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Is Australian sport changing? Which direction is it taking? The other week, on a Friday night, I had the choice of watching one A-League match, one NRL match, two AFL matches, two Super Rugby matches and a cricket Test.
All rated enough to keep them being broadcast into the future.
The reporting of the various events followed a somewhat historic path with cricket, rugby league and AFL being the most talked about, then arguably a tossup between rugby and football for the balance.
However there was a heap of other sporting events shown the same weekend, ironman, netball, car racing, bike racing, all receiving scant coverage.
It’s about this time I said to myself we must be quite a nation of sports watchers, but do we play sport as much as we used to?
What drove this question was a youtube my son showed me of a sporting contest shown live to millions [far more than an NRL or AFL grand final] of a computer game final.
The youtube pulled back so you could see the crowd estimated at 40,000 [can you believe it] inside a major stadium with screaming and cheering fans.
Interesting that these kinda of events go totally unreported in our news rooms.
The youtube clip was jaw dropping, but what it screamed at me was traditional outdoor sports seem to me to be arguably way to organised for kids to enjoy themselves.
Also do parents have the time to devote to coaching and training today as much as they did in the past?
Back to the computer games, I found out the game I briefly watched was one of a number of games fighting for appeal, not unlike our own football code war (for want of a better description).
However the computer games are largely parent-free and people playing can pick and jump between games.
Not unlike when I was a kid and we all played in the street and we just played lots of different games with little parental supervision.
Recent articles suggest that kids today spent too little time on outdoor actives. The stranger danger warnings and two parent working families result in kids not being allowed to play in the street.
The pressure on parents to get to training to coach kids is more these days as are the various regulations pertaining to how you treat children of your local sports club.
Long term, where does this leave us in the sporting world, will less people play sport resulting in a drop in the ability of our squads?
Recent articles regarding the damage to the brain from the more physical sports, will parents allow their children to take such risks?
I guess I am wondering if Australian sport is changing and we are not seeing it happen.
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