The Daily Dose/September 19, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy
Leading Off
Notes from around our human experience…
RUNNING THE NUMBERS: The figures aren’t too surprising: participation in high school sports is declining. Fueled by drops in a violent sport and, probably, kids staying home to play video games, the number of kids playing high school sports in 2018-19 dropped by over 43,000 kids, to roughly 7.93 million. It was the first decline in high school sports participation since 1988-89 school year.
Hut, Hut, Hike: High school football participation has declined for five straight years, last year losing 30,829 kids who decided they had better things to do. Just over 1 million kids played football last season, meaning the 14,247 high schools offering 11-man football had an average of 70 players in their programs.
Dry, Technical Matter: All figures are for 11-man football. 8-man football, as well as 9-man and 6-man, are actually showing gains.
Back On Message: Now, 30,000 for one year isn’t catastrophic, but if 30,000 kids quit every year for the next decade, that’s one-third of the players quitting. That would leave, more or less, an average of 50 players playing football at the 14,247 high schools that field 11-man teams. That’s not 50 players for the varsity team, that’s 50 players in the whole program, a number that would make it very difficult to field more than one team.
Oh Yeah: Basketball participation was down to, a combined 23,994 boys and girls, last year.
Crystal Ball Me: We’ve said this in this space before: fewer high school players does not bode well for major college and professional football. They are probably safe for another generation, maybe a bit longer, but there will come a time when there will no longer be enough top athletes to field the types of teams people will pay good money to see and networks good money to televise.
The biggest gainer in participants in lacrosse, for both boys and girls, which had 213,452 participants last year, up almost 20% since 2012. so maybe lacrosse will take over the Sunday afternoon dates in NFL stadiums after the NFL collapses in a couple of decades.
Today At The Site
Read Free Fortnight continues. Enjoy The Diary with our compliments:
The Diary of a Nobody: Please ring the bell. Or Sparrow will make you wait. Today’s Diary.
This time I put my falsies in and in due course I go out there and sell him his M&Ms (peanut, the only type we offer)…Turns out he’s with the group of firefighters we have in house and there were other firefighters wandering in and out all night, too, strange people keeping strange hours…But they’re psycho hotshot firefighters…They parachute into the middle of a blaze armed only with a fire extinguisher for a living and I should probably be grateful they didn’t go tactical on ol’ Sparrow…Later, in a show of solidarity, I stopped putting my falsies in the remaining times they came to the desk.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.
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On This Date
In 1778 – The Second Continental Congress of the United States passes the country’s first budget. A check of the Journal of the Continental Congress for that day shows that United States budgets were incomprehensible even then. However, it is plain the spending plan included the receipt of several loans and planned on paying $3.2 million in interest on a debt of $60 million. (That’s $59.4 million and $1.1 billion in today’s money.) As we write this, the current US national debt is $22.5 trillion, roughly $1.2 trillion in 1778 dollars.
In 1984 – Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds ties Stan Musial’s National League record for most career doubles in a 4-2 victory over the Atlanta Braves. Rose went 1-for-4 in the game, his third-inning double driving in Ron Oester. Rose would break the record on September 30 and would retire following the 1988 season with 746 doubles, still good for second on the all-time major league list behind Tris Speaker who hit 792 doubles in the American League from 1907-28
In 1964 – Jim Reeves is at #1 on Billboard’s country chart – then known as the Hot Country Singles chart – for the fourth of seven consecutive weeks with I Guess I’m Crazy. It was the sixth of eleven #1s on the country chart for Reeves and the first since his death in a plane crash, at the age of 40, on July 31. The song also went to #1 on Canada’s country chart and also hit the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #82. The song had first hit the country chart in 1955 when Tommy Collins took it to #13.
Quotebook
…if I should die it would only be a sign that my star has run its course…
Adolf Hitler
Answer To The Last Trivia Question
The New York Yankees played at the Polo Grounds from 1913-22.
Today’s Stumper
Who was the president of the Second Continental Congress in September 1778? – Answer next time!
