The coming decade in sports will be the most consequential in history, or at least since a Teddy Roosevelt-era coalition of cross-sector leaders installed sports as a tool of youth development and nation-building more than a century ago. Over the next 10 years, the U.S. will serve as host of an unprecedented series of international events, from the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup to the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, two Rugby World Cups to the 2034 Winter Olympics.

What story will we tell the world?

More importantly, what story can we tell ourselves, about the sport ecosystem that sits under each of these festivals? Because if all we did was throw good parties, we, as a nation, will have failed.

Over the past year, our Sports & Society Program has aimed to lay the groundwork for stakeholders to not miss this moment. With our partners (thank you!) in Project Play, we developed insights, ideas and opportunities for leaders – from the treetops to grassroots – to win on the scoreboard that matters most: The number of lives improved through playing sports.

In a polarized nation, sports is one thing nearly all of us support. A recent survey showed that more than 9 out of 10 Americans say sports builds character and promotes health. Yet, barely half of all people ages 6-17, according to the National Survey of Children’s Health, participate on teams or enjoy other structured sport activities. The participation rate has risen over the past couple of years, but it’s still down from before the pandemic.

Hosting mega-events for elite athletes could inspire more kids to try the sports they see. But history suggests the bump could be temporary, that children aren’t necessarily going to stick with a sport unless the ecosystem is set up to offer a local, sustained, positive experience. Growing commercial activity at the top of the pyramid could even stunt growth at the base. As downstream rewards grow, talent development pipelines can consolidate around early bloomers, early starters, and pre-adolescents from families that are willing and able to enter the youth sports arms race.

None of this is inevitable. On the contrary. As the management guru Peter Drucker once said, The best way to predict the future is to create it. Develop structures and align incentives to drive results.

The good news: many leaders are taking steps to do just that. We’ve seen that up close over the past year at the forums we convene, the response to challenges made, and the willingness to rally around disruptive ideas that hold the capacity to reshape the delivery of sport across communities.

We hope that our contributions in 2024, as a program and field catalyst, helped set the table.

63X30: OUR NEW NORTH STAR

In June, we launched the next iteration of Project Play’s industry roundtable, 63X30, a call to action for 20 leading organizations to help the nation rally around a specific target – 63% of youth playing sports by the year 2030. It’s the first time a population-level KPI goal has been set, and it’s ambitious. The most recent single-year data set released by the federal government shows a 54% rate in 2022, up from 49% during the middle of the pandemic but still down from 58% in 2016.

The number wasn’t plucked out of the thin air of Aspen. It’s codified in Healthy People 2030, the nation’s public health goals as set by the federal government. But the government alone can’t make that happen. The U.S. doesn’t even have a federal agency to help coordinate sport development in the public interest, as every other leading sports nation in the world has in some form or another.

The responsibility falls to the private sector. That starts with the not-for-profit organizations that Congress outsourced the development role to back in 1978 – the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee and its 50+ affiliated National Governing Bodies – but includes the vast array of entities operating in the space, from retailers to media, facility operators to local program providers.

The USOPC sits on the 63X30 roundtable, alongside other legacy members, plus new additions in Little League International, the National Recreation and Park Association, Gatorade and the sports insurance company Players Health.

Next: Members will introduce mutually reinforcing activities aligned with a six-year strategic plan focused on the people, places and programs necessary to develop more youth through sports. Convening a group to rally behind the time-bound goal of 63X30 is one prong of Aspen’s updated Theory of Change for Sport in America that will be introduced as well in early 2025.

CHILDREN’S BILL OF RIGHTS IN SPORTS

In November, Boston became the 10th city to endorse the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports when Mayor Michele Wu signed the Project Play-developed policy statement, announced $300,000 in grants to support 55 non-profits, and committed to the 63X30 target locally. In adopting the bill of rights, Wu affirmed that “the City’s approach to youth sports will center the needs of youth, invest in play and qualified coaches, and commit to safe, healthy sports environments for all youth.”

That’s precisely why we drafted the bill of rights with the help of a blue-ribbon working group – to serve as a framework to unlock ambition and guide investment in a messy landscape. Also, to serve as a tool for sport providers and facility operators to assess their practices with the rights as a cultural (not legal) expression of the minimum conditions under which children should be served by adults. More than most cities, Boston now has the capacity to do that, thanks to a new online youth sports directory that aggregates local programs in one place and offers sorting by key criteria.

