Sports participation at Southwest Florida's high schools is declining and COVID-19 is only one reason

Sports participation in Southwest Florida’s high schools was showing signs of decline before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Then the bottom fell out.

Elevated concern about the virus’ danger as well as inflated virtual school enrollment helped contribute to nearly 1,300 fewer high school athletes participating in Lee and Collier last school year. Compared to participation during the 2018-19 school year, the last before COVID-19, that represents a 10% overall decline in Lee high schools and a 7% fall in Collier.

Female athletes made up the majority of the decline with girls’ participation falling 16% in Lee, more than double the 6% decline among boys, and 8% in Collier.

While coaches and school administrators indicated that participation numbers have rebounded somewhat this school year with the retreat of the virus and more students returning to in-person learning, myriad continuing issues beyond the pandemic may continue to hinder high school sports in future years.

“If you look at it there is no one specific cause,” said David LaRosa, the Lee County School District's Director of Athletics and Activities. “There’s a variety of factors from (the growth of) club sports to coaching turnover to the lack of JV programs.”

While the Florida High School Athletic Association won't release this school year's participation reports until the summer, anecdotal reports indicate there's been a jump in participation numbers in Southwest Florida and statewide following last year's steep drop. However, ensuring the long-term health of high school athletics will mean finding ways to effectively deal with issues that existed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drop not unique to Southwest Florida

In 2016-17, the FHSAA set an all-time record with more than 310,000 participants. Since then, participation has declined for four consecutive years, cratering to less than 251,000 last school year, a 19% drop.

Just like in Southwest Florida, the decline in girls’ participants was greater, falling 21% to less than 107,000, its lowest level since 2012-13. Boys’ participation declined about 18%.

J.A. Colasanti, the FHSAA’s director of membership and contract management, wrote in an email that while the COVID-19 pandemic was the primary reason for last year’s extreme decrease, there’s a belief that high school sports in the state may continue to see lower participation numbers in the future.

“Sports specialization and the ability to compete in leagues and showcase events outside of school are seen as strongly contributing factors,” he wrote. “We are of the opinion that students are still competing, just not always for their school.”

According to the National Federation of State High School Athletic Associations, the number of boys and girls participating in high school sports declined in 2018-19, the first drop after 20 years of consecutive increases. The organization has not conducted a national survey of state high school associations since then because of the pandemic.

Much of those gains in the previous two decades were due to more girls playing sports. By 2018-19, the number of girls participating in high school sports nationally had grown 85% since 1988-89, while the number of boys playing increased 33%.

Fewer girls playing high school sports

In Lee County, relatively new sports like girls bowling, competitive cheerleading, girls lacrosse and girls weightlifting helped bolster female participation for a time. However, entering the 2019-20 school year, every public high school submitted a corrective action plan which listed ways each could increase the number of female athletes.

The majority of them focused on improving opportunities for more girls to compete especially on the junior varsity level, where a number of schools failed to have enough participants to field teams.

“If you don’t have a JV team you have no feeder program you have no development program you have no place to put kids to create some excitement around the sport,” LaRosa said. “I don’t think it’s OK for you to have softball tryouts and then you find out you’ve only got enough for a varsity team. I don’t agree with that. What do you have to do to have a JV team? You’ve got to beat the halls and find girls.”

LaRosa said Lee schools were making some progress in increasing non-varsity teams for girls before the pandemic began in the spring of 2020.

“COVID put a wrench into all of that,” LaRosa said. “Our goal for this year was to get back to 2019 numbers. But I know we’re not going to be there because we’re still feeling lingering effects of the pandemic.”

Two out of every three of the nearly 750 participants all Lee County high schools lost last year were for girls' sports. The county added girls wrestling in the winter and beach volleyball as a club sport this spring, which gives female athletes two more chances to compete.

In fact, of the sports the FHSAA has a state championship for, Lee County offers all except for water polo and flag football.

“Not every county can say that,” LaRosa said.

Conversely, in Collier, girls high school sports participants actually increased slightly last year when compared to the 2019-20 school year.

That doesn’t mean individual schools didn’t struggle. Immokalee High School, for instance, had just 132 girls sports participants in 2020-21, the fewest by far among Collier’s traditional public high schools even though it had the third-highest number of female students.

When Chris Siner took over as the Indians' athletic director last fall after five years as LaBelle’s AD, he said he made it a priority to improve girls' sports participation.

“When I was here before in the early 2000s we had great participation in girls basketball, volleyball, track,” said Siner, who started his high school coaching career at Immokalee. “At LaBelle, we had really good turnout in our girls' athletics and they were very competitive. I wanted to bring that here to Immokalee and I think we’re on the right track.”

Siner brought Andrew London with him to Immokalee from LaBelle to take over the girls basketball program, which went 0-11 in a shortened season last year when the team dwindled to just four players. This year, the Indians had a full roster and won four games, including a district play-in.

“A little bit of our issue here is the coaching turnover,” Siner said.  “You have a different coach each year there’s not a connection. That’s my job to make sure we hire quality head coaches and assistant coaches that build relationships with the kids.”

Siner said that’s exactly what London did, recruiting the hallways to bolster a team that was on its third different coach in the past four seasons.

