Madeline Hubbard ’19
Sports Editor
The benefits of regular exercise, and in particular the participation on a sports team participation in particular, are widely known and accepted. Researchers are trying to pinpoint why it is that adults don’t continue playing the games they loved as kids.
According to the Harvard Gazette, “In the poll, 89 percent of parents with a middle or high school-aged child said their child benefited greatly from playing sports, which improves mental and physical health, discipline, dedication, and social skills.”
So the question remains, why don’t these adults stay in the game? Regular Eexercise has been proven to reduce risk of many diseases and various medical complications. OYet only 26 percent of adults ages 26-29 had played in the past year when polled in 2015. This number was half of the percent of sports participants for the younger ages 18-25.
A 2015 poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that although 73 percent of adults had played a sport when they were younger only 25 percent have continued. The top ten sports played by adults includes golf, basketball, softball, soccer, running, football, tennis, biking, volleyball and swimming.
NPR looked at the motivations for adults to play sports and why so many dropped out of the game. Many adults worried about getting injured or being unable to work due to an athletic injury. With that, the lower income bracket was two times less likely to play sports as an adult than that of the top income bracket. It could be that many low income communities don’t have a safe place to play or there aren’t resources allotted to adult leagues.
Another contributing factor to the lack of adults in sports is time. Many adults said that with work and a family, they couldn’t find time for themselves to play. This explanation came from women especially. Coreen Schall said for NPR that “even in the most equal of marriages, like hers, mothers still, often, are the default parent.” The gender gap in adults who continue to play is another huge issue that needs to be solved with men being twice more likely to have played a sport in the past year than women, 36 percent to 16 percent. This gender gap is also contributed to by the fact that women are more likely to “‘’put themselves at the bottom of the list’ behind the needs of their jobs, their spouses, and their children.”
According to NPR’s article, “Why We Play Sports: Winning Motivates, But Can Backfire, Too,” adults lose interest as they age where losing doesn’t seem worth it or there are no stakes or competitions to win at the pick-up level. The focus on fun and fitness is lost.
Mariah Ollive ’18 plays D III field hockey for the love of the game and the enjoyment she gets from playing the sport. Ollive finds that whenever the team gets too focused on winning, it helps her to take a step back and remember her passion for the game. Ollive plans to stay active after graduation with skiing, and plans to pick up golf and tennis and partake in weekly yoga to stay fit.
Ollive would love to continue playing her college sport in the future if there was an affordable club or pickup league in her area that was also affordable. This problem plagues many college athletes looking to play their sport after graduation. With such a lack of adult leagues, especially for women, in most areas, it can be tough to pick the sport back up. Hopefully, the skills of perseverance formed from youth sports can be transferred to finding the time as an adult to pursue the sports we are passionate about.