Other new endorsers include grassroots sport providers, NBA teams, the New York/New Jersey and Guadalajara (Mexico) host city committees for the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, all 20 organizations in this year’s cohort for Project Play Champions, the mayors of Baltimore and Kansas City, and Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland – the first state to sign on. Now, more than 500 organizations, athletes and governments have endorsed the rights, forging a cultural consensus that all children should have the opportunity to develop as people through sports.

Next: Additional opportunities to secure and activate endorsements in cities will be made with the help of the Child Rights & Sports Alliance. Unveiled in November, the alliance was jointly created by the Centre for Sport and Human Rights, UNICEF USA, Aspen Institute, U.S. Soccer Foundation and National League of Cities, and aims to elevate the rights and voices of young people to drive community impact and enhance the legacy of the FIFA World Cup 2026.

COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

To help organizations identify and work together to fill gaps in the delivery of sports in communities, Aspen produces exclusive, deep dive State of Play reports on how well children are being served by adults in a geographic area. In 2024, we released three of these reports: for the 80-mile corridor surrounding our event campus in Aspen, Colorado, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Kansas City.

The most recent report, Baton Rouge, unearthed insights on, among other topics, the impact of climate change on sports. Football and other teams that begin practice in the summer may have to move the start of the season to the winter to avoid heat safety and hydration issues with athletes.

Aspen this year also launched the Project Play Communities Council, a roundtable for leaders of community foundations and other organizations who have invested in a State of Play report and want to extend their impact. We provide a venue for funders to share knowledge across disparate markets and study emerging solutions, such as the innovative Maryland Let’s Play program that brings soccer to students in schools that serve low-income families.

Next: In 2025, Aspen will release reports on Washington D.C., with Under Armour; and in 2026 on soccer and New York City/New Jersey, home to the FIFA Men’s World Cup championship game, with the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; and with other communities to be announced soon. Each report will include original insights and bold recommendations for collective impact.

PROJECT PLAY COLORADO

In September, we launched Project Play Colorado, our first statewide effort to develop insights, ideas and opportunities to build healthy children and communities through sports. Anchor funding for the project comes from UC Health, the Denver Broncos Foundation, and the Ubuntu Foundation. The first event that our team supported was Colorado Youth Sports Giving Day, with the Daniels Fund; the online event raised $3.7 million for youth organizations in the state, surpassing all goals quickly.

In tandem, Aspen released a new report with a companion two-pager on ways that states can better support and govern youth sports. Later, the state of Massachusetts created a commission to explore ways to regulate youth sports.

Next: Project Play Colorado will develop and activate a strategic plan aligned with the 63X30 target that identifies opportunities for leaders to drive collective impact. Aspen will evaluate prospects to develop more state-based collective impact efforts, as they arise.

REDUCING KNEE INJURIES

Knees are the levers of life, key to staying active into adulthood, and anterior cruciate ligament tears are among the most serious and common injuries among athletes of high school age. In 2024, the National ACL Injury Coalition, which Aspen serves as the backbone organization for with the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), helped lay the groundwork to reduce such injuries.

We developed first-of-their kind tools to solve the ACL crisis, piloting a field guide for club and school directors that is founded on new research from implementation science. Players Health, a coalition member, created the first-ever insurance credit for sports policy holders to implement ACL injury prevention programs. We sparked action by NGBs, starting with national soccer organizations. The US Soccer Federation committed to adding ACL injury prevention to its coaching license requirements, and US Youth Soccer started a working group with the coalition to address ACL, featuring 10 state associations.

We also rallied diverse organizations and leaders to participate in Coalition activities. That group includes NGBs (USA Lacrosse, USA Football), state high school associations (Colorado and Tennessee), technology companies (InjureFree, eTrainU, Stack Sports), children's hospitals (in Philadelphia, Wisconsin), advocacy groups (Osteoarthritis Action Alliance), government entities (CDC), and researchers at several universities.

Next: Release the field guide to the public and grow adoption of the tool. Soccer has been a priority given the high ACL injury rates, but girls’ flag football, another cutting and pivoting sport subject to knee injury, is rapidly growing so efforts may be made as well to help providers build prevention exercises into the standard program for training youth coaches.

IMPROVING SPORT GOVERNANCE

In March, the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics submitted its report to Congress with findings and recommendations on how to promote health, safety and access to sports. The Aspen Institute served as fiscal agent to the commission, allowing the group to finish its work. The Sports & Society Program then offered analysis of the independent report, embracing some ideas and raising concerns about others that felt like government overreach. The program also hosted a Future of Sports virtual conversation, on Olympic Reform in the Public Interest.

