I am not sure about how accurate this is but, ouch Polo and Swimming down in both male and female y over y.
So boys water polo has seen an almost 15% drop off in participation and girls water polo has seen over 25% drop off over the 8 year period being reported here.
Here is a quick spreadsheet I put together that has the 2018 and 2025 data compared for each sport so you can see the change in numbers and that expressed as a percentage as well. Apologies for any errors there may be.
I imagine flag football taking a lot of the participation from girls polo, but the drop in boys is surprising to me as is the drop in swimming. Perhaps its an early view into the issues with college spots and our sport? And yes, I know there are a LOT of threads on that subject !
Swimming has been hit a lot harder than polo with number of spots and a large insurgence of internationals. It is literally where world record holders go so the top of the top. Also of interest is the US’s decline in mens world aquatics from where we were previously. We will see if that continues.
flag football is very easy entry for aspiring girls high school athletes
not all high school programs run 5 day a week practices and you don’t practice as hard in general.
more accepted in high school social circles - a lot of the “my friends are doing it… so i want to do it”… also ties in to prepping for annual powerpuff juniors vs seniors game.
roster sizes are huge.
high school ADs and admin are 110% behind it and already treat it like a revenue generating sport.
i frickin hate flag football. lol
girls swimming from 2018 to 2025, down 11,000 kids and 33%. What is happening there?
For context, I pulled this off the CIFState.org website this morning. I am going to assume this was a study taken from AD’s and Sections reporting participation by schools and Sections. If @USAPolo is reading this, you now have a starting point of what needs to be done to increase participation at the HS Level.
California carries @USAPolo and if we are seeing this much of a downward trend in the HS participation, it is going to flow into our sport at the National Level. One area I would tackle would be Middle School/Intermediate School Water Polo Season (yes I am in Clovis, why do you ask…), which gets the hooks into kids earlier (plus it helps fill out 12U/14U rosters after the school season ends).
There are club coaches who will fight me on this. I understand the other side of the coin they are flipping in the air “HS is encroaching on the club season, when do we say enough is enough”. However, HS Sports is and always will be about the identity. When people announce they are signing on this website, I have noticed the HS and the Club is listed People who don’t follow our sport, may not know who SET is, but when a child lists “Laguna Beach HS”, the light switch kicks on. “Oh, Laguna had another child sign with a college”
I am a HS and College Football junkie. My friends know it, my wife tolerates it, but on Friday night, I will watch CIF-SS Football game of the week. I do not live in SoCal, but the fact CIF-SS has the HS Football on National TV to promote that sport and HS Athletics is awesome. What is stopping @USAPolo , CIF-SS and other organizing bodies to attempt to get our sport a game of the week at the HS Level? However, look at what this promotion has done: Flag Football. I believe Flag Football is consuming players, but our failure to promote the sport is our sports Achilles (Side note: make sure you purchase live.gols.co, overnght.com, espn3, peacock.com and the 5 other subscriptions I forget to watch your favorite teams this year) and this lack of building our brand strangled the promotion of the biggest event for the year by gatekeeping out those who might turn in to see what the sport is about. As I pay $29.95 to watch events, I always equate our sports marketing to Larry Scott doing the quick zoom meeting with the staff at the PAC-12 HQs to not announce the signing of DirectTV contract, but to announce he just signed a new contract to remain CEO of the PAC-12.
Okay, that is my diatribe on this topic. Enjoy pulling this apart and telling me that I am wrong…
Our son will be a senior this year at a public and the drop off in new players the last two years has been dramatic, four last year, three this year (the norm before was 8-10). Mostly I had attributed to Covid when the town program was shut down, we also continue to lose some of the best to privates. But with the reduced opportunities in college and competition from other sports I can see participation and the level of play dropping off for years to come. Thanks for putting this together!
We are seeing the effects of what I call the “COVID kids”. Go back 5 years and there was a massive cohort of kids ages 7-10/11 who would have made the jump from fun rec sports to more serious club sports…then the world shut down…and here in CA was down for over a year.
Unless they had proactive parents who sought training or had older brothers doing private training or clinics those kids never made the jump to higher level athletics. Many drifted away from athletics or team sports altogether, some into video games, or some into individual sports they could play during COVID (golf, tennis, pickleball, etc).
