WITHDRAWN How Performance Improvement Affects Adolescent Dropout in Swimming: A Survival Analysis

Music City Center 

The benefits of adolescents participating in sports have been well recognized and documented for a long time. However, a significant concern in youth sports is the high dropout rate among young athletes. Anecdotal evidence suggests a lack of improvement over an extended period of time is one of the main factors that cause swimmers to leave the sport. This study is the first one that adopts a survival analysis framework to formally test these hypotheses. Using a large, publicly available database on competitive swimmers, this research examines how swimmers' performance improvement affects their decisions to quit or not. Analyzing nearly 12,000 swimmers' meet performances over the last 10 years, we create two metrics to track swimmer performance improvement. One measures swimmers' self-improvement, the other measures their relative improvement compared with peers. The main findings include (1) swimmers' absolute performance level and the speed of improvement both influence their dropout probability, with the absolute performance level being a more important factor; (2) swimmers who are faster when they are younger but slower when they grow up are more likely to quit; (3) if swimmers

survival analysis

sports dropout

adolescent

large data 

Section on Statistics in Sports