Youth Sport Retention

One of the recent projects I worked on was a youth sport retention initiative instigated by Mitch Hewitt PhD funded by Tennis Australia and supported by Pip Henderson. From a litetrature review on youth determinants of involvement in racquet sports and conversations with tennis coaches and youth involved in novel tennis for youth programs at identified tennis clubs, 8 recommendations were established and 16 program characteristics for sports wanting to attract and retain youth in sport were identified.

The first project in youth sport retention I was involved in was an Australian football-AFL youth retention investigation several years ago. That research found there are two critical age ranges where disengagement with Australian football occurs; both correspond with changes in the level and associated 'intensity' of competition.

Youth sport experiences and ‘drop-out’ patterns are informed by personal, social, and organisational (such as club) influences over time. The decision by youth to withdraw from sport comes at the end of an accumulation of experiences leading the individual to make alternative choices. Attrition in sport by youth is dis-engagement, withdrawal or drop-out of sport and may mean a within-sport transfer to another club, a sport-specific termination of engagement in a sport due to pressure to commit to another sport, and organised sport termination in favour of giving the time previously given to 'playing sport' to other activities (Battaglia et al., 2022).

Our project found that while there is a large body of literature on youth sport retention and attrition over many decades with the determinants of sport retention and attrition well document, the evidence is largely based on team sports like football and there is less evidence pertaining to the nuances of sport retention in sports in other game categories. Crane and Temple's (2025) recent systematic review of the literature found the sports most represented are soccer, swimming, gymnastics and basketball.

We found that further research is needed to 1. Understand the nuances of youth retention and withdrawal from sports not well represented in the literature (such as sports in the net-court game category), particularly of youth previously keen and committed to playing; and 2. Understand what may re-engage youth in these sports if they have dis-engaged and withdrawn. Crane and Temple's systematic review of the literature (2025) found that while discrete factors associated with dropout are well identified in the literature, there is need for more research that explores the interrelationships between factors and that delves further into the underlying dimensions of factors to more fully understand the nuances of youth sport retention.

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