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Scouting is tilting at the wrong windmills when it compares itself to youth involvement in sports. Many youth simply find sports more fun than scouting. Some people may be delusional about professional sports careers or scholarships to D1 schools, but for most families, sports is merely a good activity for youth to be involved in during middle and high school careers. Even if they don't make a varsity team in high school, or make the team but spend a lot of time on the bench, they are still spending 4-5 days afterschool practicing, involved in team spirit events, involved in clinics and practices and team social events off season. They also have something equally good to put on their college application. As far as travel, there are elite teams that cost thousands, but there are far more travel teams that are just a way to continue playing if you aren't good enough to make a school team --there are elite travel teams that go around the country in their custom buses, but there are a ton more travel teams that are simply glorified rec level teams. Sometimes parents will overemphasize the sports prestige and goals so as not to offend scout leaders -- it's easier to say they are focusing on sports in hopes of getting a scholarship vs. they really don't like scouting as much. Sports involvement is also portable. It is really easy to play for one team in the spring that serves one need, and another over the summer or in the fall to serve another. There is no easy, real corollary to that in scouting other than maybe combined HA crews for things like Philmont. As far as the unfit, short family, maybe that's why they want to encourage their kid in sports. Unless you are in a unit that does a lot of hiking or high adventuring, scouts seems to be becoming increasingly sedentary and advancement focused. 

Agreed. I am blessed to live in an area with multiple active troops. But so many of the Pack parents are strapped for time, they decide at the last minute to visit one troop in the early spring to satisfy AOL requirements. After they crossover to the same troop, they decide they don't like it and assume everyone does the same program, so they drop scouts.  First-year summer camp is a big deal and the Cub parents have no idea. We stress to our Pack AOL leader to finish crossover by March so the scouts have time to acclimate to the new troop. Really that's barely enough time. We have already made summer camp deposits and program selections before they arrive. I am thinking they should meet several times with their prospective troop as AOL scouts before crossover.

Literally just went through this. My district had a unit meeting in a different district. No national policies that could be found. The unit belonged to the district of the mailing address of the charter organization. The only real issues were that the unit was not communicating with the district executive, so he couldn't help them figure out how to solve their problem (which appeared to be the charter org wanted the unit out but didn't want to just drop the charter so they were being nobs to the parents and leaders). As a volunteer trying to help the unit once the district knew what was going on it was a nightmare because the unit was imploding because they were meeting so far away from where most of the families in the unit lived.  A little bit older situation that might still be ongoing. My district has a unit that refuses to participate with council except for what they are mandated. The unit sends all of their leaders to neighboring councils for their training (IOLS, Wood Badge, etc ... ), they only camp at the neighboring councils camps, the SM has been heard literally stating "If we could register with the neighboring council we would" so that makes me believe that you have to register with your council that your CO geographically falls in. My DE has told me that as long as the adults are getting trained and the unit is camping he would rather have that then have an untrained unit that doesn't camp and so he lets it be.

After the whole Hawaii thing how did we not see something happening?  I don't think this is that big of a deal. Sure name change, but, we still have shooting sports. We're a very broad topic youth organization, not a shooting sports organization. The reduction in options is not that big of a deal, if a scout really likes shooting, and wants to get into different styles, different calibers, super serious with reloading etc ... why can't they go shoot clays on Tuesday night at their gun club, and roll into their troop meetings on Wednesday at the local church? 

We're straying a little but I'll bite on this one.  The internet thing is a big deal where I am at. There are parent/leader lounges at most of the camps in my state to allow remote work for parents. Last year it doubled the number of adults able to accompany my sons troop to camp; I agree that we need to keep the scouts off of that wifi, but we need amenities like this to keep some families in the scouting game so-to-speak.  Sports are a big deal in my area as well. Most families are delusional with these 4 season sports and the traveling/club leagues. Most varsity teams for any sport have a cap of about 20 players total. If you don't play varsity in HS it's very unlikely that a kid will make it onto a team in college, and then there's little to no chance of professional (or Olympic if your sport veers that direction). My sons unit lost a kid to baseball this Spring and it's a joke; the mom and dad are both around 5'6" and not fat, but clearly they have never had an athletic build. The dad was all like, we might be back, but we're setting him up for varsity in a few years, and then on to college ball; the delusion of these parents that don't understand the genetics aspect of high level sport play. I feel bad for the kid, unless he has some magical growth spurt that puts him 6-10 inches taller than both his parents they're building him up for a very big fall.  I think the new AOL program is going to fix some of these crossover problems. Several years ago the pack my family came out of started pushing Scouting Adventure super hard, first, and it has had much higher success in successfully crossing over AOLs to troops. The pack also started pushing multiple troop visits. The new AOL Bobcat adventure codifies those activities and establishes that troop visits start in September. Now that packs and troops are being told in doctrine that troop visits need to happen often and early I think we're going to see more AOLs crossover. This last minute go visit a troop in Feb-Mar crap has never been good.