Child Participation in Recreation Sports Up This Year

The amount of children participating in sports programs established by the Joint Recreation Department of the Chathams has continued to increase this year.

During the Recreation Committee's meeting Tuesday night, marking its first since June, the liaisons for the individual sports subcommittees indicated increased numbers of registered children and teams across many of the department's programs.

The largest number discussed came from the soccer program, which has 919 registered children as of Tuesday, according to Carol Nauta, the department's deputy director.

Nauta mentioned that the numbers are highly concentrated in the lower grade levels, especially third grade, which Recreation Committee Chairman Don Almgren said is normal for most Chatham recreation department sports.

"The normal trend of athletics, whether we are talking about boys or girls, is that from kindergarten to third grade, we always have large numbers for every sport," Almgren said after the meeting.

However, after third grade, those numbers start to drop off.

"At the kindergarten level, kids have no say," he said. "Parents think their kids look cute in their soccer uniforms. But once they get to third grade, they start developing a little more and either stop playing or choose to play a different sport."

This trend is also exemplified by the flag football program, which Nauta said has its own league of about 80 to 90 third-graders and another comprised of kids in fourth through sixth grade.

Increased numbers were also mentioned for field hockey, identified by many of the committee members as a "growing sport" with 178 total participants, and traveling baseball, which has increased over the past two years from 14 to 15 teams with close to 200 participants, among the many other sports.

"Most of our baseball teams finished with winning records and some of them won their league championships," committee member and baseball committee liaison Bill Karpowic said.

Almgren said one major factor contributing to increasing participation among children in some of the older grades has been the inclusion of additional sports, such as volleyball, which he said allows for kids to get a foot in the door using a sport they might join and then hopefully enjoy.

By the end of the summer, 35 girls in seventh and eighth grade were playing volleyball, which began just as a summer program. However, Brian McNany, director of the Joint Recreation Department of the Chathams, said this led the department to pursue the sport again for the fall season.

"The numbers were great over the summer," McNany said. "So we contacted the high school coach who ran the summer camp and asked, 'Why don't you do something in the fall in conjunction with your own program?'"

Following discussion of the trial and success of the volleyball program during the summer, committee member Jim LeMon mentioned that Chatham High School will have a fencing program starting this year. LeMon asked if it was worth starting up a program for seventh- and eighth-graders to get them used to the sport.

"Once we find out who the coach is, we would be happy to go and talk to them," McNany said. "We could do the same as we are doing now: kick it off in the summertime, see what kind of numbers we have and then roll it over into the winter."