How Streamed High School Sports Are Engaging the Next Generation of Athlete

It can be easy to forget that young athletes are … young. They put up with challenging, difficult training obligations. Competitions. Demanding travel schedules. And, often, demanding academic requirements compound the pressure on these adolescent and teenage athletes as they develop a maturity and worldliness from their interactions with peers, family and role models. They’ve taken a lot on their shoulders – even as they’re still figuring it all out.

Not surprisingly, one size does not fit all when it comes to these young athletes’ motivations. For some, it’s simply the love of the game. For others, their ambitions are achievement-based – the measurement of incremental personal gains as they inch towards perfection. The adulation of peers, financial stability, respect – these all can be fuel that stokes the flame of a young athlete’s competitive fire.

Yet most athletes share one thing: a moment in time when they fell in love with their sport – and perhaps their own pursuit of greatness within it. But how many athletes across generations recognized that moment as it happened? And among those, how many are able to run it back, watch a replay and relive it years later? Far too few.

But we now exist in an era when that moment is harder than ever to miss. The NFHS Network, for instance, is a digital streaming platform that helps member schools cover their own regular-season and playoff competitions in more than two-dozen sports, facilitating exposure and recording indelible memories for young athletes across the country.

At the same time, alarm bells are being rung about the rise of digital entertainment, the shut-in effects of the pandemic and the suddenly uncertain future of sports. “Sports has a Gen Z problem,” wrote the Washington Post in a recent article, warning of the danger that smartphones and splintered app use among today’s young people poses to the sports industry’s traditional network-based viewing model.?

This development, however, isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity. As athletes grow older, they age with the content they might be interested in. High schoolers now have the ability to keep tabs on their peers, cultivate competitive rivalries and learn from one another. Exposure to their contemporaries fuels motivations and can even teach young athletes new techniques and approaches that raise the levels of sports’ talent pool. As the NFHS grows, so too does the amount of games it streams, the amount of viewers invested in a school and thus the amount of eyes on those games.?

The old fan engagement playbook is outdated. The old media mix of properties, sponsors and leagues combining forces to engage watchers was viable then. But industries must evolve, and organizations must keep pace if they want to continue to inspire new talent. Let the young athletes do what they do best: play. Let the rest of us – including the next generation of athletes – watch them using a modern, user-friendly model that fits.