RingoI did a survey of the North American Armored Combat Scene this January. You can read about that here. I want to go over the basic Demographic data today and talk a little about what I think it means. This data is not necessarily representative of our community and it contains fighters, fans, and support, so without pulling out the separate data for each area we should be careful in our analysis here. That said I’m still gonna take a stab without actually doing that work for the moment and later we can see if there is anything that contradicts that.
The first thing to note is the overall growth. While the first survey was limited to the ACL at the time, it seems likely that that org accounted for at least half of the fighters and fans/staff in US at the time as well as a decent portion of Canada. There were only 90 responses then, 82 fighters and 8 fans/staff
2 years later and we have over 3 times the respondents in both categories. The Non fighter portion went from 8 to 57 too…meaning the community is seeing growth in fans and support, which will be needed if people ever want this to really be a spectator sport. While the different self selection biases do make it hard to tell how much is just adding people who didn’t participate last time, I think this is true growth as there was limited participation from ACW which contains many of the hold overs from the OG American league. RIP.
Next in growth I want to talk about the increase gender representation. While we are far from parity between men and women we’ve gone from 86% male to 80% male domination. Women gained 2%, for a total of 51 respondents. This is up from the previous 12 who responded and I would guess there were another 20 who didn’t. And we are beginning to see the sport try to find space for non binary. We’re still struggling on that aspect however as some people took this opportunity to troll. Others put trans indicating they feel a need to select their gender without the qualifier which I fear may mean they feel the sport refuses to allow them to say their gender without a qualifier, though perhaps they feel there is a need to separate? I’m legit not the guy to speak on that but I don’t want to completely ignore it either so giving my best guesses.
I decide to look at age and I feel like we are a relatively old sport with over 60% of people in the 30+ range. That seems high but I need to go pull stats from other sports to really know.
Speaking of, the average income seems to have gone down. In 2018 50% of people made 60k plus
And in 2021 50% made 50k plus. That’s very possibly due to the decrease in armor prices and the increase in used gear…but it also may just be a reflection of the stagnation of wages and poor economy. Either way we do seem to be a sport for the rich with almost 20% of people in the 100k plus range. In the future I will need specify whether this is household or personal income in order to compare to general population. Will probably go with household.
When it comes to locations, Texas and Cali are leading the way which makes sense based on population. New York is very under represented which is hopefully an artifact of people not responding, not the scene there falling apart cause it was growing alot. New Hampshire and Virgina see spikes likely due to the fact both places have training gyms dedicated to the sport. Though it’s possible Virginia is also showing the tidewater growth? Not sure what’s going on in Alberta but I love it. Quebec looks low and I’m gonna say that’s partially cause the survey was only in english. That’s likely a reason we saw no Mexican participation. Something to ponder is why relations are not as good with them as Canadians, besides the language. And if it is just the language perhaps for such an international sport we should be pushing more multilingualism in the US community. Anyway.
There are plenty of other pockets but nothing else jumps out at me
My main take away from the demographics section was that a) I need to make sure I format my questions better to make it easier to parse data, b) As much as the sport is growing we still need to do more to make the barrier to entry lower, particularly for Non-Men and young people, and c) The most growth appears to come in areas with alot of local activity which suggest people NEED to get out there and make sure they are putting on events, training, and building their local scene if they want to grow.
I know that C is common sense and alot of people will say they are trying but don’t know how they can do more. I will try to get in touch with people who have done a good job of this and see if I can put together a guide(or better yet get someone else to do it for me lol). If you have succeeded at this please reach out!
For B I don’t really have thoughts on how but its a thing I plan on thinking on more and hopefully figure something out or at least poke enough other smart people that it we find a good way. Comment or Message your thoughts please!
Lastly for a) I def need to improve the way I ask questions and also the questions I ask. Please let me know what other data you’d like to see collected or if you have ideas on better ways to filter.