The Most In-Demand Kids' Activity in Every US State

1. 1

   America's cheerleading heartland is the northern Plains, not Texas. North Dakota (2.36x), Alaska (2.30x), Wyoming (2.20x) and South Dakota (2.15x) all search cheerleading at more than twice the national rate. Texas ranks 18th (1.30x). New York is dead last (0.54x).

2. 2

   California searches for after-school programs at 3.00x the national rate: 81,000 searches a month, and more than double the over-index of the state's runner-up activity, the widest winner-to-runner-up gap in the study. Ohio (2.62x) and Tennessee (2.03x) show it's not just a coastal story.

3. 3

   The US swim belt is up north. All 12 states where swimming is the most over-indexed activity sit in the northern half of the country (Maryland leads at 1.62x), and not a single Sun Belt state makes the list.

4. 4

   Theater country is Appalachia and the South. West Virginia searches acting and drama classes at 2.07x the national rate, the highest in the country, with Mississippi close behind at 1.88x. New York's most over-indexed activity is swimming.

5. 5

   Utah is America's ballet state. Utahns search "ballet classes" at 1.85x the national rate, the highest of any state searching in real volume, in the home of Ballet West and one of the country's best-known university ballet programs.

Each state is colored by its most over-indexed activity: the category that takes up a bigger share of that state's kids'-activity searches than it does of the nation's. A score of 1.00 means a state searches an activity at exactly the national rate; 2.00 means twice the national rate. Thirteen of our 14 categories win at least one state.

In many states the race is close (about half have less than a 10% gap between the winning activity and the runner-up), so treat the map as each state's strongest lean, not its whole personality. The state sections below stick to the findings where the gap is wide enough to mean something.

Ask anyone to name America's cheerleading capital and you'll hear Texas: the state of Friday-night football, Cheer on Netflix, and the sport's biggest all-star gyms. The search data says otherwise. The four states that search cheerleading at the highest rate relative to the national average are North Dakota (2.36x), Alaska (2.30x), Wyoming (2.20x) and South Dakota (2.15x), all at more than twice the national rate.

Texas ranks 18th at 1.30x. New York finishes dead last at 0.54x, searching cheerleading at less than a quarter of North Dakota's rate.

To be clear about what this measures: Texas still generates more raw cheerleading searches than any other state: 4,200 a month, the most in the country. But as a share of everything Texan parents search for, cheer is unremarkable. In the northern Plains, it dominates. (The top four states are small search markets, at 90 to 100 cheer searches a month each, but four independent state samples landing on the same pattern is what makes the finding hold up. More on small states below.)

The likely explanation is school-spirit culture in places where school is the town's social infrastructure. In rural, low-density states, cheerleading rides along with school sports: every high school fields a squad, and there are fewer dance studios, gymnastics gyms, and specialty programs competing for girls' after-school hours. In Texas, cheer is enormous in absolute terms but diluted by one of the country's broadest menus of organized kids' activities.

Ed Hollinghurst, Director of Pembee, says the finding is a lesson in the difference between where an activity is biggest and where it matters most. In their view, cheerleading in the Plains states functions less like a niche sport and more like default civic participation: when the school squad is one of the few organized options in town, it absorbs a share of family attention that no coastal metro can match. They add that national brands consistently overrate Texas and underrate the rural North when deciding where demand for cheer programs actually is.

California searches for after-school programs at 3.00x the national rate: 81,000 searches every month, and the single most lopsided result in the study. The gap between after-school care and California's runner-up activity is 120%, the widest winner-to-runner-up margin of any state.

It isn't a California quirk. Ohio over-indexes at 2.62x (29,600 searches a month) and Tennessee at 2.03x (7,200 a month). Only five states search after-school programs above the national rate at all, and three of them do so at more than double it.

Unlike most categories in this study, after-school program searches aren't really enrichment shopping; they're childcare logistics. The school day ends around 3pm; the work day doesn't. In high-cost states where two incomes are the norm, the 3-to-6pm gap is a household infrastructure problem, and the search data reads like a map of where that problem bites hardest. California has also spent recent years scaling up its state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, which funds after-school and summer enrichment for the elementary grades and puts "after school program" on the radar of families who might never have searched for one before.

Hollinghurst argues these numbers should be read as a demand signal, not a curiosity: three-times-national search intensity means California parents are actively hunting for care that the market isn't surfacing easily. They note that when a childcare category over-indexes this hard in a state, it usually means demand is outrunning supply: a warning light for policymakers and an opportunity for providers.

Swimming is the country's most-searched kids' activity by a distance: just over a million searches a month nationally, roughly twice the volume of the runner-up category, music. But the states most disproportionately obsessed with swim lessons are not the ones with year-round pool weather.

