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Mental Skills Toolkit:

Women’s Soccer is Popular as Ever, so Why are Girls Still Quitting Soccer?

Published: July 25, 2022
Updated: February 22, 2023
By: Jenn Ireland

Category: Coaching, Mental Wellness, On the Soccer Field, Performing under Pressure, The Women's Game

Girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys, we’ve all heard the statistic. But here’s an interesting conundrum: in youth soccer, it seems to be mostly the recreational teams and lower level select and club teams that are disappearing and getting harder and harder to fill, NOT higher level premier teams, ECNL teams, or Girls Academy League teams. Those are all absolutely thriving right now.

So what’s going on? Why is high level competitive soccer for girls & women absolutely crushing it right now, while the recreational side of the girl’s game is struggling to fill rosters because players no longer want to play? Why are girls quitting soccer at the height of the popularity of the women’s game?

Why do girls quit soccer?

Women’s soccer is exploding right now. With competitive clubs and leagues for promising young players popping up at lightning speed across the United States, the NWSL expanding, and multiple new professional leagues kicking off, not to mention a growing market of fans that can’t get enough – women’s soccer is hot stuff right now. (This NYTimes article does a fantastic job of explaining how Title IX’s impact paved the way to this phenomenal moment we are at.)

More girls are playing soccer than ever before, that’s a fact. It’s also a fact that girls are still dropping out of soccer at a high rate – even while the sport is flourishing. Why is this happening? Why are girls still quitting soccer?

Here's why girls drop out of sports

As a mental skills coach that works exclusively with young women, I am writing this post as an opinion piece, based off of the observations I have from working with many, many middle and high school aged girls. When I get asked the question ‘why do girls quit soccer’, the thing I immediately go to is this trend that I’ve seen a lot of over the past few years: many girls today do not want to participate in activities that they do not inherently excel at.

Today’s culture has created an environment where young women feel like they can no longer do things just for fun, they HAVE to be good at them. Because of this, they hold themselves to impossibly high, unrealistic standards of perfection in everything they do. There is no room for being OK at something or just doing it because you enjoy it, you must be good at it.

Nowadays, many young women tend to base their self-worth off of their ability to meet these impossibly high standards of perfection. This social conditioning is detrimental. It sets them up for repeated feelings of inadequacy and failure both in soccer and in life. This is a hard way to live and has extreme negative effects on an individual’s mental health, confidence and just overall wellbeing.

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Pressure, expectations and comparison culture

Comparison culture plays a huge role here and contributes to female dropout rate in sports. Social media is BUILT to compare, whether we realize it or not. Every time you get on Instagram and see everyone’s fancy training videos or goal scoring videos, you feel deep down that you will never be as good as this person, so why should you even try? Comparison is the thief of joy and boy does it work.

The win-at-all-costs mentality of youth sports doesn’t help the situation either. Now, not only do girls feel pressure from themselves to perform and meet expectations, they now feel the outside pressure and crave the external validation (both on social media and in real life) that ‘means’ they are worthy.

These feelings are not unique to recreational players, but these players are the first ones to call it quits because they do not have the same long term goals as the players that have invested themselves into the competitive youth soccer market. Club, premier and elite players feel the pressure as well and do call it quits. But more of these players will keep going even with the pressure: they’ve either done the mental skills training needed to push through and reach their goals, or they are too invested in the process at this point to drop out. Some thrive after pushing through while others try for a little while longer before pulling the plug.

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Other reasons why girls drop out of sports

This isn’t just happening in soccer, young women are dropping out of sports across the board. And not only is it pressure, expectations and perfectionism that are leading to girls quitting soccer, there’s a whole lot of other stuff that can impact their decision too.

While this list is in no way a list of EVERY reason girls quit sports at a higher rate than boys, it is some of the common reasons that girls drop out during the middle school and high school years:

Burnout: burnout happens when you feel frustrated from putting in a lot of effort and getting slow progress in return. Burnout is when you decide that your goals are no longer attainable and feel that it would be best to just give up and walk away.

Productivity shame: social conditioning has led some of us to a place where we believe ALL minutes must be productive minutes. That means we can’t do something simply ‘for fun’ because that is not a productive use of our time. If you do something fun, you feel guilty about it.

Injury: injuries can play a big role in girls dropping out of sports. Not only recovery after injury (getting back to where you were before the injury) but also potential of an injury can cause anxiety – especially in recreational soccer where the range of skill can be quite large and some players feel more vulnerable when up against stronger, more competitive players.

Capacity: once girls enter high school, they often find themselves in a place where they don’t have as much time on their hands as they used to. Between school, working, trying to get into college and extra curricular activities, they don’t have a ton of capacity and it can be rough to try and do it all.

Limited resources: Girls also drop out of sports too due to transportation and financial issues as well as other socioeconomic factors too.

Social factors: Many girls drop out of sports due to the fact that they don’t get along with their teammates or the team has clique issues that make the experience not fun. They may have been bullied as well, which is a big driver for quitting.

Perhaps the most important thing to point out is that, historically, soccer (and especially recreational and non-competitive soccer) is something that is played for sheer FUN. And with all the pressure and expectations, it suddenly becomes not fun anymore. Which is exactly why girls drop out of soccer.

Coaches and parents, here's how to help keep girls in sports

Even though women’s soccer is popular as ever, girls are still quitting soccer. And that’s unfortunate because keeping girls in sports is really important and really beneficial to them.

It’s important because sports contribute to a lot of life skill development. There are a million and a half things we could list off, but here are just a few of the skills that girls can learn while playing sports: teamwork, work ethic, perseverance, patience, resilience, focus, leadership, communication, self-regulation, confidence and self-belief.

To keep girls in sports, we need to normalize the conversation around these difficult topics of pressure, expectations, perfectionism and self-worth. We need to bring mental health to the table and make it part of our game plan. We need to talk about these experiences more, because these are SHARED experiences that pretty much everyone has, they just don’t know that because no one ever talks about this stuff!

We can help keep girls in sports by showing that we care, by asking questions and getting to know them as individuals, and by being willing to have hard conversations. Conversations that help them realize they are not alone in their experience and address the issues head on before players get to the point that they just want to walk away.

Hi everyone! I’m Jenn and I create content to help female soccer players and coaches maximize individual and team potential by developing healthy mindset skills. Join other subscribers and sign up for the newsletter for all my best tips and advice!

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Hi everyone!

I'm Jenn, a USSF C-licensed youth soccer coach, mental skills coach & founder here at Expand Your Game. I created this site because it is the site I needed when I was a soccer player.

About me: I am a former newspaper photojournalist who loves downtempo electronic music, guacamole and books of every sort. And of course soccer! On days off you can find me researching tiny farms in Portugal , tossing a frisbee for my dog, or tending to my growing collection of indoor plants.