Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union and Girls' Basketball for 2024-25.
 

This article about high schools canceling their seasons before the 2024-25 season has even started came across the MSN News Feed:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/oth...d777e364&ei=15

If any of our Iowa members can shed more light on the problem please do so.

Thanks,

MTD, Sr.

Isn't the main problem obvious? Demographics. And it's worldwide.

We're seeing a birth dearth. The population overall is aging. In some parts of the world, like the USA, lack of reproduction is being temporarily made up for by immigration, but overall we're due to hit peak population fairly soon.

This is why the sport scene is shifting to things like pickleball that old people can play.

Numbers Game ...
 

My local board covers about seventy high schools.

For several years now many of our high schools had problems offering girls freshman and girls junior varsity basketball programs.

Last year one of our high schools dropped their girls varsity basketball program.

One factor, off season specialization in one sport. Girls playing indoor soccer, or taking indoor pitching and/or hitting softball classes, in the winter months.

Outside of the summer camps, we would have never dreamed of playing such off season sports back in my high school years. And, back then, summer camps were often for the best of the best, those with aspirations of playing college sports.

Iowa is a rural state and many people are not living in rural areas that have no industry or some kind of draw to bigger areas anymore. And girls overall do not play sports at the rate boys do. Boys will play a sport or two still, whereas girls will find a sport and not want to play anything else. And how we treat education in many rural areas is a problem. Many communities want their own schools and it is hard to get enough kids to be in the school let alone play sports or other activities.

I used to umpire baseball in the late 90s in Iowa specifically. I would go to schools right over the border of Illinois and Iowa and I went to this one school that had something like 120 kids. I believe they had 70 kids were boys out of the entire enrollment. Iowa played their baseball at the time during part of the summer. It started in May and ended in late July (high school season). They would get 60 boys to play baseball from that particular school which was almost the entire boys enrollment. Might not be the same as it was then, but boys will try to play sports that girls will just pass over. So I think it is a combination of the culture of boys and the other factors of enrollment in these schools and in that enrollment who wants to participate.

Peace

School Choice ...
 

Connecticut has a ton of magnet schools and charter schools that draw from outside town, or city, limits.

Public high schools, especially urban public high schools, are experiencing decreasing enrollments.

In my (non-Iowa) area, the number of girls trying out for freshman basketball teams has dropped to the point some schools have eliminated that level altogether or have rebranded the teams as "JV B" so that lesser-experienced sophomores can be included on the roster just to have enough players to field a viable team. I'm also seeing schools with a low numbers on both their freshman and JV teams take advantage of the state's 5 quarter rule to have a few players play on both squads each night.

Even at the middle school level, there are fewer girls participating in basketball. In the 13 years I've been officiating basketball, some of the area middle schools that once had enough girls to field separate 7th and 8th grade teams are now fielding a single 7th/8th grade combined team that is lucky to have 10-12 on the roster in recent years.

Between decreasing population trends, more sports to choose from, and teens choosing non-athletic activities, this isn't overly surprising from my perspective and we may see more of it in smaller schools or schools with relatively low athletic participation.

Video Games ...
 

Blame it on video games.

Society can blame everything on video games.