In the past few years, its become very prevalent that the rate at which students are participating in after school activities and sports is decreasing.
While some may say it’s because students are lazy, this is not necessarily the case.
It actually goes deeper than that.
Sports used to be an immensely popular activity students were excited about and participating in. But since the COVID-19 pandemic, the participation rate within sports has since decreased greatly.
“I think the rate in sports especially in OPS has decreased since COVID-19 when they cancelled the fall sports in 2020,” Coach James Patterson said. “Besides Covid, I think the cause of this is just a trickle-down affect. There was just a really big fallout with sports that year with not playing and then just a matter of starting to increase little by little in certain sports but its gonna take 5-10 years before participation in sports goes back to normal again. Especially in middle school, that year they didn’t have sports at all, and high schools had sports but mortified and limited on what you could do, now that those kids that were in high school during covid have graduated already, those middle schoolers that are in high school now that didn’t have sports at all didn’t play, so now it’s just a matter of getting them back into it which is the hard part.”
During COVID-19, students were stuck at home forced to distract themselves while social distancing and keeping themselves and others safe. Since then, coming back to school has come with a lot of distractions for students that can be difficult for them to part from.
“I think technology has also played a role in excellence and participation, especially what we have seen here at Burke High School,” Coach Carla Schroder said. “I think people just don’t want to go away from there phones, they want to scroll and scram. I also think that people just don’t care about sports anymore, it’s not cool anymore. They don’t care about being the varsity football player. Kids need to get back into it at a younger age, I think we need to start with the youth and then move to upper levels.”
Although students can fix this issue by getting younger students involved in sports at a younger age, this also comes with an issue of decreasing numbers caused by some not knowing what programs they can get involved in.
“I’m a senior and I think over the years I’ve seen a drop off in interest and not only just drama but also in a lot of activities,” Lily Reid (12) said. “So, I think it is kind of hard to get students involved, and I think that’s something the entire school has seen, especially with theatre our numbers are decreasing but I think the more we push it out to middle schools the more that we’ll see that number go up. I think it definitely does help our department, and that’s also why we do our middle school tours to get them interested in it, to tell them hey if you come to Burke this is something you can do.”
In other departments, such as the dance team its not so much of the fact that they can’t recruit members, its promotion issues, and not having the resources to do so.
“The biggest issue from last year to this year is that we didn’t really promote it we were switching coaches, so it was really hard for us to get it out there over the announcements and on social media,” Emily Douglas said. “We had the same coach for 7 to 8 years here so we were so used to the coaching style and the amount of us posting stuff about it to make it known that we had tryouts so that was defiantly hard because we couldn’t get it out there as much, but it was also hard because we were separating from west view. So I feel like this upcoming year if we just promote it a lot more people will be involved because more people will know what’s going on. I also think that it would help to get new people who have never really done dance before, we do have a few new people right now who have never danced before so I think it’s definitely helped new opportunities for people even if they haven’t done it before and expose then too new things.”