All 12 states where swimming is the most over-indexed activity sit in the northern half of the country. Maryland leads at 1.62x, followed by Delaware (1.60x) and Michigan (1.58x). Not one Sun Belt state makes the list.

* Nebraska over-indexes on swimming at 1.56x but cheerleading edges it out as the state's winner.

The swim-winner club is the Mid-Atlantic, the Great Lakes, and New England, plus Idaho as the lone western member. New York, meanwhile, generates the largest raw volume of swim-lesson searches in America (97,300 a month) even though its over-index is a modest 1.33x. Florida, Arizona, and Texas, the states where children are around water most, don't win swimming anywhere.

The pattern makes sense once you flip the assumption. In the Sun Belt, swimming is ambient: backyard pools, community pools, beaches, and a culture where many kids pick it up informally. In the North, swimming is a scheduled activity: it happens in indoor swim schools, in booked lesson blocks, often driven by parents who see water competence as a safety skill their kids won't absorb by osmosis. Searching is what you do when an activity requires enrolling rather than wandering outside.

Hollinghurst says the swim belt is the clearest example in the data of search behavior tracking formality rather than participation. In their reading, northern parents aren't more interested in swimming than Floridians; they simply have to buy it as a structured service, which is exactly the moment a Google search happens. They suggest the finding should reassure northern swim schools that seasonal climate isn't a demand ceiling; it's the reason their market exists.

If search interest decided where America's drama capital was, it wouldn't be Broadway. West Virginia searches acting, drama, and theater classes at 2.07x the national rate, the highest in the country, followed by Mississippi at 1.88x and North Dakota at 1.87x. Theater is the outright winning activity in West Virginia, Mississippi, and Oklahoma.

New York, the state everyone would have guessed? Its most over-indexed kids' activity is swimming.

These are small-volume states (West Virginia's theater searches total 260 a month, Mississippi's 370), so the finding is a strong lean rather than a landslide (Oklahoma's winner margin in particular is slim). But the direction is consistent across three states in the same broad region, and it fits the region's deep amateur-theater tradition: church pageants, school plays, and community playhouses are often the most accessible performing-arts outlet in towns without a dance studio or a youth orchestra, and one of the few indoor, low-equipment activities available year-round. (One note on interpretation: acting-class searches include adult learners, so this is best read as overall theater appetite, skewing family.)

Hollinghurst sees the theater finding as the study's best argument against equating an industry's headquarters with its grassroots. They point out that New York is where acting careers happen, but Appalachia and the Deep South are where acting classes punch furthest above their weight, because community theater there isn't a stepping stone to anything, it's the main stage. For local arts organizations, they argue, that's evidence of underserved demand hiding in places national programs rarely look.

Beneath the category-level map, individual search terms give some states an unmistakable signature:

• Utah: ballet. Utahns search "ballet classes" at 1.85x the national rate, the highest of any state searching in real volume (320 searches a month), in the home of Ballet West and BYU's storied ballet program. (Alaska and Hawaii technically score higher, at 2.01x and 1.93x, but on 30 and 70 searches a month.) It's a fitting signature for a state where dance studios are famously thick on the ground.
• Minnesota: youth hockey. The State of Hockey checks out: Minnesotans search "youth hockey" at 5.97x the national rate (140 searches a month), the highest of any state with meaningful volume. (Alaska, Wyoming, and the Dakotas score between 6.42x and 7.63x, but on about 10 searches a month each.)
• Nevada: taekwondo. Nevada searches "taekwondo classes" at 2.06x the national rate (210 searches a month), the country's highest, part of a broader martial arts lean in the West and in Hawaii, which over-indexes the whole category at 2.40x.
• Hawaii: flag football. Hawaii searches "flag football" at 2.66x the national rate (590 searches a month), far ahead of second-place Mississippi (1.78x), a fitting result for a state famous for producing football talent far out of proportion to its population.
• Montana: horseback riding. Montana's winning activity is horseback riding at 2.29x the national rate, the highest horse-country score in the nation, and one of the few results on the map that surprises no one.
• Louisiana and Florida: camps. The only two states where camps are the most over-indexed category (1.52x and 1.37x), though the single most camp-crazed search belongs to West Virginia, which looks for "sleepaway camp" at 2.27x the national rate (320 searches a month).

Six states (Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Montana) generate fewer than 5,000 kids'-activity searches a month across our entire 111-keyword basket. Alaska is the smallest market at 3,190 monthly searches; Montana the largest of the six at 4,780.

Their results are directionally real but noisier than the big states': Google rounds low volumes, and a single popular local program can nudge a small state's ratios. That's why this piece leans on patterns that repeat across several small states (four northern Plains states independently agreeing on cheerleading) rather than any one small state's number on its own. Vermont's horseback-riding win, with a 1% margin over its runner-up, is the kind of result we'd treat as a coin toss; Montana's, with a 16% margin and a 2.29x score, is not.