NCAA VPs say college need to help repair 'broken' youth sports model

Oliver Luck & Brian Hainline
Aspen Institute Guest Authors

America’s approach to the development of the youth athlete is broken.

As a leader in amateur sports, the NCAA is committed to supporting and promoting solutions to healthy, sustainable, long-term athlete development strategies in youth sports.

As the Aspen Institute notes, participation in sports by children and adolescents can provide a range of benefits that can last into adulthood. These benefits are not limited to the expected physical improvements that come with physical activity, but also include important emotional and social benefits that can translate into stronger social and leadership skills.

But for these benefits to be fully available to our youth athletes, the participation experience must be effective. One troubling trend is the increasing number of young people specializing in a single sport beginning at a young age, typically in their pre-puberty years.

One common myth that often leads to early sport specialization is the misconception that having a single sport to focus on will lead to opportunities to participate in elite levels of competition beyond the high school level. But this myth is not supported by the facts. Indeed, the vast majority of Olympic athletes played multiple sports as children. There are no data to support that early specialization leads to a greater likelihood of a college scholarship or a career as a professional athlete.

The unfortunate reality is early specialization is fraught with risks. For example, researchers are finding that early youth sport specialization is associated with increased rates of overuse injury, burnout, decreased motivation for sport participation and, eventually, complete withdrawal from sports.

Professional athletes, Olympic athletes, NCAA coaches, and countless medical experts have spoken out against the trend, but youth sport leagues and many parents still struggle to find the right balance for their respective young athletes.

Our expectation is that other NCAA sport communities will re-examine their early recruitment rules and practices.

The consequence of sport withdrawal is particularly concerning. According to the American Heart Association, about 1 in 3 American kids and teens is overweight or obese, with the prevalence of obesity in children more than tripling from 1971 to 2011. Stated another way, the United States has become one of the most physically illiterate countries in the developed world (physical literacy means having the ability, confidence and desire to be physically active for life). This is due, in part, to an increasing number of kids dropping out of sport during pre-pubescent years because of sport burnout.

What many youth sports leagues and parents may not realize is that multisport participation — not sport specialization — is the key to developing better long-term athletic performance while simultaneously increasing the potential for a lifetime of enjoyment of physical activity and recreational sports.

Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer and Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney both have been vocal about their preference in recruiting high school athletes who play multiple sports.

“I want the multisport guy,” Swinney told The New York Times. Data from professional sports underscore why Swinney, Meyer, and many other coaches prefer well-rounded athletes.

Early sport specialization has not been beneficial for high-caliber athletic performance at professional levels. The most recent NFL draft supports this concept.

In 2017, 30 of 32 NFL Draft first-round picks were multisport high school athletes, representing high school participation not only in football, but also track and field, baseball, basketball, and lacrosse.

The athletic success and advancement of multisport athletes is not limited to just professional sports. Among Olympic athletes, 7 in 10 report playing multiple sports growing up.

The NCAA is working in partnership with many organizations to help create a healthy, balanced culture in youth sports that supports the positive potential outcomes of sport participation, while strongly discouraging some of the more pervasive, negative elements of youth sport culture like single-sport specialization.

In 2015, the NCAA collected information from more than 21,000 current NCAA student-athletes at Divisions I, II, and III universities. According to the survey results, the sports with the highest percentage of students who had not specialized by age 12 were football, lacrosse, and track.

• 71 percent of Division I men’s FCS football players played other sports before college.

• 88 percent of Division I men and 83 percent of Division I women lacrosse players also played other sports.

• 87 percent of Division I female runners and 91 percent of Division I male runners played other sports before college.

Across all three divisions, the men’s sports in which athletes were most likely to specialize in their sport by age 12 were soccer (63 percent), ice hockey (59 percent), and tennis (45 percent). Among women’s sports, the highest rate of specialization occurred in gymnastics (88 percent), soccer (61 percent), and ice hockey (57 percent).

Nearly 50 percent of college athletes in baseball, football, and men’s soccer said that young athletes in their respective sport play in too many contests, and approximately 40 percent of football and men’s basketball players said they regret not trying more sports when they were young.