“We put them in a good environment that they want to be in that we can teach them and they can learn and have some fun,” Siner said.

Need to co-exist with club sports

Another obstacle for high schools is they can struggle to provide the coaching, competition and exposure offered by high-level club teams. High school coaches who refuse to relax practice schedules and attendance requirements to accommodate athletes who want to compete for both risk losing some of the best players on campus.

“If a kid gets put into a situation where they’ve got to choose my high school team or my club team they’re picking their club team,” LaRosa said. “Because their club team can do more for them than we can.

“We’ve got to learn to really work with those programs.”

North Fort Myers girls soccer coach Nick Erickson has done just that since he took over the Red Knights program nine years ago. It also helps that he’s coached club soccer for the past six years and has two children that play in club organizations.

“It’s about finding that balance for what your program is and trying to figure out the lay of the land that they’re trying to deal with,” said Erickson, whose entire varsity roster played club soccer this season, including several who regularly traveled to play with a Tampa club. “In my opinion, if you want to have a successful program you have to have certain allowances for that.”

That means being aware of players’ club tournaments schedules and knowing which ones encourage their players to compete for their high school teams and which do not.

Erickson said about half of this year’s North team also played for a club that discourages high school soccer participation.

“Having to deal with that can be very difficult,” he said. “I’ve always just had the mindset of I’m going to do what I can do to make sure that my kids are playing competitive soccer and I will cater to it to a certain degree. But you don’t want to just be playing second fiddle all the time.

“At the end of the day it’s not going to be perfect but I’ve never pushed it away. I’ve just tried to accept it and mold it into what we do.”

Decline in 'country club' sports

Among the high school sports that have seen some of the biggest participation declines are those that would seem perfectly suited to Florida’s temperate climate: golf, tennis and swimming.

Collectively, participation in those three sports last school year dropped by about 28% in both Lee and Collier counties when compared with 2017-18.

Not all of that decline can be blamed on COVID-19. In Lee County this year, only a handful of high schools had the minimum four female golfers to compete as a team in the LCAC Tournament.

During the 2020-21 school year, only 112 girls participated in high school golf at the 36 Lee and Collier schools that are members of the FHSAA. A total of 199 boys participated, down from 291 four years earlier.

During his four seasons on the boys' golf team at Palmetto Ridge, senior Ty Kaufman said the Bears only had enough experienced golfers to regularly compete as a team his first two years. He says competing almost exclusively as an individual diminished the high school golfing experience for him.

"Having a more established golf program with other kids that are as competitive as I am, I think it could have helped me out a lot," he said. "We could have pushed ourselves more and gotten better at the game together."

Instead, Kaufman said it was often up to him to help tutor beginning golfers on the basics of the game. The 17-year-old, who learned the game at an early age from his father Eric, a golf pro at Cedar Hammock Country Club in Naples, said introducing golf to kids when they're in elementary and middle school can help grow the sport.

Meanwhile, participation in boys and girls tennis in Lee declined every season from 2017-18 through 2020-21, accounting for a collective loss of 125 players.

But it's swimming has seen the largest dropoff of the three sports with nearly 300 fewer participants during the 2020-21 school year, than in 2017-18.

Access to facilities as well as skilled coaches that can teach the sport is an ongoing issue for some schools. Immokalee, for instance, does not have a home golf course. Siner said the school just installed a hitting bay and a putting green on campus which he’s hoping will help encourage more students to try the sport.

Only four public high schools in Lee County and none in Collier have on-campus swimming pools. Those four Lee high schools – Cape Coral, Cypress Lake, North Fort Myers and Riverdale – along with Bishop Verot and Fort Myers, traditional swimming strongholds that both use the nearby DeLeon Pool to train, combined for 54% of all swimming participants in the county.

Rob Pellicer, a Swim Florida coach who works with high school-age swimmers, said it’s no surprise that schools with easy access to facilities have the most participants.

A Riverdale High graduate who was a two-time district champion and three-time state qualifier during his career with the Raiders in the early 2000s, Pellicer said being able to simply walk outside to the school’s pool was a huge benefit.

“A lot of schools they have to travel to an off-campus site to swim so they’re either busing them or parents have to shuttle kids,” he said. “It just adds a layer of friction and when you add that you’re going to have less participants turn out ultimately.”

Pellicer said Riverdale, which had a county-high 48 swimming participants in 2020-21, also has the advantage of a longtime coach in Pam Barry, who has been at the school for more than 30 years.

With Swim Florida’s numbers remaining fairly steady throughout the pandemic, Pellicer observed that the overall decline in high school participation is likely the result of fewer “high school only” swimmers coming out for the teams.

LaRosa said participation in golf, tennis and swimming is also affected by how the Lee County School District’s student population has changed over time. He shared that when he was the principal at Fort Myers, the majority of the school’s tennis players had a private coach in addition to their high school mentor. That sets up an additional obstacle that less affluent students are unlikely to be able to overcome.

“We call them country club sports for a reason,” he said. “If you’re not in a situation to be able (to pay for private coaching), it will likely deter you from wanting to play those particular sports.”

Connect with Dan DeLuca: @News-PressDan (Twitter), ddeluca@gannett.com.

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This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Participation decline in girls sports hurting Lee, Collier high schools