Overview

The Healthy Sport Index recognizes that psychological and social aspects of sports play an important role in youth having a healthy and positive sports experience. The tool evaluated this category based on high school-athlete survey data (75% of the score) and expert analysis (25% of the score).

Data came from original national surveys of high school athletes designed and conducted by the Aspen Institute and analyzed by the University of Texas, as well as data compiled by the Women’s Sports Foundation for a report titled Teen Sport in America: Why Participation Matters. Each sport was measured by the following data (weighting for Psychosocial score in parentheses):

• Personal Social Skills, Cognitive Skills, Goal Setting, Initiative, Health, Negative Experiences (40%)¹
• Psychological Health (15%)²
• Substance Abuse (10%)³
• Academic Achievement (10%)⁴
• Expert Opinion (25%)⁵

This report explores the results only from the Aspen Institute/University of Texas survey, which contributes to our understanding of psychosocial well-being. Football and softball rated highest in the psychosocial survey in their respective gender among the 10 most popular high school boys sports and 10 most popular high school girls sports. Individual sports tended to score the lowest in the survey.

Who did we survey?
Working through approved access from state high school associations in, first, North Carolina, and second, Michigan, we were able to distribute the survey through our association contacts. After an initial wave of responses in North Carolina, we pursued distributing the survey through association contacts in Michigan and, to a lesser extent, nationally. At the time we closed data collection (June 6, 2018), we had amassed 1,404 total responses to the survey, of which 1,290 were usable. We ended up with 632 responses from North Carolina, 522 from Michigan, and an additional 136 scattered nationally. While not perfectly representative of demographic trends and sport participation rates, the representation was a solid sample on a scale rarely seen in sport-specific studies involving youth participants.

What measures did we use?
Given our target population (i.e., high school students), it was important that the Healthy Sport Index advisory group develop a survey that would be short enough and easy enough to respond to that we would be able to maximize our response rate while still yielding enough insight to be of value. We also wanted to utilize a validated instrument in an effort to further substantiate the overall analysis. We elected to utilize a slightly modified version of the short-form Youth Experiences Scale for Sport (YES-S).

The YES-S is a five-factor instrument designed to measure Positive Youth Development (PYD) through tangible, experience-focused items that ask respondents to assess on a four-point scale how often an experience has occurred while playing sports (see Appendix for full survey and traditional scoring; note: we elected to reverse the scoring values for ease of interpretation). We ended up adding four questions and one dimension to the survey in order to more directly ask respondents to reflect on health-related experiences. In addition to the YES-S, we also included a number of demographic and sport-specific questions (see Appendix). Researchers from the University of Central Missouri and University of Texas published a validation of the modified YES-S instrument in 2021.

How did we analyze the data presented in this report?
The analysis provided in this report focuses almost entirely on the basic, descriptive results from the study. We have elected to report the findings in a simpler, more straightforward manner in order to make the results as accessible as possible to anyone who may be interested in the rankings and the other results.

How should I interpret the “rankings” and results?
Like any research that attempts to understand and simplify complex human behaviors and experiences, the results in this report should be considered as the next step in trying to explain what benefits or drawbacks that participating in sport may produce for youth. The sample, the measures, and the analysis all contain limitations, as is the case with any project of this scope and scale. For instance, the survey respondents were current high school athletes, meaning the survey was less likely to capture athletes who may have quit a sport due to negative experiences. The results are not the definitive or permanent assessment of these sports, and in many cases the scores separating sports are not quite as different as a 1-10 ranking might suggest. The results here are provided as a lens through which to try understand the sport experiences of the high school athletes sampled at this moment in time in their particular sport. Our hope is that these results add to the conversation about how to optimize the health outcomes for the children and adolescents who play these sports.

Results

Below is how each sport ranked in the survey based on analysis by the Aspen Institute and University of Texas. (Note: These results comprised one component of the psychosocial analysis in the Healthy Sport Index, which also included data from a Women’s Sports Foundation study of boys and girls sports. The final psychosocial rankings were the product of aggregating the two and including the expert opinion score).

What do these rankings mean? The rankings reflect each sport’s overall performance on the six categories that we measured using the Youth Experiences Scale for Sport (YES-S). The results do not mean that the sports at the top of the rankings are uniformly better than the sports at the bottom of the rankings, nor should they be interpreted to mean that we suggest children play the top-ranked sports and avoid the bottom-ranked sports. These rankings simply capture how frequently our survey respondents indicated that positive experiences associated with the six categories of the YES-S occurred while playing their self-identified primary sport. These six categories were Personal/Social Skills, Cognitive Skills, Goal Setting, Initiative, Health, and Negative Experiences.