We recognize and acknowledge that there is substantial room for change and improvement within the NCAA model of recruiting as well.

Results from a recently released survey of more than 15,000 NCAA student-athletes show that although a strong majority of college athletes view their recruiting experience as positive, early recruitment is related to less positive feelings about the recruiting experience.

Additionally, young people who commit to a school before 11th grade are less likely to enroll there or to have known what they wanted to study at the time of commitment. Those who commit before 11th grade are also more likely to have had a coach leave before their enrollment and to experience a change in their scholarship offer.

Recruiting rules vary by sport, but the college lacrosse community is among those leading the way to address early recruitment via rules changes.

Last April, the Division I Council passed a rule — submitted jointly by the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association and Intercollegiate Men’s Lacrosse Coaches Association — prohibiting college lacrosse coaches from communicating with prospective student-athletes until Sept. 1 of their junior year of high school.

Additionally, a Division I governance group is examining the issue of early recruitment for all sports. We all need to keep in mind that talent identification is quite unpredictable before age 17 — another reason to question the value of early recruitment.

The encouraging news is that some very good work already has been done, and many organizations are taking seriously ongoing steps to help encourage change where it’s needed. Specifically, the American Development Model is a targeted effort between the United States Olympic Committee and its national governing bodies of sport, including the NCAA, to apply long-term athlete development principles in a way that improves the culture of sport in the United States.

Importantly, the American Development Model emphasizes the importance of kids having fun in sport, while also participating in multiple sport activities before the age of 12. This approach allows young athletes not only to develop motor skills that transfer from sport to sport, but also to cultivate a passion for sport and an active lifestyle. The American Development Model brochure, which is free and available online, serves as a valuable resource for parents and coaches of young athletes, regardless of age, sport, or ability level.

The guidance provided by the American Development Model long has been supported by experts in the field, but the concerning results of recent research has amplified the importance of re-examining the way in which we approach youth sport participation in this country. We welcome the news that the Aspen Institute’s Project Play 2020 coalition of leading industry organizations and non-profits plans to make sport sampling and multisport play a year one priority.

Our expectation is that other NCAA sport communities will take a cue from lacrosse and work with the NCAA national office and its governance structure to re-examine early recruitment rules and practices. Similar rule changes in other sports may prove to be a key step in encouraging multisport participation at the high school level.

We strongly believe that athletics should be an integral part of youth development and society as whole, but it’s important that we do it properly. Kids need to be physically active, but they also need time to recover both physically and emotionally.  And if they’re not having fun, they are less likely to be physically active for life.

Oliver Luck is NCAA executive vice president for regulatory affairs and strategic partnerships. Brian Hainline is NCAA senior vice president and chief medical officer.

Story was originally published here.

The best sports town in America

The tiny town of Norwich, Vermont, has likely produced more Olympians per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Over the past thirty years, the town of 3,000 has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics. New York Times sports writer Karen Crouse traveled to Norwich to discover the town’s secret. Also in this episode, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred discusses taking the professionalism out of youth sports, and creating a simpler, more informal atmosphere of play. Featuring onstage talks from the 2017 Project Play Summit, held by the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.

The “Aspen Ideas to Go” podcast is a weekly show featuring fascinating speakers who have presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival and other public programs offered by the Aspen Institute — including Aspen Words, the Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series, and various events around the country. For a curated listening experience, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or listen to each episode on the Aspen Ideas website.

Originally posted here.

Preparing our children for a lifetime of fitness

Chris Watts
Aspen Institute Guest Author

It is widely known that this generation of kids is the least active in our nation’s history. At the National Fitness Foundation, we find this unacceptable and are on a mission to reverse this trend so that all children can benefit from a lifetime of health and fitness.

That is why we recently joined with more than a dozen leading national sports organizations, including the US Olympic Committee, NBC Sports, and Nike, on a multi-year commitment to boost youth sports participation rates for kids, regardless of ability or zip code. Led by The Aspen Institute, Project Play 2020 will execute evidence-based strategies to get more kids in the game and help them continue playing for life. This unique effort is an unprecedented partnership in which industry and non-profit groups are coming together to develop shared goals and specific actions so we can truly start making progress by 2020.

