Welcome back to Keeping Score, our Friday column that highlights the personalities, teams and games that sports fans are talking about — by the numbers.
72.1%
Increase in youth participation in tennis in the last six years.
The latest State of Play report from the Aspen Institute showed that two of the most traditional sports are seeing the biggest surge in youth participation. Tennis was No. 1 in terms of growth in kids 6–12 since 2019, with 72.1% more kids playing tennis, while golf saw a 55% increase in kids 6–12 picking up their sticks.
For teens, tennis and golf are still at the top, but the order is reversed, with golf seeing an increase of 73.1% participation since 2019 in youths ages 13–17, while tennis participation has increased 45.6%.
The demographics of young golfers are changing, too. Girls make up 35% of junior golfers today and minorities make up 26%, according to the PGA. Twenty years ago, 15% of junior golfers were girls and just 6% were minorities, according to the Aspen Institute.
Basketball is still the most-played sport, with 14.2% of kids age 6–12 playing on a regular basis, but has just a 1.4% increase since 2019. For teenagers, basketball participation fell 17.9%.
The biggest losers: wrestling (down 42.9% with kids and 41% with teens) and lacrosse (down 30% with kids and 22.7% with teens).
36
Franchises in the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL that have never won their league’s championship.
When Tom Petty sang that “even the losers get lucky sometimes,” he didn’t mean these teams.
Almost 30% of all teams in the big four North American sports leagues have never won their league’s championship. (The Milwaukee Brewers only escaped this fate on Wednesday night.) That includes a full 40% of NFL teams that have never won the Super Bowl, first played in 1967.
The longest all-time droughts by each league are the Pacers and Nets in the NBA (franchises started in 1967), the Padres in MLB (founded in 1969), and the Vancouver Canucks and Buffalo Sabres in the NHL (both founded in 1970). In the NFL, the Arizona Cardinals have never won a Super Bowl, but they did win the NFL championship in 1925 and 1947.
The Cardinals joined the NFL as a charter member in 1920. Back then, the team played in Chicago (before moving to St. Louis). The Cardinals and the Bears are the only charter members of the NFL still in operation.
0
How many times New York City Marathon favorite Andreas Almgren has actually run a marathon.
One of the favorites to win the New York City Marathon this Sunday is a Swedish half-marathoner running his first-ever marathon.
