Three years ago, University of Ohio sports management professor David Ridpath authored a book, “Alternative Models of Sports Development in America: Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health.” The treatise drew on his study of sport systems in the U.S. and Europe. He asked me to write the foreword. I was honored to do so and used that space to suggest alternative models would need to emerge in response to storms on the horizon threatening to disrupt the status quo.
Those storms have now arrived. This year, college sports is headed for a rethink, with Congress, states and the Supreme Court all considering efforts to secure the economic rights of athletes, as well as health protections. A federal commission is being formed to develop recommendations on the modern role of the U.S. Olympic movement. The expansion of legalized sports betting and the rise of streaming media will further change consumers’ relationship with the games they watch.
Then there’s the pandemic – the unforeseen disruptor that still has months to play itself out. School-based sports have been especially impacted, with many seasons cancelled or delayed. The grim upside? The loss of activity has heightened awareness of the physical, mental, social, and emotional benefits of playing sports. We’re left to ask: If sports are so great, how do we give every student an opportunity to play when they return in full?
Learn more about Reimagining School Sports and apply here.
This year, the Aspen Institute’s Project Play hopes to make a meaningful contribution to that dialogue. Our “Reimagining School Sports in America” initiative will identify schools that are exemplars in delivering sport experiences. We’re looking for high schools that outperform their peers in terms of student body participation rate and whose models include innovations that can inspire adoption by schools everywhere. Ridpath is among the experts who sit on the project advisory group. Learn more about the initiative and apply here, which will distribute $160,000 to eight winning schools.
Below is my foreword in Ridpath’s book, which previewed the need. (Note: In a couple places, the text is updated to reflect recent data).
Let’s start with the end in mind, with a vision of the communities that we as Americans want to live in, based on human needs and shared values. Imagine, if you will, towns and municipalities where people want to get out of their homes because life is richer out there, full of parks and balls, dogs and laughter, old friends and new. Imagine places that offer a rich array of recreational options, where citizens and schools and industry demand those options because they appreciate the myriad benefits that flow to those whose bodies are in motion.
How do we get there?
It’s a question that has guided much of my work at the Aspen Institute, where we convene leaders around the important challenges of our time, help them find common ground, and inspire solutions that aim to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number. My focus is on how sport, broadly defined, can serve the public interest, starting with the building of healthy communities.
This book makes a great contribution to that dialogue. David Ridpath recognizes the essential role that sport plays in the vitality of the nation and its people, then asks whether the sport system we have in place, drawn up more than a hundred years ago as a tool of nation-building, is serving the needs of Americans in the 21st Century. Better yet, with research and courage, he identifies several potential paths forward.
We should not be afraid to explore systems-level change in the development and delivery of sport programs in the United States, but rather understand it as an opportunity to respond to the marketplace.
Read the "Sport for All, Play for Life" report here.
Consider: More than four out of five parents of youth under age 18 say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that their child play sports, and a full 96 percent see some value, according to household surveys conducted in 2017 for our Aspen Institute program, Project Play, a multi-stage initiative to provide stakeholders with tools to build what we call “Sport for All, Play for Life” communities. Americans get sports, and not just as spectators. It’s a physical expression of the spirit, and a site of self-learning and social connection. No one wants their kid stuck on the couch, glued to a screen, all but thumbs inert.
Project Play’s webinar launching the Reimagining School Sports project, featuring Dr. Karissa Niehoff of NFHS.
Yet today, as early as first grade in some communities, the structure of our sport system begins to push aside kids. We create tryout-based travel teams, sorting the weak from the strong well before children grow into their bodies, minds and true interests. Those who don’t make the cut, or don’t receive the playing time, get the message that they are not a priority and begin checking out of the system. Meanwhile, the kids at the center of the system – those told they are the next generation of athlete-entertainers – are increasingly encouraged to train year-round. They often play too many games for their developing bodies, risking overuse injuries, unnecessary concussions, and burnout.
In recent years, the percentage of youth who are “active to a healthy level” through sports has fallen, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. In 2012, 42% of youth ages 6 to 17 played sports in any form at least three days a week; by 2019, it was 38%. That figure is close to rate of students who participate in high school sports – 39%, according to a 2017 report by Government Accountability Office. The figure is lower for urban (32%), high-poverty (27%) and charter (19%) schools.
To date, Project Play has been focused on ages 12 and under, given the mountain of research on the physical, mental, social-emotional and educational benefits that flow to physically active kids. Getting them moving early unleashes a virtuous cycle – they go on to college more often, stay active into adulthood more often, make higher incomes in the workplace, enjoy lower health care costs, and are twice as likely to have active children. As a society, we must make quality, regular sport activity accessible to every child, regardless of zip code or ability.