These national collaborations are important, but it is the work at the local level that makes the most meaningful difference. Last month I was proud to announce our Foundation’s commitment to train physical educators for the newly announced Project Play: Baltimore initiative, because when kids receive quality PE, they are more likely to participate in sports, embrace physical activity and perform at their highest potential both inside and outside the classroom.

This commitment demonstrates how the National Fitness Foundation uses cross-sector partnerships to deliver long-term results towards a healthy, active nation. As America’s health and fitness charity and the nonpartisan nonprofit partner of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition, we are focused on making sure students are empowered to be fit for life by enhancing and elevating quality physical education.

Six Decades of Championing Fitness

Project Play 2020 is the latest national push to prepare kids for a lifetime of health and fitness, one that the federal government has been trying to drive forward for more than 60 years. In the 1950s, alarming research showed that American youth lagged in several fitness measures. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by convening a White House Conference on Youth Fitness and establishing the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. It’s striking to see how similar the goals of that conference are to Project Play 2020, as both make universal access a top priority. Project Play strives to make “sport accessible to all kids, regardless of zip code or ability.” In 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon vowed to work on behalf of kids in “urban, suburban and rural homes, in crowded tenement sections and in well-to-do neighborhoods.”

The stats haven’t changed much either. In his keynote speech to the White House Conference on Youth Fitness, Nixon noted that less than 50 percent of high school students were taking physical education. Today, half of US high school students reported not attending any physical education during an average school week. Other numbers paint an equally dire picture today: more than 66 percent of youth don’t get the daily physical activity recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; only 37 percent of 6- to 12-year-olds played on a team sport last year; and one-third of children are obese.

Getting kids active will pay dividends in many ways. Children who are active and fit are better behaved in school, display a greater ability to focus, and have lower rates of absenteeism. And, of course, the health care system will see significant savings if we can make a dent in childhood obesity and physical inactivity.

More than 66 percent of youth don’t get the daily physical activity recommended by the CDC.

Despite the presidential focus and the commitment of other high-profile figures, such as past chairs of the President’s Council Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominque Dawes, the problem of youth physical inactivity worsened. Council members serve an important role advising the president on national priorities and serving as official ambassadors to the country, but with a $1.1 million budget, they are limited in their ability to provide grants and make long-term investments.

Private Sector Partner Needed to Accelerate Mission

In 1970, President Nixon made high school basketball star Tom McMillen the youngest member ever to serve on the Council. McMillen went on to careers as an NBA player and Maryland congressman, and then returned to the Council in the 1990s, this time as co-chair under President Bill Clinton. As a Council insider, Tom believed its mission would benefit from an outside-the-government partner. He conceptualized the idea for a congressionally-chartered foundation to support and supplement the Council and championed the cause for 15 years, when finally, in 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law creating our Foundation. McMillen was named its inaugural chairman and still serves on the board.

“It was clear that Congress wasn’t going to come up with any significant investment for the President’s Council,” McMillen said. “So it was important to create a foundation to fill the leadership and funding gap at the federal level, and really make a full-throttled effort to get kids active.”

Although the Foundation was established to support the mission of the Council, we operate independently and are not part of the government. Our board members come from innovative companies such as Facebook, Helix, and UFC — empowering us to develop unique strategies and partnerships capable of producing tangible results. Although private-sector business leaders help drive our priorities, we work closely with our ex-officio members from the government, such as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to ground our priorities in evidence and expertise.

We need to work across sectors to make sure all children are prepared for a lifetime of health and fitness.

Freed from the constraints of tight government budgets, we’ve already earned a return on the early investment from corporate backers, with a $10 million grant from the General Mills Foundation that kick-started efforts to get kids to be more active. This grant helped us modernize the old Presidential Physical Fitness Test, remembered by generations of Americans as the blue patch test for doing pull-ups, sit-ups, and other activities. Research showed that the test was 25 years out of date, so with guidance from the CDC and the Institute of Medicine, we developed a new program that focuses on student health and personal progress towards lifelong fitness, rather than athletic performance.

