Sport in the United Kingdom sports combined have less than one-third the participation of football. Additionally, a British sport journalist pointed out that football academies are "really bad at letting players out of the system who aren't going to make it", frequently keeping players until age 17 or 18, beyond an age at which they can reasonably be developed for top-level basketball. Another issue is politically related. Basketball is not played in the elite fee-paying secondary schools that produce a disproportionate share of the UK's political leaders. Also, several British basketball insiders have cited problems with the sport's governance within the UK, with Kevin Routledge,
Sports in the United States running (25,000), and (7) swimming/diving (20,000). The most popular sport among female athletes is soccer, followed closely by track and field. Community college athletics are governed separately by the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA). Most public high schools are members of their respective state athletic association, and those associations are members of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). Some states have separate associations for public and non-public high schools. As of 2018, the NFHS reported 29 consecutive years of increasing high school sports participation, driven largely by growth in girls participation. The high school sports with