How did we arrive at these rankings? We arrived at the rankings by conducting a simple analysis in which we added all the average scores on the five positive categories and subtracted the average from the Negative Experiences category. See below:

Calculation: Overall YES-S = Mean of Personal/Social Skills + Mean of Cognitive Skills + Mean of Goal Setting + Mean of Initiative + Mean of Health – Mean of Negative Experiences

*The exact scores are presented on the next page

Key Findings: Psychosocial

1. Sports are generally a good thing for students who participate in them
   As we dive into a detailed sport-by-sport look at the performance of these sports in the coming pages, it is easy to focus perhaps too closely on the differences and to overlook the similarities. That’s why it is important to remind ourselves that, in general, the findings of both this study and many others across the research literature indicate a clear connection between sports participation and outcomes like positive development, academic performance, and overall achievement. There are certainly concerns – again, in this study and others – that sports can foster higher rates of negative experiences as well, but in many cases the potential for negative experiences is counterbalanced by a potential for positive experiences that may exceed other developmental contexts.

In this sense, we should probably remind ourselves that, regardless of the sport-by-sport differences in this study, the notion that sports have the capacity to provide positive experiences comes through very clearly from these results. As you look at the breakdowns of the sports, keep in mind that we are talking about an 8-percent difference separating the top-ranked and bottom-ranked boys sports, and a 10-percent gap between No. 1 and 10 for girls sports. Are there differences? Absolutely. Are the sports ranked at the bottom producing undesirable experiences across the board? Absolutely not. These rankings, along with the work done by the Women’s Sports Foundation study, provide very clear evidence that playing sports, in general, has a positive impact on a child’s well-being.

2. Traditional team sports come out ahead
   One of the more interesting findings is that football appears to deliver strong psychosocial benefits; the Aspen Institute/University of Texas survey placed it at No. 1 (and it’s No. 2 in the overall Healthy Sport Index rankings). Despite the growing concerns over injuries and physical safety, football still provides a social context that is highly important to identity development and may be as well-suited as any other sport to fostering the experiences that are captured by the YES-S. The same can be said for many of the team sports that make up the top half of the rankings for both boys and girls. What is perhaps even more interesting than football being at the top for the boys is the relative consistency across genders with respect to the other sports. For both boys and girls, lacrosse, tennis, track and field, and cross country reside in the bottom half of the rankings – of particular interest is cross country and track and field sharing the bottom of the rankings for both boys and girls.

One could reach a bit and say that it seems as though more team sports occupy the top half of the rankings and more individual sports occupy the bottom half; that wouldn’t necessarily be inaccurate. There seems to be enough evidence to suggest that more traditional team sports may be structured – or, at least, interpreted by the participants – in a manner that produces more concrete experiences associated with well-being. Questions worth asking: Do team sports better meet the social needs of youth? Are there particular benefits that flow to those on teams in sports, such as football, that are more at the center of school culture? Or are most of these sports just more accessible to youth, given their larger rosters (with the notable exception of track and field and cross country) – and thus are more likely to improve the lives of its participants? While all of the sports measured are organized around teams, many of the sports at the bottom half of the rankings would be considered as individual sports within a team setting, rather than team sports. This may be important as we think about what fosters greater levels of positive development and well-being.

3. No sport is “all good” or “all bad”
   While there were clearly sports that performed higher than other sports on the overall YES-S measure, it is interesting to note that the sports at the bottom of the rankings didn’t necessarily perform poorly across every category, nor did the sports at the top perform well across every category. Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate this point. Take boys basketball – although its overall rank is fifth, it actually ranked in the top four on four of the five positive categories; what pulled down its overall ranking was that it ranked dead last in producing negative experiences. Football and soccer, the top two ranked boys sports, didn’t fare much better in having fewer negative experiences (ranking eighth and seventh, respectively). Questions about negative experiences dealt with injuries causing missed class time; adult leaders who may be intimidating, manipulative or disparaging, or encouraged the athlete to do something morally wrong; teammates who may have gotten an athlete to use drugs or alcohol; and different treatment based on gender, race, ethnicity, disability or sexual orientation. But both football and soccer ranked so highly across the positive categories that it didn’t impact their overall ranking. Conversely, track and field and cross country both ranked very well on having fewer negative experiences (second and third, respectively), but did not perform well enough in the positive categories to be able to move up the list.

