Einleitung

Section 3: trends in youth sport
The authors examine the potential for sporting experiences during youth to impact upon active involvement in sport during the later stages of the life course. Utilising the concept of tracking (continuity or persistence of sports participation over time), they conclude that the empirical studies related to tracking provide support for the taken-for-granted assumption that participation during childhood and youth is one of the strongest predictors of adult involvement in sport. Indeed, adult involvement in sport and physical activity appear more strongly influenced by childhood and youth involvement than by social and economic constraints experienced during adulthood. In other words, people who are locked in to sport during childhood tend to be able to sustain their involvement almost (but not quite) irrespective of the cross-cutting effects of such social divisions as class, ethnicity and gender later on in life. Empirical support for the existence of tracking notwithstanding, the authors also note that unstable patterns of sport involvement in youth and between youth and adulthood tend to be the norm, with stable patterns of participation from youth to adulthood more likely to be exceptional. Indeed, the tracking of inactivity appears more deep-seated than that of activity per se: those who spend little or no time on sports during youth have, it seems, a much higher risk of continuing this pattern into adulthood and, subsequently, throughout the life course. While the extant research confirms some patterns of tracking in youth sport and between youth sport and later phases in life, the authors are keen to insert several caveats. Perhaps the most significant of these is that no causal relationship between input and output can be established; not least because a number of other intervening variables may account for both youth sport and later life participation. The authors also draw our attention to the fact that tracking has gender-specific features — the participatory patterns of females are more likely to be characterised by change, instability and drop-out. This latter observation makes sense of the findings in relation to lifestyle sports (Gilchrist and Wheaton, this volume) and trends in Nordic countries (Green, this volume) even more pertinent vis-a-vis youths’ sports participation.