At the same time, we recognize that the landscape of youth sports has been transformed over the past generation by the priorities of the two institutions that Ridpath explores in this book – school and college sports. NCAA member institutions today offer $3.6 billion in athletic aid, up from $250 million in the early 1990s, according to the NCAA. That’s a lot of chum tossed into the sea of youth sports. Even for the well-positioned, it’s rarely a meal, as full-ride athletic scholarships are confined to just a few sports; rather, it’s just enough to induce a feeding frenzy among parents, terrified about how they one day must pay hefty college tuitions. So they invest, at ever-earlier ages for kids, in private trainers, traveling club teams, and $300 cleats or bats.
If they can.
At Project Play Summit 2020, author Michael Lewis shared insights about his time as a travel softball dad.
They seek return on investment, even if it’s just playing time for their kid on the high school team. Not an easy thing to come by today. Intramurals are largely a thing of the past, as is regular P.E. past middle school. At large, public high schools, 80 kids might try out for the varsity basketball team. Thirteen might make the team, with eight or nine seeing real minutes in games. It’s hardly a recipe for broad-based provision of the health and other benefits that sports participation can provide.
In places, school-based sports works beautifully. Go to just about any prep school. They usually create as many teams in a sport as there are kids in the school who want to play that sport – an A, B, C and D team if necessary. They allow the supply of sport opportunities to meet the demand. And they ask that every student participate in that economy, by playing at least one sport. Often, sports are not extracurricular but cocurricular, in recognition of the educational value they can provide.
38%
Youth ages 6 to 17 who played sports in any form at least three days a week in 2019
Write me if you think that’s an awful model, one that leaves U.S. students less prepared to compete in a global economy. Guessing here that my inbox isn’t about to explode.
So, to me, the question becomes: Can that model be adapted to high schools with larger student bodies and/or smaller budgets? If so, how? This is where the conversation that Ridpath seeds gets very interesting – and promising, if we allow it. Given schools’ responsibility to serve all students, can they work more effectively with local clubs to identify participation opportunities for students? Can they allow them to use campus facilities more readily, if clubs embrace policies and practices that are inclusive and model best practices? Can the role of the athletic director or P.E. teacher be reimagined, from less of a provider of sport opportunities to more of a connector to community programs?
One level up, the hard question to ask is: Do NCAA Division I member universities need to continue to position themselves as the pathway to the pros? To fill their stadiums and arenas, do they need the very best emerging athletes – or should they turn over the training of the top 1 percent of the major sport pipelines to leagues like the NBA starting at age 16 or even 14? And, if the model adjusts in that direction, could the NCAA amend its rules to make room for prospects who, after spending time with such a club, realize college is likely their best option?
What’s clear to me, having studied our sports system as an author and journalist for 30 years, is that the day will come when the role of sports in schools gets reappraised and updated by its key stakeholders.
This day could come suddenly, and from any of several angles. The catalyst could be a legal ruling, changing the economic relationship between universities and athletes. It could be a legislative action, akin to Title IX, which with a stroke of a pen in 1972 opened up sports opportunities for one disenfranchised group, women. It could be an administrative action, a meatier version of the Dear Colleague letter issued by the Obama Administration prohibiting discrimination of disabled students in school sports. It could be a unilateral industry action, such as the NBA embracing a version of the European club model described above. It could be a collective industry action – a serious push to legalize and tax sports betting, with a cut dedicated to investments in parks and other recreation infrastructure.
When that day comes, you will hear doomsday scenarios. About the end of sports as we know it, and maybe the loss of American values. Sports participation is too easily conflated with participation trophies, which no one outside the trophy industry is really all that big a fan of but has become a great tool anyway to grouse about millennials and liberals. It’s ironic, given the original vision of school sports in America, by its founders more than a century ago, was of mass participation, of sport as a tool of public health and educational achievement.
The way you can support renewal of this vision is to be open to new ideas. Do not buy the theory that if change is made, our games will go away. The sports entertainment industry will be just fine; the market demands that Alabama play Auburn on one Saturday each fall. Nor is anyone going to start tearing down the gyms and fields attached to schools; the physical infrastructure of sports in our country remains. What is in play is the software side of sports – how the operating system works, who gets to use it, how its assets can best be deployed and services scaled.
Do not marinate in nostalgia. Do not idealize the way we used to do it, because, while for many of us there was much to like about our childhood experiences, there was not much room on playing fields for girls and almost none for kids with disabilities until the ‘80s. The next great sport development and delivery system that we embrace will be the first great sport development and delivery system that we have.
Do not forget that most kids do not play sports regularly today.
Scan your network of friends and family, and think about who is left out of our de facto sport system. Picture their faces …
The nephew who is slow to grow into his body.
The niece with a chronic condition, like asthma.
The co-worker’s kid who is overweight.
The neighbor’s kid who can’t play football anymore due to concussions.
Think about how we can help them, how we need them, to become their best selves. And the role that you know sport can play in that process.
Tom Farrey can be followed @TomFarrey and reached at tom.farrey@aspeninstitute.org.