Participating schools get access to expert training and professional development for physical educators; national youth fitness standards to measure endurance, strength, flexibility, and body composition; student incentives and school recognition; and grants for equipment and training, among other things. Since 2012, more than 10,600 schools and 5.3 million students have used the program, and we’ve trained over 1,200 physical educators and given out more than $3 million in grants in 47 states. We’re excited to build off that early success by teaming up with players from pro sports, the sporting goods industry, the US Olympic Committee, and others in Project Play 2020.

Of course, there will always be a role for the federal government when it comes to lifelong health and fitness, as we need a full team to deliver on our mission. We are encouraged that Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price identified reducing childhood obesity as one of his three priorities, and that President Trump singled out youth fitness and sports participation in his proclamation this spring of National Physical Fitness and Sports Month.

The nation has been fighting this battle for 60 years without much success and in this unique time in our country, the National Fitness Foundation is committed to accelerating progress to finding innovative solutions by working across sectors to make sure all children are prepared for a lifetime of health & fitness.

Chris Watts is the executive director of the National Fitness Foundation. 

The story was originally posted here.

MLB commissioner discusses the benefits of playing multiple sports

Jon Solomon
Editorial Director, Sports & Society Program

Athe 2017 Project Play Summit, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred highlighted the potential of professional sports leagues, who ordinarily compete with each other, to collaborate in building healthy kids and communities.

In the event’s keynote conversation, Manfred specifically pointed to the shared interest in promoting multi-sport play among youth. He said he had spoken with the NBA, NFL and NHL commissioners and they all agreed that the best athlete is a kid who played multiple sports.

“Multiple sports give body parts rest, which is a really important issue in today’s youth participation market,” Manfred told more than 400 people at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Sept. 6.

Manfred’s comments came on the heels of the announcement of the Aspen Institute’s new Project Play 2020 initiative, the first time that major industry and non-profit organizations have come together to set shared goals around growing sport participation and related metrics among youth. Multi-sport sampling is a key area of focus for the collaborative, which includes MLB and 16 other groups.

The specialization of youth sports has been felt heavily in baseball, with kids often playing on multiple teams for most of the year – and at the exclusion of other sports. Two years ago, MLB had a rash of younger pitchers who needed Tommy John surgery to correct elbow injuries, which typically occur due to overuse going back to their youth.

Orthopedists who studied the issue told MLB, “you are getting damaged goods in the draft, and you’re getting damaged goods as the result of overuse of pitchers, in particular when they’re young,” Manfred said.

MLB started Pitch Smart with USA Baseball so youth coaches understand the appropriate number of pitches and when pitchers should start throwing certain types of pitches. Most importantly, Manfred said, coaches simply need a way to track how many innings a kid is pitching since they’re playing in multiple leagues.

“Multiple sports give body parts rest, which is a really important issue in today’s youth participation market.”

— Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball Commissioner

The travel-ball phenomenon – and all of its time and cost demands — is often viewed as the best way for kids to be scouted by colleges and professional baseball. MLB isn’t ignoring travel ball.

“You can’t change that piece of the world,” Manfred said. “So we’ve responded to that by scholarshiping kids into programs that we know are doing a great job and actually paying for them to participate.”

MLB has created youth academies for underprivileged kids to participate. Manfred said the goal is to eventually have 30 academies around the country.

On the other hand, Manfred said MLB has embraced informal play opportunities through its Play Ball program. Play Ball is a one-day community events in which kids do baseball-related activities. Casual play associated with baseball has increased 18 percent, according to Manfred.

“I take that as a really good sign,” he said. “It’s focus, it’s investment, it’s making great partnerships in the youth space. … We had unusual partners like the U.S. Conference of Mayors. You have to have partners who believe the game can be played on an informal basis.”

Manfred recalled how as a child he would go to a local park in the morning, resurface for lunch, and come home for dinner without any adult worrying.

“My kids grew up dramatically different than that,” Manfred said. “But I do think in a different environment that if you have community-based activity, those activities can be structured in a way that promotes a form of informal play that can exist in a more complicated society.”

Manfred said getting parents to understand the benefits of kids playing multiple sports will be an education process. He pointed to John Smoltz’s recent Hall of Fame speech on the topic as one way parents can understand that many elite athletes played multiple sports as a child.

