BERKELEY, CA – If you saw Antonio Davis on the court, you remember a fierce power forward and rebounder. As he played, he saw failure as something he couldn’t afford.
“If you would have taken sport away from me, where would I be today?” says Davis who helped lead the Indiana Pacers to four NBA Eastern Conference finals in the 1990s.
“That’s a scary feeling for me, and I don’t know what a 6-9 skinny kid would have been doing, but it wouldn’t have been pretty. Growing up here in Oakland, I could have done a lot of other things.”
We were at March’s Project Play Summit, asking him and two other successful men brought up in their own distinct ways through sports, about why they think the athletic participation rate among boys has crashed.
According to the latest data from Sports & Fitness Industry Association, half of boys aged 6 to 17 participated regularly in sports in 2013. But only 41% did in 2023. The number has been at 41% or lower for eight straight years as the rate for girls (35.6% in 2023) has remained steady.
At the same time, according to Reeves’ research team, sports are the only extracurricular activity boys are more likely to do than girls.
“It’s not like on the average, boys are going to go to theater or math club – maybe they should,’ Reeves tells USA TODAY Sports. ‘Participation in youth sports is a big issue in and of itself, but the stakes are even higher for boys than they are for girls, because they’re less likely to do other stuff and they need to move more.”
How do we get more boys to play sports, and keep the ones who are playing? We spoke with Reeves and sat in on his discussion with Davis and Larry Miller, the chairman of Nike’s Jordan Brand advisory board, to help find answers that could help you and your young athlete.
Another ‘way out’
Miller, who grew up in Philadelphia, says he was the teacher’s pet through elementary school. He was in junior high when he got distracted.
“The cool guys were doing the stuff that was in the street and I got pulled into that,” he told the crowd in Berkeley.
At 16, he killed another teenager he mistakenly believed was a rival, according to ESSENCE.com, and spent years in a juvenile correction center.
He rehabilitated himself first by taking college classes in jail, eventually matriculating at Temple University.
“Of all things, as a criminal I decided to get an accounting degree,” he said.
After revealing his dark background to a hiring manager cost him a job with Arthur Anderson, he kept the story to himself for 40 years. After Miller built his career at Nike, though, his eldest daughter, Laila, suggested it might inspire other people. They collaborated to write, “Jump: My Secret Journey from the Streets to the Boardroom.”
Michael Jordan and Phil Knight, the company’s chairman, supported his decision, and he met with the family of the young man he shot to ask for their forgiveness. In February, Miller launched the Justice and Upward Mobility Project (JUMP) to provide chances for those affected by the justice system.
“Part of our goal is how can we provide more opportunity for people who have the talent but just don’t have the ability to utilize that talent?” he said.
Why not through sports?
“I think in the Black communities, brown communities, the sense of hope has kind of dissipated,” Miller says. “And I think that’s why boys in particular are saying, ‘Hey, there’s no reason for me to do this, because it’s not going to lead to anything.’
“In our community, people saw sports as a way out. And I think what happens as boys advance, (they) realize that, ‘I’m not gonna be able to play professionally, I’m not gonna to be able to get a college scholarship, so I’m just going to fall off and try to figure out a different way out. I’m gonna go do something else that can allow me to get paid.’ ”
A re-education starts, Davis suggests, with a change in perception of what it means to be a kid, and what it means to be a man.
‘Get back to the basics’: Normalize what success means for kids
Davis’ dad was killed when he was in high school. He remembers being singularly motivated to provide for his family. After he played for 13 years in the NBA and raised a son (A.J.) and daughter (Kaela) who both played high-level college basketball and professionally, he thinks more about the benefits he got from sports.
Today, youth coaches seem to link their self-worth with winning a game more than providing kids with an experience.
“All the pressure that’s being put on them by their team and their parents, I just think they’re opting to do all the other stuff that’s kind of pulling and tugging on them, whether it’s playing video games or just hanging out or doing other things,” Davis says. “I think they’re just being kind of turned off. And I feel we just have to get back to the basics of the importance of all the other life lessons that you’re going to learn from just playing sport. I’m a big advocate of just give kids space to move around and move their bodies and learn how to be in shape and to be healthy.
“And then as we go on, as I did with my kids, introduce all kinds of sport and whatever they gravitate towards, because that’ll be something that’ll be tugging at their heart and not forced into.”
Coach Steve: American kids get a D- in physical activity. What can we do about it?
Davis, who is also the CEO of the National Basketball Retired Players Association, says the No. 1 thing former players say they miss about the NBA is the camaraderie.
That’s a benefit from sports we all get.