In December, the Safer Sports for Athletes Act bill was introduced with bipartisan support. It proposes changes in the way the U.S. Center for SafeSport processes allegations of abuse, and provides $10 million in annual funding – a five-fold increase – through 2030 to create training materials that can protect athletes from sexual, physical and emotional abuse at all levels of sport.

Aspen also published research on how governments closer to home are supporting youth sports, from campaigns to funding to advisory boards that help balance competing interests. A two-pagers was released identifying five ways that cities/counties are doing that, along with a companion report on places where these mechanisms are working. Massachusetts later created a commission to study ways the state could regulate youth sports.

All sport governance resources can be found on our hub.

Next: Aspen will release a Youth Sports Policy Agenda identifying policy opportunities that align with the mission of Project Play and can help community programs promote safety and engage more children.

INTERNATIONAL

Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities exists to ensure that all children in Canada have the opportunity to experience the transformational benefits of sport. It’s the kind of partner we love working with, a trusted agent across the public and private sectors that does its homework in developing solutions, moving collaboratively but with a bias for action, and listens to youth above all other parties.

We were honored that they asked us to help them create the Jumpstart State of Play Youth Report, published in April. With the help of Resonant Education, we surveyed more than 3,000 youth between third and 12th grade across the country, providing a clearer picture of the sport preferences and participation levels of young people, their motivations to play (or not play) sport, their access to sport, and relational experiences built through sport - specifically, the student-coach relationship.

The findings were presented by Jumpstart Charities to the Future of Sport in Canada Commission. Created by the federal government, the commission is charged with making sport safe from abuse across while also improving the sport system itself, including but not limited to policy, funding structures, governance, reporting, accountability, conflicts of interest, systems alignment, culture and legal considerations. We’ll be watching what recommendations emerge from this work.

Tip of the cap as well to our friends at Project Play Mexico, an initiative of Aspen Institute Mexico. In October, during the Bloomberg CityLab conference of mayors from around the globe, the team at Aspen MX unveiled their latest contribution – pulling together the partners to build a new soccer mini-pitch in a community of need in Mexico City. All international extensions of Project Play can be found here.

Next: In February, Aspen will field another and even more robust survey in Canada that adds questions related to mental health and exposure to extreme/adverse weather and its impact on play. We will also explore opportunities for leading entities across North American to adopt the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports, with the 2026 FIFA World Cup as a catalyst.

LARGEST PROJECT PLAY SUMMIT

Held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and emceed by NFL broadcaster Greg Olsen, the Project Play Summit 2024 hosted a sold-out crowd of more than 625 attendees in May, its largest gathering to date - making the Summit among the largest public events at the Institute outside of the summer Aspen Ideas Festival. The event served as, among other purposes, a showcase of what one community can do as it rallies around youth, as Baltimore has since the publication of our very first local State of Play report back in 2017 when Under Armour commissioned as much.

One of the most well-received sessions featured high school students who created projects to expand access to quality youth sport and physical activity opportunities in their communities. The students were among the first cohort of our Service Learning Through Sports project, supported by the Allstate Foundation. They received mentorship and a small cash donation for their projects.

We thank all who joined us and shared their learnings and good energy, as well as our event sponsors: Under Armour, HSS, Game Changer, Maryland Sports Commission, GoodSport, Players Health, the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, Baltimore Ravens, and the Boys & Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore.

What’s next: 2025 Project Play Summit, Presented by ESPN, is March 24-25 at UC Berkeley. (Reserve your spot by registering here).

ANALYZING GAME-CHANGING TRENDS

In October, we published our annual report, State of Play 2024, on how well youth have been served by adults through sports in the past year, a trusted resource referenced by major media outlets and other stakeholders aiming to understand the best data and insights on developments. This year, we added a new feature, 10 Youth Sports Trends To Watch. Private equity is a thing now in youth sports. So is artificial intelligence, which seems here to stay.

So let’s end there, by asking Chat GPT to write a poem based on the contributions of Project Play and the many thousands of organizations in the past year that have done the hard, often creative, usually uncelebrated work on helping youth develop as people through sports. This is for you.

Not bad, huh?

Maybe the future is scary. But maybe it’s also full of promise, a great story to unfold, if we ask the right questions and all commit to driving progress.

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, the signature initiative of which is Project Play, which helps leaders build healthy communities through sports. He wrote the above report with input from program team members including Jennifer Brown Lerner, Marty Fox, Vince Minjares, Jon Solomon, Katherine Quinn, Sabrina McDonnell, and Ruby Avila. Tom can be reached at tom.farrey@aspeninstitute.org.