Earlier in the day in his 2017 State of Play address, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program executive director Tom Farrey called for a new approach to evaluating success in youth sports. He encouraged sport providers, coaches and other stakeholders to focus more on creating a “new scoreboard for sports,” based less on the traditional measure, whether a team won a competition, and more of metrics like participation rates, churn rates, and percentage of coaches trained.

Manfred said youth coaches are always going to want to aggregate the best athletes on their own teams, but that they could be convinced to better appreciate the value of multi-sport sampling.

“Competitive people are attracted to coaching,” Manfred said. “(However) I do think you can make coaches understand the argument that you’re going to get a better athlete over the long haul if he’s playing three sports.”

Watch the full conversation here. 

Project Play Summit 2017 wrap-up: News, quotes, and more

It’s time for a new scoreboard for sports. The first day of the 2017 Project Play Summit brought together over 400 leaders to take measure of the nation’s state of play and chart next steps in building healthy communities through sport. Together, we explored alternate ways to measure success through emerging metrics, introduced major new initiatives, and heard from many speakers, including a keynote conversation with Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.

Announcements

The Aspen Institute formally rolled out Project Play 2020, which will be guided by the Project Play framework of eight strategies for eight sectors. Project Play 2020 will initially focus on training all coaches and encouraging sport sampling, with members developing shared and mutually reinforcing activities over the next three years that will be determined as work groups define gaps and opportunities. The founding members of Project Play 2020 are Nike, NBC Sports Group, Target, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, Dick’s Sporting Goods, U.S. Olympic Committee, Hospital for Special Surgery, PGA of America, Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation, New York Road Runners, National Fitness Foundation, American College of Sports Medicine, Ketchum Sports & Entertainment, Sports Facilities Advisory, Sports & Fitness Industry Association, and the Global Obesity Prevention Center at Johns Hopkins University. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serves as Technical Liaison to the group.

The announcement was lauded on stage by Craig Robinson, New York Knicks senior executive and brother of former First Lady Michelle Obama, who made an appeal at last year’s Project Play Summit for industry to rally to grow sport participation for underserved kids. “It is absolutely amazing how fast that this formidable group got Project Play 2020 off the ground so quickly,” Robinson said.

Don Wright, Acting Assistant Secretary of Health, said that Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price will make childhood obesity and sport participation an HHS priority.

“This is truly an exciting announcement,” Wright said. “We look forward to supporting and uplifting the shared goals of Project Play 2020.”

Read more about Project Play 2020 and why it’s needed.

Founding members of Project Play 2020

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Project Play: Baltimore released an in-depth State of Play: Baltimore Report, which provides the Aspen Institute’s findings and recommendations for youth sports in East Baltimore. Read the report here.

The report includes results of an exclusive survey of youth in East Baltimore, 40 findings on factors that shape their access to quality sport activity, and maps that highlight the connection between the loss of recreation centers and areas where gun violence rates are highest. The report offers guidance for Baltimore stakeholders in using a new city fund to bolster recreational opportunities to keep children and teens active and involved in their communities. Baltimore’s Children and Youth Fund is a “game changer” and represents a major opportunity to build a healthier community, the report said.

Anyone interested in connecting to Project Play: Baltimore should contact program coordinator Andre Fountain at andre.fountain@aspeninstitute.org.

Project Play is teaming with the Community Foundation of South Alabama and the Jake Peavy Foundation to examine closing the opportunity gap for youth sports in South Alabama. The initiative is called State of Play Mobile County, where the child poverty rate is 28 percent and only 69 percent of all residents have easy access to physical activity locations.

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Jake Peavy, former baseball player

“Having a chance to use the resources of the Aspen Institute and be a part of Project Play is special to me, and it’s very special to me because I’m a dad of four boys,” said Peavy, a former World Series champion pitcher and Cy Young Award winner.

Peavy has not pitched this year. “I am going to go back to playing baseball,” he said. “You’ll see me sometime soon on a major league mound.”

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The Aspen Institute unveiled Project Play: Harlem, joining Baltimore as the Sports & Society Program’s latest model community. It’s a multi-year initiative to help stakeholders increase youth sport opportunities in East Harlem, with the support of Harris Family Charitable Foundation, Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, and Mount Sinai Health System.

