yknot

The 650,000 was a membership snapshot number posted on Scouting Forums before they closed it to general discussions. It wasn't from NAM. The NAM reports use annual numbers which for multiple years during and post Covid were artificially inflated for a variety of reasons.

Thank you for posting numbers. The nadir during Covid was at one point around 650,000, but that low included a lot of paused not lost memberships.

Nope Citizenship was taught pretty well for decades primarily in the outdoors

I think this is one of the problems with scouts. Adults are more oriented towards what kids "should" know and "should" do vs. what they want to do, or they are stuck on nostalgia for the way things used to be for them -- how they experienced it, how they led it. As the outdoors program continues to wane in importance and variety, adults are boring youth out of the organization.

Nothing more fun than watching your kid get the big trophy. However, many scout parents get that same dopamine rush from seeing their non team kid excel in scouts. Being in an Eagle Scout ceremony, with congratulatory messages from mayors and members of Congress, sees some parents almost turn purple with pride. It's all good. I think the issue for scouting is that there are more kids and families that enjoy other youth activities more. That's because they are more fun and appealing to kids and easier to access and understand by parents. Scouting has been focusing on everything but those issues for decades and it's had a culmulative effect. Every newly diverting crisis that develops, like this one, only deepens the hole.

Scouting really didn't/doesn't need the West Point Camporee or Jamboree to deliver program though. Both events serve very few scouts in the scheme of things. I think the potential loss of the Eagle Scout promotion and pay upgrades was likely much more consequential, especially since attaining Eagle is the single most important marketing point for the US program. It's a potential benefit noted in almost all the marketing materials and is positioned as almost a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from the U.S. Military of the scouting program. That, and the ability to operate units on US bases were likely the biggest items on the table.

Somewhere I saw that the number of military memberships overall is around 25,000. If that's true, then waiving the national fee for those youth will remove around $2 million. A lot of money, but not catastrophic although it likely means another increase in the national fee, which might be further amplified by the effect of the ongoing membership drop.

It's a great idea and good on you for trying but liability is the issue. They are in no authoritative position to confer any kind of credentialling and if an incident occurs it opens a can of worms that could only lead to enhanced liability. It's easier to just say park it and drive in.

Trailers can do more damage than standard vehicles. Other threads here have talked about scouters who don't know how to properly connect, load, equalize, or drive trailers. It's not always just about weight. Somebody who gets themselves in a bad spot, or has to yink yank all over to back in, can do a lot of site damage. It may be only your scout camp that has this particular policy so far, but there are a lot of places where you can no longer drive in at all. Scouting also has a 'camp in all weather' credo. People sometimes do not consider potential site damage when weighing plans but it is upper mind for many facilities. They're trying to work with you in their own way -- they know it's hitched properly, that maybe you can't drive it around after they've parked it, and they can control where it's put. It is a liability concern though for he reasons mentioned.

Sounds like some of the damage is being done based on how and where people park and how that affects where and how they pull out. If the staff parks the trailer, then they know how you are going to leave, so that's why they are not so worried about the pull out.

We've had similar experiences with various sports coaches and then specifically baseball coaches when the more sports oriented son settled into that. Almost all of them were good and many, especially in baseball, were supportive of scouting. I think one big difference I've seen in youth athletics overall is that bad coaches, unlike bad adult scout volunteers, generally don't linger. The volunteer shortage in scouting means the organization seems to hang on to almost any warm body, no matter how problematic. The existence of umpires and league arbiters also mean that the kinds of rule and vague policy questions that plague scouting, and are the source of numerous social media sites and posts, are resolved more efficiently in sports. As for adult scouters, one possible reason is I think scouting experiences are much more fragmented and individual. One adult might have been in a unit that camped all the time; another adult might have been in a unit that was more advancement driven; another in a unit that was very integrated with a religion; yet another with one that was influenced by military connections and philosophies. When they re-experience it with their kids, it can seem completely different and offputting and definitely more complicated. Sports, on the other hand, can seem almost universally familiar. There have been rule and equipment changes but pretty much youth basketball, football, baseball, soccer players are playing the same game their parents did no matter what part of the country they were from. It's easier to re-onboard with and more understandable. They don't need as much training to be functional.

