People in my hometown love baseball. The next town over they love football. My hometown has never produced a professional or semi-pro football player, and the next town over has never produced a professional or semi-pro baseball player. But they each have had one or two people at least show up on the rosters of a professional team in their favorite sports. That's a difference of 11 miles, with highly mobile people who do intermarry between towns.
There can be significant enough differences in the culture of particular communities to allow for varying sports values. I would expect smaller towns to tend to emphasize one sport over all others, to the point that the townspeople in large part will live and breath that sport in a way that people in larger communities with more diverse sports options would not.