First, the Aspen Institute will capture the State of Play in East Harlem through an exclusive report to be published in Winter 2017. Then, local stakeholders will be convened to share findings, identify opportunities to fill gaps, and connect community organizations with potential partners. Anyone interested in connecting to Project Play: Harlem should contact program coordinator Ranya Bautista at Ranya.bautista@aspeninstitute.org.

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Laureus Sport for Good Foundation USA (Laureus USA) announced that it will be launching Sport for Good New York City and Sport for Good Chicago in January 2018. (Watch the announcement here.) These place-based initiatives will drive collaboration between local organizations that are strengthening their communities through sport. Nike will be the funding sponsor of Sport for Good New York City. Alongside its 2018 chapter expansion, Laureus USA will also launch the Sport for Good League – an online community focused on the use of sport to create positive social change. If you are interested in joining the league, sign up here to receive updates.

The Aspen Institute recognized one group per Project Play strategy for taking a new, meaningful and specific action.

• Ask Kids What They Want: Parks and People is launching six new sports leagues based in part on youth surveys.

• Reintroduce Free Play: Joy of the People will reach 1,200 underserved kids with free, fun soccer events across Minnesota for the 2018 World Cup.

• Encourage Sport Sampling: Seacoast Public Health Network will have a new program reducing the stigma of families asking for financial aid.

• Revitalize In-Town Leagues: Volo City Kids Foundation is launching new, free rec programming in Washington, D.C., that focuses on development and skill and provides after-game meals for players and their families.

• Think Small: LA84 Foundation and Street Soccer USA are partnering to connect at-risk/homeless youth to soccer and services.

• Design for Development: USA Wrestling is revamping training in 2018-19 to emphasize physical literacy, movement and health skills.

• Train All Coaches: The National Fitness Foundation will invest up to $50,000 in training and grants for quality PE for Project Play: Baltimore.

• Emphasize Prevention: Hospital for Special Surgery will launch free digital education for youth coaches replicating ACL workshops it’s been conducting.

• Call for Leadership: Winning Communities will train high school and college students in five communities to lead health and sports programs.

Watch/Listen Project Play Summit Highlights

• State of Play in 2017: Reflections from the Project Play Summit

• Watch every Project Play Summit session

• MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s full conversation

• Collaboration Nation: What’s possible when silos connect for kids?

• Tom Farrey’s State of Play: 2017 address

• Former MLB players Harold Reynolds, Rick Ankiel and Jake Peavy offer advice for kids and parents in youth baseball

• Reece Whitley, a 17-year-old star swimmer in Philadelphia, talks with 11-year-old Nina Locklear of Baltimore about what kids want in sports

• Aspen Ideas to Go podcast: Karen Crouse on the Best Sports Town in America

• Project Play Summit photo album

They Said It

“This is the least active generation in history and we should never get comfortable with that.”

– Caitlin Morris, Nike General Manager of Global Community Impact

“Some of you crazy parents are making these kids go nuts, playing (one) sport. I want you playing all kinds of different sports.”

– Harold Reynolds, former MLB player

“Parents should assume nothing about who’s interacting with their kids. It’s amazing the interactivity in which parents engage in their child’s life outside of sport … but more and more parents kind of hand off their children to a particular program or coach without any understanding of the qualifications that that adult has to interact with the child and make sure that experience is a good one.”

– Steve Stenersen, U.S. Lacrosse CEO

“Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t do sports. Yeah, I’m a little girly. I do worry about my hair because I don’t want to look a mess. But the thing is, when you play sports, it’s like playing with your own family. You meet new people every day.”

– Nina Locklear, 11-year-old from Baltimore

“Seventy percent of African Americans in Detroit do not know how to swim. About 48 perent of Hispanic folks do not know how to swim. … It’s a very serious item.”

– James Nicholson, chair of YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit.

“Let your kids have an open mind and learn to swim on their own without pushing your fears on them.”

– Nikki Cobbs, swim coach at Baltimore’s Dunbar High School.

