USTA League Mixed Participation - A preliminary look at some USTA League statistics for 2023

 I've been doing some mid-year looks at participation for 2023 to get a preliminary idea of what any continued recover post-COVID there is or if the general decline we've observed since 2013 may be continuing.  I even took a look by section, first warm weather sections, then the rest, and saw some sections are declining faster, and a few have actually shown growth.

In doing that analysis, I looked at only the main Adult advancing leagues as I've done that each year and it provides consistency for comparing things year to year.  I thought it would be interesting to also look at Mixed, so this post will dive into that.

For this analysis I'm looking at unique participants during the USTA rating year in the 18 & Over or 40 & Over Mixed leagues.  This is unique participants, not total registrations, so someone playing in both leagues or multiple levels will be counted just once.

Also, since the USTA had a 2-year rating period for 2020/2021 due to COVID, I'm grouping those as a single "year".  As you  might expect, when I've looked at them individually in the past, 2020 was way down, and 2021 recovered some but not all the way to 2019 (or 2022) levels.

Here are the overall participation stats for Mixed!

This may be the first time I've done this for Mixed, so we actually get a view into the years from 2013 and on to see how it compares with the trend in Adult.  From 2013 to 2018, Adult dropped about 7-8% and here it is similar, although the bulk of the drop was in 2018.  There was a slight recovery in 2019 like Adult leagues also saw, but Mixed was a bit larger.  Combining the COVID years also shows a greater bump than Adult, and then a similar drop in 2022.  So overall Mixed participation very much mirrors Adult.

What is interesting is that 2023 is way behind 2022 at this point.  That is alarming at first, but a number of sections run Mixed leagues either in the Summer so just starting, or as early start leagues so still to be played, so much of that gap is due to that.

Another observation is that Mixed obviously requires the same number of men and women on the court, but every so slightly more women participate than men.  My observation locally is that to ensure player availability, teams often have more women than men, so this seems to back that up.

Next, I went ahead and looked at unique participants across Adult and Mixed.  Adult showed 275K in 2013 and Mixed shows 91K, so do these get added together?  Alas no as many players play both so only get counted once when looking at the combined stats.

Here is the chart.

Since the trends are similar in each category by themselves, combined we see the same trend.

It is interesting that in 2013 the combined number is 296K which tells us that about 21K appear to have played Mixed but not Adult that year.  In 2022 it was 243K in Adult and 262K combined so about 19K playing only Mixed.

What do you think?

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