State of Play 2023: Aspen Institute Annual Report
When it comes to youth sports (young children to high school), the Aspen Institute has begun to separate itself as a leading research group. With a passion for bringing “play” back to youth sports, the Aspen Institute strives to gather annual data from all across the country in order to better understand how sports are trending, where they’re trending, and what investment is required to participate.
While this report falls much more on the “athlete” than “student” side of the equation, I feel it is important to share this resource with our community to help better contextualize some of the mentalities and passion our student-athlete families have for their sport. Many families use this as their main bonding experience, others have been conditioned by coaching funnels to have particularly healthy or unhealthy mentalities on sport balance, and many are spending far more on their sport participation than anyone wants to admit out loud.
The report itself is highly visual, and is broken up cleanly to help you get to the information you want to see. If you have any student-athletes or want to better understand the student-athlete world, I highly recommend exploring the State of Play 2023.