“We have to be mindful that just saying go out to play is nice and nostalgic, but the reality is for many, many children, unless we can create a safe environment that their parents feel safe for them, then that’s going to be a very challenging thing to overcome.”

– Ed Foster-Simeon, U.S. Soccer Foundation President/CEO

“What we see often is criticism of our program that we’re not real baseball – it’s just rec league baseball, it’s just community baseball, the better players are in travel teams. Some people get irritated with that. I don’t. I actually tell our people we should wear that as a badge of honor. We always get caught up in what’s the next thing for 9-year-olds.”

– Steve Keener, Little League Baseball President and CEO

“I’ve never been part of any industry that’s moved at this rate – 40 inbound calls per week on new (youth sports facility) projects, most of which shouldn’t be built in the original concept as shared with us.”

– Dev Pathik, Sports Facilities Advisory CEO

“Women are more detailed. They’re better coaches. … We have to open up our minds that an athlete is an athlete and if you can coach, you can coach.”

– Reynolds

“If I was a young kid I wouldn’t know what he was doing besides making his kids’ shoes and looking cool while doing it, and yelling at a female is just a side product. Since I graduated from Stanford, I look at it as what are you doing to these children? Are you creating a path that’s going to be helpful to the kids that don’t make it? Your sons are the ones that are privileged to make it, and the reality is most people don’t.”

– Chiney Ogwumike, WNBA player,on controversial AAU basketball coach LaVar Ball’s rant against a female referee this summer.

“LaVar Ball, if he was in our (Little League) program, would have been suspended for two games. … We need to take those kinds of things seriously.”

– Keener, on LaVar Ball’s rant against a referee.

“If we want kids to be able to have free play, if we want them to just go out and run around and do things, we have to address the root issue, which is that the parents need to be secure enough in that they can afford their kid not to get a scholarship.”

– Chris Kluwe, former NFL player

“The irony is for all the money flowing into travel ball and in youth sports, it’s not actually more professional, it’s just more commercial. Most coaches are still not trained in the key competencies of working with kids.”

– Tom Farrey, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program Executive Director.

“(What) I don’t like about coaches is putting pressure on you and they’re always thinking you can win or you’ll do very well. But if, say for example, if they put you in a play back to back or you’ve got to run an event back to back and you’re really tired, you wouldn’t do so well.”

– Brenton Baker, 10, Buffalo, NY

Project Play Summit Media Coverage

• The Washington Post: Youth study shows declining participation, rising costs and unqualified coaches.

• The Atlantic: What’s lost when only rich kids play sports

• The Baltimore Sun: Aspen Institute aims to help Baltimore youth fill recreation gaps

• The Undefeated: Study shows no one is asking Baltimore youth what sports they want to play

• Business Insider: Industry leaders rally to grow youth sports participation

• Sports Business Journal: Sports stakeholders join forces in effort to stem decline in youth sports participation

• NewHotGood: Highlights from the Project Play Summit and the Aspen Institute’s work

Project Play Summit Social Media

The Project Play Summit trended nationally on social media during Sept. 6. The hashtag #ProjectPlay alone generated 24 million impressions and was seen by nearly six million people. More than 3,100 posts with that hashtag were made by 1,250 people – double from last year when First Lady Michelle Obama was featured.

The story was originally published here.

An Olympian explains how video games can get kids active

Angela Ruggiero
Aspen Institute Guest Author

After four gold medals, Hockey Hall of Famer Angela Ruggiero retired from the US women’s national hockey team in 2011. Her new career may be even busier and more impressive. Ruggiero is the co-founder and managing director of Sports Innovation Lab, chief strategy officer of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic bid committee, and an executive board member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). On Sept. 6, she will speak at the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Summit on a panel titled, “From Pokémon Go to Esports: Lessons and Opportunities.” Portions of the Summit will be streamed live. See the full agenda here.

Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, recently spoke with Ruggiero. Their wide-ranging conversation touched on sports tech innovation, improvements to youth sports through the LA 2028 Olympics, and whether the rising popularity of esports video gaming undermines — or actually helps — participation in traditional sports.

The Sports Innovation Lab seems like a great canvas to pursue your many curiosities. Why create such a firm?

