New book finds declines in most participatory sports and active recreation
AMHERST, Mass. - America's interest in sports is limited, for the most part, to watching people play them on television, according to a new book co-authored by Rodney B. Warnick, a faculty member in the department of hotel, restaurant and travel administration at the University of Massachusetts. While mountain biking and snowboarding may play well in the media, American adults are far more likely to golf, walk, or gamble in their spare time, say Warnick, and his colleague, John R. Kelly of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Their new book, "Recreation Trends and Markets: The 21st Century" (Champaign, IL:Sagamore Publishing, 1999), focuses on how Americans really spend their days off. The vast majority does something sedentary or close to it, and only a handful participates in extreme sports, say the authors, who cite participation trends in 103 leisure activities.
According to Warnick and Kelly, even Americans' interest in playing tennis and bowling has waned since the 1970s. Basketball and volleyball have seen slight increases in occasional participation, mainly among adults under 35, but those over 35 find their pleasure in less active or even stationary modes of recreation. The number of people walking for fitness, for example, has doubled in the last decade, but so has the number gambling for recreation.
What about the fitness craze? "There never was one," say Warnick and Kelly. "Fewer people are jogging now than in the 1980s, and the dropout rate for most exercise programs is more than 50 percent. The idea of Americans running around trying to keep fit appears to be a myth."
What will Americans do for recreation in the next century? "It's unlikely that we'll see much growth in physically demanding activities, despite the image of the new 'active old' in the media," says Warnick. "It's more likely we'll see growth in passive recreation, such as visiting theme parks and taking cruises."
"Clearly, Americans of all ages have more recreation choices today than ever before. When we first started monitoring recreation trends in the early 1980s, there were only 25-30 sports with consistent data. Now, there are 50-100," says Warnick.
The authors base their conclusions on yearly surveys of 15,000 to 23,000 households done by the Simmons Market Research Bureau from 1976 through 1996, and on data from Sporting Goods Research Network of Princeton, N.J.
Rodney B. Warnick can be reached at 413-545-6629 or 413-665-3849.