A month after the start of the school year, the sports federations are delighted with the good figures for the month of September. Among the eight largest federations – football, tennis, judo, athletics, handball, rugby, basketball, swimming – all have seen their number of licensees increase in this start of the 2022 school year compared to the previous year and sometimes even already exceed their figures. from before covid. However, this good news hides a much less pleasing constant: the drop in the number of practitioners among adolescents.
So how can such a decline in practice be explained at this pivotal age? First, in adolescence, “there is a desire to assert oneself, a need for a culture of peers which manifests itself and consequently a distancing from adult supervision, which is already very strong at home”, explains Pascale Garnier, sociologist specializing in childhood and children, and professor at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University. “The very young practice is important but after the age of 10, the number of licensees is reduced”, confirms Laurent Ciubini, the general manager of the French Swimming Federation (FFN).
The lack of physical practice of the French, and in particular among children and adolescents, worries more and more doctors and specialists while the phenomenon has been observed in the literature for about thirty years. According to the latest figures published by ONAPS (National Observatory of Physical Activity and Sedentariness), 37% of children aged 6 to 10 do not reach the recommendations of 60 minutes of physical activity per day. A figure that rises to 73% for the 11-17 age category.
This figure takes into account, of course, the practice within sports federations but also the unsupervised practice that young people do spontaneously, among themselves, on urban and rural grounds, such as skate parks and playgrounds.
This need to assert oneself is also expressed in the choice of discipline, as further explained by Pascal Garnier: “SOften, the first physical activities that children practice are oriented according to the tastes of the parents. Moreover, always on the parents’ side, as soon as their child arrives at college, “the eschool games increase a lot”, she still details.
“Studies take precedence and there is a certain pressure from parents with a view to results before and after the baccalaureate.”
Pascale Garnier, sociologistat franceinfo: sport
Added to this is also the question of other hobbies for young people, such as going out with friends or playing video games, which, according to the sociologist, “become at this age more attractive than sport”.
At the same time, these age groups are faced with a stronger search for performance, desired by sports clubs and associations. “Clubs tend to focus their ambition on competition, and thus favor the best. There is thus a stronger selectivity of the federations as young people get older, which is a demotivating factor for supervised practices”, continues the sociologist Pascal Garnier.
Especially since the practice of leisure is also there “very unevenly developed, she points out. An observation of which Laurent Ciubini, the general manager of the FFN, is well aware: “Swimming is one of the fundamental sports. So we have a lot of very young graduates to learn the basics, but once they have acquired them, the coaches will quickly increase the intensity with a view to competition. Swimming is a demanding practice that requires a lot of repetition, and can quickly become tiring for children, which may therefore explain their dropout.
This observation is certainly true for boys and girls, but is more pronounced for the latter. “In adolescence, the rate of practice among boys is much higher than among girls. They let go of sports activities in clubs, in 5th or 4th grade, a little before the boys”, confirms Catherine Louveau, sports sociologist and academic, specialist in girl-boy inequalities. ONAPS has also looked into the matter, and its study corroborates these observations. Among young people aged 6 to 17, only 50.7% of boys and 33.3% of girls meet the recommendations of 60 minutes of physical activity per day.
“From childhood, many of them still enroll in sports such as dance, gymnastics, in other words indoor and aesthetic practices, while boys will go more naturally to football, judo .”
Catherine Louveau, sports sociologistat franceinfo: sport
Practices from which they want to free themselves in adolescence. But unlike boys, they will not defer this time to an unsupervised sporting activity, but “more towards indoor activities, such as reading or shopping. The girls are more inside, the boys more outside”she summarizes.
As with their male counterparts, adolescence is a turning point in club practice, where the requirement of competition is increasingly present. “Being sporty for a girl, that is to say practicing athletics, handball, basketball for example, a fortiori in competition, raises questions for many of them in terms of the construction of femininity. For many, there is this idea that a girl who is too sporty would not be feminine enough, whereas at this age teenagers question their bodies a lot, seduction…”, analyzes sociologist Catherine Louveau.
Faced with this phenomenon, sports federations are struggling to keep their young players, the 12-14 age group often being the pivotal age for a drop in the number of licensees, and this until 18-19 years old. So, in an attempt to reverse the trend, the French Rugby Federation (FFR) looked into the subject to understand the reasons and try to find solutions. “Our figures are not bad, but not excellent either. We are in as much difficulty as the other federations to attract and retain young people aged 14 to 19”, explains Olivier Lievremont, national technical director in charge of professional and amateur teams.
To reverse the curves, the FFR has thus put the package to ensure a “quality practice” across all clubs. Labeling, support from technical advisers in each territory, and a young player’s follow-up booklet, are all solutions that the Federation has introduced in rugby schools (6-14 years old).
Youth commissions (14-19 years old) have also been set up to retain young people until the end of high school. “If we are already seeing the first effects, we still have to improve in the girls, because we attract a lot of them but we also lose a lot of them”, note the DTN. For the sociologist Pascale Garnier, the work of the federations is certainly essential but must be added to other measures. “The federations must develop leisure practices, with self-organization of young people, to hook the children.”
“We also need support from the State, which should further promote the EPS and the UNSS. Financial support for the practice as well as the relay of doctors are also important elements to promote the practice.”
Pascale Garnier, sociologistat franceinfo: sport
Lhe march is still long, but the federations have now tackled this societal problem head-on with a common goal: to reconcile adolescents with the practice of sport.