Part of my motivation to found the Sports Innovation Lab was all the time I spent on various boards shaping decisions with very little objective and analytic information. I’m obviously curious about business in general. I got my MBA at Harvard and studied how technology has changed multiple industries. I realized if there is a way to help the industry I love — the sports industry — adopt the right technology quicker, accelerate innovation, create the right partnerships, find the right people, and find the right markets, I wanted to do that. We want to help companies that are on offense come in and test out products and services in sports that they could actually leverage into wider markets. Sports is just the test bed, but can be the platform to tell the story.

How do you look at the opportunity around the LA Olympics in 2028?

LA 2028 is unlike any Olympics ever. Usually, there’s a seven-year horizon between the bid selection and the Games. This is the first time ever it will be an 11-year horizon, and on top of that, we’re not building a single new venue. It’s a sustainable bid at the core. We’re going to build a Games that fits the needs of the city, not the other way around. We’ll build some temporary venues, but we’re using existing infrastructure in LA.

So people go, “Well, where’s the budget going to go?” What’s important to us is using the Olympics as a platform to inspire America, inspire Angelenos, and get kids more involved. Starting in 2018, we’re going to create more opportunities for youth sports in LA — a full 10 years before the Games — as a lasting and impactful pre-legacy.

It’s been reported that the IOC will provide $160 million for youth sports programs. It’s very early, but are there specific ideas LA has of how to disperse that money?

Disbursement is at LA 2028’s discretion, but it will fund youth sports in Los Angeles today. It’s basically an advance on the payment that’s typically given during the Games to help endow youth sports today. That’s another innovation in and of itself, where a lot of the focus of this is on the pre-legacy and not the post-legacy.

When I had youth camps, everything was a disguised competition. Kids love that.

The topic of your panel at the Project Play Summit overlaps here a little bit. There’s talk of Paris adding esports to the 2024 Olympic set of sport offerings. How should we feel about that?

I look at sports and think, ok, people huddle around a TV and they watch football and they don’t participate, and they never will participate, but they just love watching. Kids might do the same thing with esports. You can’t deny the numbers.

At Sports Innovation Lab, we’re actually spending a lot of time really understanding the dynamics between sports and esports, and how traditional sports could leverage what esports is actually doing right. Within this trend, esport athletes are engaging with their fans more, they’re creating an atmosphere where no one’s looking on their phones. They’re actually present in the building. It is worth studying and understanding at the very least.

Is there anything that youth sport organizations can learn from esports?

If all you do is sit and play games and watch people play games and you’re never active, that’s definitely not in line with getting active fans to participate in your sport. But, if traditional sports organizations can figure out the mechanism to turn them into participants – maybe they play Madden (the NFL video game) and there’s an easy way for them to sign up and play football. That’s part of the reason the NBA is investing in the NBA2K esports league. The hope is that they’ll convert some of these kids into participants of basketball as well.

Think about adults with Fitbit and a lot of fitness options that they gamify to get more activity into their day. If you think from that same framework then yeah, absolutely, traditional sports and youth sports could learn from esports and Pokémon Go. When I had youth camps, everything was a disguised competition; it was a game. Kids love that. They push themselves a lot harder. Maybe youth sports creates a virtual community so then there are more ways to stay in touch with those kids. There’s a company creating a mechanism for marathoners to meet up with other marathoners in advance so they can train eight months out with someone they know is going to be running alongside them on the day of the race. Suddenly, you’re using technology to bring communities together to do physical sport — to actually move.

You’ve done so much in your early part of your career. What drives you?

What I think I have realized is that you can have a personal impact at a very individual level. When I was coaching kids’ camps — I had a girls hockey school for 10 years — I got to know the girls’ names, I saw them develop, and I stayed in touch with them. But now in my capacity with the IOC or LA or with my company, I’m trying to change the world in a more scalable way – affecting change that’s on a policy level or creating a new business model that doesn’t exist. What drives me is finding those right endeavors and then just putting my heart into those pieces, and seeing real change. I think in some cases I’m driven to win a game (while playing hockey), and in others I want to help shape the world. I want to help change the world in a positive way.

The story was originally published here.