One could even say that for a lot of the top-ranking sports, they just seemed to produce “more” of everything, good and bad. And we see these trends mirrored, for the most part, in the rankings of girls sports as well. Track and field and cross country have virtually the same patterns, and the top-ranking sports also are not necessarily the sports with the fewest negative experiences. Softball, for example, ranks a middling sixth in negative experiences, but also sits atop three of the five other positive categories. So, it would seem that the good doesn’t necessarily come without the bad, and in some cases, the good is so good that it simply outweighs the bad.

4. In some sports now, the kids who make high school teams specialized in that sport before age 10
   That was the case in baseball (9.7 years old) and softball (9.9), among the team sports that in recent years has offered – and in some cases encouraged – year-round training and play at ever-earlier ages. Despite evidence suggesting that multisport play when young delivers myriad benefits, from overall athleticism to lifelong engagement in sport, it’s clear that children and families are responding to marketplace opportunities and pressures to focus on one sport, which in turn may better position a child to play at the high school level. Early specialization also is associated with higher levels of overuse injuries and burnout, but those who continue to play into high school are more likely to have set aside other sports when young. Track and field has the latest age of specialization for both boys and girls (14.1 and 13.5, respectively). In terms of the psychosocial benefits associated with early specialization, the results are inconclusive.

5. The survey highlights the need for more research related to youth in sports
   Beyond the findings in this report, researchers and stakeholders have access to few large-scale studies that attempt to understand how sports create experiences that impact the development of sports participants – both as athletes and people. Much of what is known has been gleaned from more systematic efforts to study young athletes in other countries, or through secondary analyses of large-scale studies that are not specifically focused on sports. As a researcher in this area, the results being reported here demonstrate the need for more in-depth attempts to study sport participants over time, and to try to unpack the complex way in which sports can impact development. What you will read should be viewed as the next steps in a long journey toward understanding how all of this works. More needs to be done to prioritize understanding of how a multibillion-dollar industry that serves millions of children actually works, or could work better.

Demographic Breakdown (Boys)

Age

Response Count by State (n=640)

School Setting

School Classification Breakdown

Racial Breakdown

Demographic Breakdown (Girls)

Age

Response Count by State (n=650)

School Setting

School Classification Breakdown

Racial Breakdown

Sport-by-Sport Countdown (Boys)

#10 Cross Country

#9 Track and Field

#8 Tennis

#7 Lacrosse

#6 Baseball

#5 Basketball

#4 Swimming

#3 Wrestling

#2 Soccer

#1 Football

 Sport-by-Sport Countdown (Girls)

#10 Track and Field

#9 Cross Country

#8 Cheerleading

#7 Tennis

#6 Lacrosse

#5 Swimming

#4 Volleyball

#3 Basketball

#2 Soccer

#1 Softball

Appendix: YES-S Survey Instrument

Please rate whether you had the following experiences in your primary sport:

Scoring*: 4 (Yes, definitely); 3 (Quite a bit); 2 (A little); 1 (Not at all)

Personal and Social Skills:
I became better at sharing responsibility
I learned that working together requires some compromising
I learned to be patient with other group members
I learned how my emotions and attitude affect others in the group

Cognitive Skills:
I have improved: Skills for finding information
I have improved: Academic skills (reading, writing, math, etc.)
I have improved: Computer/internet skills
I have improved: Artistic/creative skills

Goal Setting:
I learned to find ways to achieve my goals
I set goals for myself in this activity
I learned to consider possible obstacles when making plans
I observed how others solved problems and learned from them

Initiative:
I learned to push myself
I learned to focus my attention
I put all my energy into this activity
I have improved athletic/physical skills

Health**:
I felt like a happier person by playing this sport**
I made more friends by playing this sport**
I was more interested in being physically active**

Negative Experiences:
I have had an injury in the past year in my primary sport that caused me to miss at least 1 day of school**
Adult leaders in this activity are controlling and manipulative
Adult leaders intimidate me
Adult leaders make personal comments that I find upsetting
Adult leaders encouraged me to do something I believed morally wrong
Youth in this activity got me into drinking alcohol or using drugs
I was treated differently because of my gender, race, ethnicity, disability, or sexual orientation

* Values reversed from standard YES-S
** Added dimension/item

Demographic and Sport-Specific Survey Questions
Choose which gender you identify as
Choose the race you identify as
How old are you in years?
Choose your current high school class standing
At what level do you play any of the following sports? [JV, Varsity, Club, Informal]
What would you consider to be your primary sport?
At what state conference level does your school compete? (North Carolina only)
What is your home zip code? (Michigan/National Survey only)
How would you describe the setting of your high school [Urban, Suburban, Rural]
At what age did you begin to focus most of your sports activity on your primary sport?
How many months a year do you currently play your primary sport?