“I’ve played almost every sport you can think of really badly, but I had a great time,” says Reeves, the British author, who played rugby at the University of Oxford. “The great thing about sport is that someone has to lose. I think one thing that should be zero-sum in sport is you have to lose. And by God, you can lose brutally sometimes. Some of my strongest memories were playing in subzero temperatures (against) these massive kids and losing like 67-0. So you lose. …
“And because I moved around from different sports, probably I would lose more. And I think that that sense of you can compete, you can lose, and that’s great, was actually an incredibly important life lesson for me because you lose in life all the time.”
Coach Steve: Have we lost the sportsmanship in high school sports?
What do we ‘call a man’? Boys need male role models
Reeves, who raised three boys who are now in their 20s, writes in “Of Boys and Men” about how girls consistently outperform boys in school, and about how men are struggling to fit into society and the workforce.
He founded the American Institute For Boys and Men (AIBM), which shares in its brief that while we don’t have definitive answers as to why boys might be playing sports less often, one hypothesis behind it is the decline in male teachers who serve as coaches, particularly at the high school level.
Meanwhile, according to AIMB research, men account for 23% of U.S. elementary and secondary school teachers, down from about 30% in 1988.
“Coaches of boys sports are mental health professionals in disguise, and part of it is because they do it shoulder to shoulder, which is a much more male friendly way of doing it,” Reeves tells USA TODAY Sports, “but the coach sitting next to the young man or the boy on the bench saying, ‘How you doing? You seem off today. How are things at home?’ … that may be one of the most important men in that boy’s life. That’s very interesting to me, coming from a different culture and raising my kids here, is the almost iconic position of coach in American culture.”
Davis was raised in Oakland by his mom. He says his grandmother told him what to avoid, and he had influential men around him who gave him sports opportunities and a safe space. Being a professional athlete, he says, doesn’t make you a role model. What does is taking accountability for yourself and what you make out of your life.
“I hate that if we play sport and we don’t make it, we feel like a failure,” Davis says. “Whether you are a young man or a growing man, we have to learn how to take this stance, that no matter what society says, no matter the outcome, I’m doing the things that I’m supposed to do: Being a contributor to my community, taking responsibility if I have kids,” Davis says. “And we have to find ways to let our kids know that it’s OK to hopefully graduate from high school, go off to college if he or she is lucky, and then go on to get a job.
“It’s not bad to just say, ‘Hey, I got a job. I’m making good money, I’m taking care of my kids, I got a ride that can get me from A to B.’ We don’t have to have the best car and the biggest house and a pocket full of money in order to be what we call a man.”
Ask your kids about what they get out of sports, and always be there to support them
Our life in sports doesn’t have to end when our career does. Reeves plays squash and tennis, “and I can still beat my kids at badminton,” he says.
Working for Jordan Brand, Miller has gotten to travel the world, where, he says, he can attend any sporting event he wants.
“I never even came close to being a professional athlete,” he says. “There are all these other incredible benefits that come from playing sports and I think we’ve gotten away from teaching that: The teamwork you learn, the working with others, the being able to be part of something that’s bigger than yourself.”
Basketball remains perhaps the most popular sports for boys and girls to play. According to the Aspen Institute’s State of Play 2024 report, more than 7 million kids between the ages of 6 and 17 played it regularly in 2023. However, the percentage of kids who play it has declined or remained the same since 2013.
“As I kind of move around and watch a lot of youth basketball, and coach youth basketball, I feel that there’s just kind of this pressure: If you’re not the best, if you’re not going to succeed, then why even try?” says Davis, 56. “And I think there’s a lot of layers to why that happens: Parents, the way that it is today with social media and I think a lot of our young men are getting turned off very early by I guess the system.”
He has a grandson who plays football.
“I ask him why is he playing,” Davis says. “Regardless of what’s going on outside of my house and all this other stuff that I can’t control, what I can control is his perception: ‘Did you learn something? I saw you get knocked on your butt. How did that feel?’ We have to fight against it by getting into the heads of your kids and the teams that you run.
“We can’t let it take away what we know to be true, which is, if our kids play sports, they’re eventually gonna be better off than not playing.”
His grandson is a 12-year-old lineman. When Davis watched him recently, though, he was allowed to play quarterback. He took the ball, went a couple of steps, and was tackled. Davis acted like he scored a touchdown.
“I’m not sure why I did it,” he said, “but I needed him to understand the fact that he did something should be celebrated: that he was out there and he was engaged and he got up and he was smiling and having fun. Like, make that the normal, not being a champion.”
Reeves said the anecdote reminded him of when he was 12, and he finally managed to break through that rugby line. As he ran to score, he saw someone tagging along with him on the sideline. It was his father.
“He was more excited than I was,” Reeves said.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.