My point in this Scouts vs. Sports thread is that most families/kids interested in youth sports type activities are not going to be interested in scouting no matter how many free nights they have available.* That's because the activity doesn't appeal much to a lot of them in the first place. A few hours of possible fun on a monthly camp out isn't what they are looking for. Another point is that sports exclusivity to the degree claimed by scouters is largely a myth. There are regional differences but opportunities for play at middle school and high school levels have only expanded, both in and out of school. Specialization, injury/rest protocols, tiered programs/leagues, freshman teams, and emerging sports have increased roster sizes and broadened options across the board. Ages also don't really align -- if you're talking about JV or Varsity play, a significant percentage of scouts have already moved on from scouting by then. Sports is not keeping them from scouting. If you are talking cub scout or cross over ages, take a look at the mandatory requirements for AOL. The most appealing active adventure, Outdoors, has practically no actual activity prescribed in it. There is not much there to appeal to an active 10 year old. That is why scout membership is declining, not because of youth sports. It is wasted energy for scouters to be distracted by sports instead of focusing on why scouting itself isn't more appealing to youth and families. Another observation as a parent volunteer in both youth sports and scouts is that too many adults in scouting want the program to be what they think "kids today" need vs. just serving youth. For a supposedly youth led organization, adults layer an awful lot onto the program and it has made it stultifying in some aspects. *Shorter statured basketball players, even gifted ones, start having free nights once the height equation kicks in. You don't see a huge wave of them showing up in scouts in middle school and early high school though. They generally transition to another sport just as you are looking at football. What would scouting have to do to make the activity more appealing to your basketball player than football?

Things are different depending on where you are. Juniors who don't make varsity can still play JV in most cases. Some of those juniors won't make Varsity as seniors, but there are other extracurricular options and most of them will still see three good years of play at the high school level. You are doing what most scouters do -- focus comparisons on the single, final, high school senior year of a student athlete's entire career. It's even less relevant when you look at how many scouts are not even active or in scouting by that age. As far as rosters, baseball, soccer, football, and even basketball carry pretty large numbers. We haven't talked about Lacrosse or Winter ice hockey. In regions where those sports are common, they can carry even bigger rosters -- 20 to 30. There are also plenty of situations in scouting where youth can't make the "cut" for something -- activities that have limited head counts or prerequisites that are harder for some kids to meet for whatever reason. And if you are in a unit that is Eagle or First Class First Year focused, which many are, scouts can absolutely get left behind by peers if they miss things. I don't see much point in attacking youth sports for scouts' membership decline. I think it's irrelevant. Issues with scouting are why it is in decline. Trying to blame sports is a nonproductive distraction away from those issues in my opinion.

I don't understand the math here. Rosters for most varsity level team sports are 20-25 kids -- baseball, basketball, soccer. If your eligible demographic is 200 kids, that's at least 10% of the grade. But that's also probably 50% of the hopeful demographic that actually wants to play the sport. Not every kid in the grade wants to play a sport or make the commitment to play it at such a competitive and all consuming level, but scouting seems to like to assume that everyone does. There are also plenty of nonschool options for kids that don't make Varsity cuts and they are not all high end travel. Like scouting, there are teams and leagues at all levels of play. Do a certain percentage of kids and parents aspire to be the star starting player in a sport and pursue it that way? Yes, of course, but scouting seems to like to exaggerate that number to blame declining interest in scouting on sports.

It's true the high cost of volunteering in scouting is often unacknowledged, especially when compared to other youth activities. This is part of the value perception equation. It's also not as simple as thinking parents want to dump and run. Potential volunteers who are used to operating in more functional organizations find the systemic dysfunction in scouting incomprehensible. The onboarding experience in most youth activities is efficient and user friendly. Trying to onboard in scouts can be an ordeal. That makes the first point of entry a complete turn off for a lot of competent adults. Not necessarily dumping kids but running backwards away from dysfunction.