Despite increasing injury concerns around tackle football, the number of American youngsters playing the sport has been mostly stable since 2009, according to figures released this week.

In 2014, 1.88 million children ages 6 to 14 played organized tackle football, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, or SFIA. While that’s down 7 percent from 2013, a closer look shows football participation hasn’t take much of a hit since 2009, a time period marked by widespread media coverage of emerging science linking the sport with brain disease.

In 2009, 1.97 million American children played organized tackle football. That was a bad year for football. In October 2009, members of Congress verbally pummeled NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell over his league’s handling of health issues and compared the NFL to the tobacco industry. In December 2009, the NFL acknowledged for the first time concussions may lead to later-life cognitive problems.

The next year, however, youth tackle football participation actually went up, to 2 million. Then it went down in 2011, to 1.99 million, then back up in 2012, to 2.06 million, then slightly down in 2013, to 2.03 million. It adds up to a 4 percent drop over five years.

The bigger issue, according to Tom Cove, president and CEO of SFIA, is the larger decline in American children playing all sports. Overall youth sports participation fell 9.3 percent between 2009 and 2014. Basketball (7 percent), soccer (8 percent) and baseball (4 percent) all also lost players from 2009-14.

“A dangerous sign,” Cove said.

These figures are based on an annual survey SFIA commissions of more than 10,000 Americans ages 6 and older about participation in more than 120 types of physical activity. Last week, SFIA released its “2015 U.S. Trends in Team Sports” report, and in response to questions about numbers that appeared to show a significant drop-off for tackle football, the SFIA provided more detailed figures.

The report showed an 18 percent decline for tackle football since 2009. If you’re trying to figure out the impact of injury concerns on youth football, though, that number is misleading, because it includes children who said they played casual pickup games a few times a year.

“The family turkey bowl in your backyard on Thanksgiving Day counts,” Cove said.

While family turkey bowl activity is apparently way down, the number of youngsters strapping on helmets to play for schools and private leagues is not. SFIA’s numbers show a 55 percent drop in casual/pickup tackle football play since 2009.

Cove doesn’t know why Americans are apparently abandoning casual games of tackle football en masse. But it’s clear – so far – that years of prominent media coverage of safety concerns surrounding tackle football have had a negligible impact, if any, on the number of American children actually playing the sport.

Within those larger numbers about football are a few interesting trends. More girls are playing now – females represented 11.8 percent of all youth football players in 2014, twice as much as in 2009. And more children are playing for private leagues, which Cove attributes to schools dropping sports.

In 2009, 1.1 million children played football for schools, 861,000 played for private leagues. In five years those numbers flipped: now 1.1 million play for private leagues vs. 773,000 for schools.

Cove expressed concerns that the trend could drive lower-income children from football.

That impact hasn’t been felt yet either, though. SFIA broke up each sport’s popularity by household income across five earnings categories. Tackle football was only really popular in one income sliver – the second-poorest, $25,000 to $50,000. Football didn’t crack the top-five most popular sports for any other income level.