Who is driving the changes in team and individual-sports participation?
By Nick Rigitano
Based on National Sporting Goods Association’s (NSGA) Total Participation Points (TPP) measure, team sports increased 1.6 percent in 2019 compared to the prior year, while individual sports increased 1.2 percent during the same timeframe. TPPs take into account both the number of people participating in each sport segment (reach) and the number of sports each person is participating in (depth).
In the past, sports participation for different segments has largely been reported by the total number of people participating in a given segment (the number-of-participants measure), which doesn’t necessarily provide the whole story.
For example, in Figure 1, both Person A and Person B participated in soccer and baseball in Year 1. In Year 2, Person A continued to play both sports while Person B stopped participating in soccer. If using the number-of-participants measure, then Person B would have still been considered a Team Sports participant, since playing baseball continued in Year 2. However, if using the TPP measure, then participation declined because Person B was involved in one team sport instead of two.