There is a skill drop off as well…you can see it in the huge talent gaps between the top 12u and 14u …and even 16u players and the middle tier of players and that gap is going to lead to some kids to say “not worth it if I cant compete” and go do something else.
And it’s not just aquatics…I have watched youth travel basketball and baseball over the past few years and sometimes thought “oh no…this is terrible.”
Its going to be interesting how this all plays out over the next few years.
And keeping with poster above…1 freshman showed up this year at our HS despite several huge clubs and swim programs in a 10-15 mile radius and recent team success.
I’ve had two daughters go through our HS waterpolo program. This is at Foothill HS in Orange County CA and always one of the top programs on both boys and girls in CIFSS. Eight years ago we had close to 50 boys and 40 girls in waterpolo and our swim team, which included some of these same WP players, had about 100 swimmers.
In 2025 we had I believe 34 boys and 26 girls in WP, and about 60/65 swimmers.
So yes swim sports across the board, even at top programs are down in general. Not all, but most of the schools we compete against on the girls side, can no longer field frosh/soph teams
I completely agree Covid had a huge impact. My son is rising senior and every team he was on just didn’t have as many kids in his same year as the year before or below. I started to look at other clubs, other cities and saw the same situation. I know during Covid our local pools were open and water polo and swimming were some of the only sports still going, but local boys tended to pick up lacrosse during that time. So many kids left water polo for lacrosse that year and didn’t come back
It would be interesting to cross reference this with other sports in general. From what I’ve seen with my kid’s friend groups, sports in general are not as appealing as they once were. Blame a host of things like social media, video games, more volunteer requirements, more competition to keep your GPA competitive for colleges, etc. It is a very different world and gone are the days where kids show up for HS and decide to try a totally new sport so it is even more critical to get kids learning the game young.
The other sports are in the survey. Polo and Swimming stand out in the decline categories.
Well that’s what I get for commenting just based on the comments 
I’ll show myself out
Might be a unique experience, but my kids got into the sport because…as parents we were looking for an alternative to Football (Fall HS Sport). Been at it for 5 years, now in HS in NorCal. My observation as a non-WP person with WP kids is there are big challenges in 3 categories:
- Learning the sport (if your parents didn’t play or aren’t swimmers)
- Developing yourself if you want to be good (access to quality instruction)
- Facilities (scarcity of available/open facilities with a net vs land sports)
Additionally there is a perception among the land based athletes that WP is “too hard” and they don’t want to play a sport where you are constantly “drowned”. Our initial experience as a family that was new to the sport could not have been better. The splash ball and 10U club was welcoming and made it fun/easy to get started. We’ve also seen some clubs that have both swim and WP do very well with participation. Convincing swim clubs to introduce splash ball could be lower friction.
Later on (12U/14U/HS) less and less kids try out the sport where we live, despite a very successful Varsity program and HS JV team with no cuts. The swimmers dabble in WP and a few strong swimmers seem to enjoy the sport, but in large part WP struggles to attract kids, especially “athletic” ones (in our area).
Not sure the “Water Polo Tough” campaign helped to your point.
I blame ebikes, tiktok and zyn/vapes
The total number of athletes participating is pretty much the same as 2018. They have shifted sports though especially impacting girls swimming but all water sports in general have taken the blow.
On the girls side, no other sport has the growth engine like flag football does with the NFL. I’m certain the participation numbers will continue to grow and be the #1 girls sport by LA28.
Fortunately for other land sports in the winter and spring, there won’t be a conflict and girls will be allowed to compete in both.
Unfortunately for waterpolo, NorCal teams and competitive SoCal teams that place an emphasis on the fall pre-season will all have a conflict. And I’m afraid that flag will win that battle.
I think one solve is to revisit another thread about aligning the girls water polo season at the state level. If we move girls polo to the spring and swim to winter for all of CA, it creates a buffer season where HS polo teams can treat the winter as a preseason training period, while also swimming for conditioning AND compete in swim meets.
This allows the kids who want to play flag in the fall do both. No more conflicts with the fastest growing sport. And it finally gives us the opportunity to have a true state championship for both boys and girls.
With the decline in both swim and polo, I would think both sides would be open to this. Swim needs polo.