Are Indoor Numbers Trending Downward?

One of the conversations I had with a fellow coach Saturday on the floor of the Cadet Field House centered on the question of meet attendance, "Does it feel like to you this meet is smaller than last year's?" 

We agreed that it did feel smaller.

But, feelings can be wrong. Acting on feeling alone is a shortcut to making a fool of yourself. So, I decided to put a measuring stick to the question. And, while I was putting a measuring stick to Martin Luther King Mile High participation, I thought it worth doing the same to the Fort Collins Track Club meet up at Balch Field House. 

Here are the numbers for participation last year vs. this year, for both meets:

Fort Collins Track Club Invitational

To be clear, two meets do not a season-long trend make, but the overall decline in numbers is unmistakable. It is especially apparent on the girls side of the ledger.

There are no especially obvious explanations. The Fort Collins Track Club meet was up against the Air Force Open last year, too. The Martin Luther King Mile High was on a Sunday last year versus a Saturday this year, and both years on the same weekend as the National Pole Vault Summit. If anything, a Saturday date would seem to be preferable to a Sunday date in terms of participation for the MLK Mile High. Certainly, it allows coaches who also happen to be school coaches show up and do some coaching at the meet. 

So, in the absence of an easy explanation, it would seem that the numbers do suggest a decline in indoor participation from last year to this. It should be further noted, though, that indoor numbers had been on a long upward trend up until this year.

We could speculate at some potential reason, but the speculations that follow are just that--speculative.

• It could be that some discouragement in the ranks is starting to creep in. For years now, it's been getting harder and harder to reach the top. Perhaps that is starting to take its toll on the number willing to try.
• Burnout. It could be that athletes--and parents--have started to become weary of seven or eight months of track.
• More competition from school programs. It could be that more and more schools are running their own off-season programs and these programs are not as inclined to participate in indoor meets as the club programs are.
• More non-club meet options. It used to be that, but for the Air Force High School Indoor Open, you had to be a card-carrying USATF member to be eligible to compete in indoor meets. That is no longer true. There now exists a wide variety of indoor meet options to does not require USATF membership.
• More athletes committed to other sports. Perhaps more of the athletes who used to do indoor track and field are doing basketball, wrestling, and swimming (I kind of doubt that, but it's theoretically possible). Or, perhaps the year-round demands of football, volleyball, and soccer are starting to eat into indoor participation.
• Finances. It's possible, though I've not yet seen strong indicators of this, that fewer people are opting into club track on account of keeping household finances under a tighter rein.
• The long, steady climb of participation in recent years pulled in numbers that were not sustainable. Under this theory, we should see a plateau a little below the peak of the last couple of years.

And, of course, it could be some combination of the above. Or, there could involve explanations I've not yet even thought of.

In any case, I'll try to keep monitoring the trend here on my end. At this point, the trend (and a very short-term trend it is, so far at least) is a puzzle.