles in August? What type of sporting participation currently out scores tackle football and baseball combined when participation patterns in the United States are measured?

Hopefully, you were able to use the title of this section and recognize these women are among the best female "extreme sport" athletes in the world; LA serves as the site of the 11th X Games; and maybe even guessed that there are more inline skaters than tackle football and baseball players. Naturally use of the "extreme" is attributed to the land of “everything alternative and forward moving” known as California. The term was subsequently changed to “X” Games which seemed appropriate since Gen X was the group most involved in such pursuits.

Extreme now translates into extreme interest on the part of marketers everywhere. ESPN indicates that the X Games are the most watched sporting event by males ages 12 to 34, a lucrative but hard to reach target market. The economic windfall for cities hosting the X Games has increased from $5 million in 1996 to $30 million in 1998. San Diego benefited $14 million directly and an additional $18 million indirect. (Source: Simmons, Mark. X Games: Extreme Marketing (http://askmen.com/sports/business).
X Games: Extreme Marketing

According to the Sports Goods Manufacturers Association (SGMA) the most recent Superstudy® of Sports Participation, conducted by American Sports Data which monitors over100 sports and fitness activities, extreme activities are not that extreme anymore. For instance

…Extreme sports are now year-round activities with the popularity of snowboarding and the construction of indoor climbing walls

...Inline skaters outnumber baseball players (9.7 million) and tackle football players (5.4 million) combined with participation levels of 17.3 million

...Overall participation in paintball has increased by more than 60% in the past 6 years since 1998

...Trail Running has experienced rapid growth in that same 6 year time period with overall participation growing by nearly 25%.

The top 10 most popular extreme sports according to Superstudy® of Sports Participation based upon participation by Americans six years of age and older for at least one time include (in order of popularity): inline skating, skateboarding, paintball, artificial wall climbing, snowboarding, trail running, mountain biking, BMX bicycling, and rock/mountain climbing.

(Source: SGMA International, owner of The Super Show®, the Sports Research Partnership and Sports Edge magazine, is the global business trade association of manufacturers, retailers and marketers in the sports products industry)

The Leisure/Learning Connection

The National Intramural Recreational Sports Association recently reported that 333 of their 700 colleges and university members are building or expanding recreation centers, or have made plans to do so soon.

Signs of the Times

1. Ohio State University is in the middle of a four-year, $139 million project
2. Cleveland State University began construction on a $29 million center
3. Youngstown (Ohio) State University plans to open its $12.1 million center in August.
4. Boston University's $90 million center opened this spring

Evidence of Positive Impact

This isn’t the old, smelly gym with limited hours that used to be part of the college experience. These facilities include the usual basketball courts, swimming pools, running tracks, but in more recent times have added rock-climbing walls, specialized training, nearly limitless weight equipment, Internet connections, and late-night hours. Early monitoring suggest that such expenditures in recreation centers make a difference including:

• An independent student survey at Indiana University revealed 87% of its students were involved in some recreational sports activity; 79% percent indicated it was important to their campus experience
• University of Michigan just completed $4 million in upgrades to its four recreation centers and the center receiving the most improvements saw visitation rates increase by 66%

Boomers – NOT Old Yet

According to the Boomer Project, the baby boomers are not that old just yet. July 1 of this year marked the halfway mark for members of this generation born between 1946 and 1964 turning 50 and that same date marked the first of the Boomers reaching 59 ½ years of age.
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Data from the Census Bureau indicates that of the 76 million Americans born in this "baby boom" time frame, only 32.7 million of them were born in the first nine years of the boom while a larger number, 43.4 million, were born in the second nine years. According to the findings released by the Boomer Project, it will take until August 15, 2007 for one-half of this generation group to turn 50. That will still leave one-half of them under 50. In addition, it will be another six years before even 25% of the Boomers reach 59 ½. One half of the Boomers will reach the more common retirement age of 65 in 2022.

(Source: “Hold on to Your Hate: Boomers Aren’t Retirement Age Yet”, The Boomer Project Newsletter, July 2005)

Recent Policies – Future Impact

Many of us in parks and recreation follow government action related to open space and funding, but there are a number of different areas that hold potential impact for our field. Some of those include:

Title IX

In 1972, the federal government passed Title IX, a law which banned discrimination against females in school sports. What a difference a law could make as the number of girls and young women working out in gyms and taking to the athletic fields has soared. However, this hasn’t been a law that was spared criticism particularly from colleges and universities who were forced to drop some traditional men’s sports to meet the criteria outlined in Title IX.

Schools demonstrated compliance with the law having proportional numbers of male and female athletes; showing a history of expanding programs for the gender group with less access to sports, or showing that the group with less access has little interest or ability in sports. This past spring, the compliance issue was watered down when the Department of Education informed schools that the level of interest could be determined through an email survey.

(Source: “A loss of women’s sports”. Globe Editorial. Boston Globe, July 12, 2005)

Tobacco Funds

Where has the tobacco settlement money gone? According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, not all states have been using the settlement money to improve health as originally intended. Categories where states have been allocating the largest amounts of funds include:

(Source: Governing Magazine, June 25, 2005, p. 56)

Eminent Domain

A recent Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain makes it easier for local government to force property owners to sell. Eminent domain is a provision traditionally used by the government to buy out property owners when the land is needed for the greater public good such as it would be for a new highway or school, etc. This new ruling now allows eminent domain to be used for economic development meaning that the benefits to a region outweigh the rights of individual property owners. This ruling is sure to have implications and controversy in communities everywhere.

(Source: Jim Herron Zamora, “Eminent domain ruling chills property owners; Fear of land grabs unites odd coalition”. San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 2005.

Summer Reading Suggestion

If you manage to sneak in a little down time this summer, you may want to consider reading Last Child in the Woods – Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder (Also listed in the CPRS Bookstore). The author, Richard Louv, a columnist, adviser to a number of organizations, founder of Connect for Kids, and a nationally known speaker on family, nature, and community, has written a book that speaks to all segments of our profession. Louv makes a strong case as to how we need to restore the relationship between people and the planet especially as the current generation is the first one to be raised without any kind of real contact with nature.

Please Note:

The information in the July version of trendSCAN included information about how families from different ethnic groups interacted with their children during the weekends. The source for that information was inadvertently omitted. The source for that information is “Survey finds weekends offer no rest for weary”. Advertising Age, May 16, 2005, p. 12.

TIPs: Trends into Practice

A couple of suggestions from this month's version of trendSCAN - all of them related to our important role with today's youth. Actually, we are asking the questions - HOW

HOW can parks and recreation lead the way by both providing and encouraging youth to become involved in less structured, more active opportunities for play? Can we return to the days (or increase our emphasis upon) drop-in type programs where parents feel safe allowing their children to play in neighborhood parks at certain, specified times?

HOW can we structure such opportunities so we will enable kids to organize activities on their own rather than waiting for an adult to take over? and

We are one of the only or the key providers of access to open space and natural settings within most communities. HOW can we leverage our role and responsibility to re-connect youth and adults to badly needed contact with nature?

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trendSCAN is created by CPRS by Leisure Lifestyle Consulting of Sarasota, FL. Comments and questions can be directed to Dr. Ellen O’Sullivan at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Please feel free to share interesting trend information with her as well.