Rewarding National Governing Bodies that best support grassroots sports and tying financial incentives to coach training were among the ideas heard Sept. 6 by an independent commission studying entities that shape the sport ecosystem for 11 million Americans.
The Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics & Paralympics (CSUSOP) was established by Congress in 2020 to study recent reforms after the Larry Nassar sex-abuse scandals and make recommendations for policy changes in governance and oversight of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and its affiliated NGBs. After funding delays, the commission began its work in early 2023 and will deliver a final report to Congress and the public in the spring of 2024.
Part of the commission’s work includes an analysis of the sport participation rates of girls and women, disabled individuals and minorities. The last Congressional commission examining the role of the Olympic Movement within the larger sport ecosystem came in the mid-1970s, resulting in the 1978 Amateur Sports Act that gave the USOPC an unfunded mandate to “coordinate amateur sports activity in the United States” and “promote and encourage physical fitness and public participation.”
Since then, the USOPC has mainly focused on supporting elite athletes and Olympic and other events funded by sponsorships and media contracts. Pressures to prioritize Olympic success coupled with lack of funding or incentives to support the grassroots have meant the USOPC is only fulfilling half of its dual mandate, said Victoria Jackson, associate professor of history at Arizona State University.
“Trust depends upon a hard backstop of regulation, coordination, transparency and accountability through checks on power, something the American sports ecosystem does not have,” Jackson said.
In the decades since the Amateur Sports Act was passed, the USOPC has suggested it cannot effectively support all the youth sports ecosystem. When asked at the Sept. 6 hearing in Washington D.C. whether the USOPC can serve the grassroots or whether Congress should delegate that responsibility to another body, USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said there’s only so much the USOPC can do.
“We feel very confident that in partnership with the National Governing Bodies we have elevated the quality and caliber of sport administration in this country over the past several years,” Hirshland said. “That said, the remit or purview of that does not include all of the organizations and entities in what is a very, very fragmented sports environment in our country.”
Sally Nnanami, co-executive director for PeacePlayers U.S., said the overinvestment of privatized, pay-for-play sports marginalizes late bloomers, young girls and youth with disabilities who don’t have a safe place to learn. “The youth sports system as it exists today has failed millions of young people,” she said. “It’s a basic fairness issue and a social justice issue.”
Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, called for requiring NGBs to create an annual Grassroots Performance Plan (GPP) that could include reporting on what it has done to grow participation, recruit and train youth coaches, partner with schools, promote multisport play, and advance abuse prevention. He recommended building on the success of the American Development Model (ADM), an evidence-based framework pioneered by USA Hockey and adopted by other NGBs that describes best practices at each age and stage of a child’s participation in the sport.
Farrey said there are appropriate roles for government to play at the federal, state and local levelsto build a better sport ecosystem. The Aspen Institute is in the process of studying sports governance structures in 10 peer countries. “There is no perfect system,” Farrey said. “But those that are most effective connect the treetops to the grassroots. Here that would start with registration – a database of everyone who’s offering sports. Help families find the trusted providers. They can’t do that now.”
Jeremy Goldberg, president of LeagueApps, said the main question if creating any sport policies is what outcomes are trying to be achieved and how to create accountability. The youth sport system is dynamic, with consolidation happening so much among providers that about 75% of programmatic spending in youth sports is concentrated in 20% of organizations, Goldberg said.
Goldberg recommended incentives for sports providers to be eligible for pools of funding that allow coaches to be trained and accountable in exchange for providers accepting certain standards. He believes incentives could help organizations think more creatively about marketing recreational and participatory sports as opposed to only focusing on the very top of the sports pyramid.
“In general, most private organizations want to do the right thing,” Goldberg said. “They just ultimately need to be nudged and know what the resources are available to them.”
Yet Goldberg saw the challenge firsthand recently when he attended his child’s kindergarten flag football coaching clinic hoping to hear about positive coaching principles. Instead, fellow coaches completely focused on X’s and O’s for 5-year-olds. “This can’t be the right way of entrusting the development of our kids in what seems like a high-qualified organization,” Goldberg said. “One thing that worries me is everybody is focused on the wrong thing.”
“Welcome to coach training and coach development in youth sports,” added Vincent Minjares, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program project manager and an expert in coaching. “This is what happens when we entrust the development of our volunteers to people well-intentioned butunder-supported or under-aware of the work that goes into this important practice. I think coaching needs to be recognized as an important field to develop people’s capacity to do it. You don’t just know how to do it because you’ve played, or you coached last year. We can’t keep taking for granted this work.”
The session considering the influence of the USOPC and NGB governance on youth sports was the longest in the day-long hearing. Other sessions focused on preventing and processing allegations of sexual abuse, and the needs of Olympic and Paralympic athletes, among other topics. Read the Associated Press recap of the hearing and a survey that leveled criticism at the U.S. Center for SafeSport. The full transcript of the youth sports discussion is available here from C-SPAN.
Jon Solomon is editorial director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program.