Always On: Understanding Youth Basketball Participation

Welcome to Always On. Each week, we’ll dig into a brand or audience trend you need to know about, tapping into Morning Consult Intelligence, our always-on insights platform powered by 15,000 daily surveys across 40+ countries. That means thousands of brands, audience deep dives, and enough fresh data to make your spreadsheets jealous. Sign-up here to get this email sent to you directly every week.

To mark the end of the NCAA tournaments, we’re taking a look this week at parents who have kids involved in youth basketball. This is an audience we started tracking in late August 2024 and we have a sample size of more than 80,000 respondents in the 7 months since then.

Morning Consult Intelligence clients can explore this audience here. We also track participation in many other youth sports, including: baseball, football, golf, gymnastics, hockey, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis and track & field. While you could look into each of those audiences one at a time, you can also ask our AI Chat tool about them and get your answers all at once.

With our AI Chat tool, we can quickly see that parents of children involved in tennis are far more likely to be earning $100k a year or more than the other groups. Only golf comes close. Meanwhile, parents with kids involved in basketball, gymnastics or track & field are more likely to be from lower-income households.

Our AI Chat is now available to Morning Consult clients. Give it a spin for yourself here. If you don’t have access, reach out — we’d love to chat.

Fast Facts About Basketball Parents

They’re living in cities
Half of this group lives in an urban community, which is 23 points more likely than the general population.

They’re betting on sports (but hopefully not their kids’ games)
Nearly 40% of parents involved in youth basketball are betting on sports games at least once a month, which is 16 points higher than the general population.

The kids aren’t the only ones playing sports
79% of this group is exercising or practicing sports at least once a week, which is 30 points higher than the general population.

They’re more likely to be optimistic about economy
54% of this demographic says their personal finances will be better off in 12 months, and 51% say business conditions will be better off in 12 months. That’s 19 and 27 points higher than the general population, respectively.

They’re more into politics and more likely to identify as partisans
This group is 23 more points likely to say they are very or extremely interested in politics or public affairs. They’re also far more likely to identify as either Democratic or Republican, but less likely to identify as independents.

Going Deeper: How Basketball Parents Feel About Activewear Brands

This week, we’re going to do a brand ranking amongst activewear brands for this demographic.

Here, you can see Adidas, Nike and New Balance lead the pack amongst this demographic. It’s not all that dissimilar compared to the general population, but Nike ranks a bit higher with these parents. These are just some of the 40 activewear brands we track in Morning Consult Intelligence, which is where brand metrics on more than 3,000 brands live. Clients can do their own brand rankings here.

Extra Credit

In this week’s extra credit section, we wanted to highlight a chart that shows how important sports are to parents of Gen Alpha kids. This comes from our latest report on how Gen Alpha is shaping spending in their households and engaging with media and technology.

More than 50% of these parents said playing sports is essential or very important. In the chart below, you can see where that activity ranks amongst other priorities for parents.

Friendships, hobbies and a reliable schedule all take priority — but playing sports is still being prioritized by a sizable portion of this group. Download the full Gen Alpha report here for more analysis, including how influential Gen Alpha kids are for purchasing sports gear (page 17).