USTA Adult League Participation 2013 thru 2018 - The decline in unique players continues

USTA League Nationals are done for 2018 and year-end ratings have been published, and I've been analyzing bump up/down rates in a variety of ways and that will continue, but lets take a break to do a related analysis and look at participation numbers for the past year compared to prior years.

For this analysis, I'm looking at unique players that played a match in the Adult leagues which includes 18 & Over, 40 & Over, 55 & Over and 65 & Over during each ratings year, which is roughly November thru October.

This does not include any participants in Mixed, Combo, Tri-Level or other secondary leagues.  Including those may change the trends and I'll try to look at those as well.

I've been doing this analysis for a few years and so I'm just adding 2018 to prior years so we can see the trend.  So here goes!

What we see above is that while there are still more than 250 thousand unique players in Adult leagues, the trend from 2013 continues and there is a decline overall and amongst the men and women.  Overall, participation was down 3.9%, and the women's and men's decline was each also 3.9%.  This is unfortunately the largest drop for any one year period over the past five years.

Now, while nationally there is a drop, that doesn't mean participation is declining in all areas or in all leagues.  This is looking at just the main Adult leagues and in past years, 40 & Over and 55 & Over have been growing with 18 & Over shrinking.  Here is what that now looks like adding in 2018.

First, here is participation in just 18 & Over.

This is still the largest division with over 190 thousand participants, but we see significant decline here of 4.2% overall, 4% for the women, and 4.4% for the men.

Here is 40 & Over.

This tells a different story with growth from 2013 thru 2017, but for 2018 that is gone and there was an ever so slight decline.

Here is 55 & Over.

Here we see steady growth but a flattening in 2018.  Overall, women, and men all grew, but the men were up 10 players, and the women only a few hundred.

The working hypothesis I've floated in previous years is that the USTA membership is aging and that fueled the growth in 40 & Over and 55 & Over, as more players became eligible, but those players have begun to play less 18 & Over and they are not being replaced by new under 40 players.  This seems to still be the case, and now even 40 & Over has shown a very small decline which would seem to indicate players that have played in the past are choosing not to now.

Again, as I noted above this is looking at just a slice of USTA League play.  I will look at the other leagues soon to see if there are pockets of growth there.  A notable one is the new 18-39 league as that is hopefully an area we will see growth and will pull in younger players.

Also, some areas have shown growth in recent years, while others are declining faster than the national averages above.  I'll look at that too.

What are your thoughts on the decline?  Is it real in your area?  What are ways to turn it around?

Stay tuned for more.

Note: These are statistics from the data I've gathered and may not exactly match the USTA's data or they may report numbers using different criteria than I am.