Aspen Institute Mexico creates its own Project Play for kids sports

Dieter Holtz

As a lifetime swimmer, from the starting blocks in Mexico City to the roster of Florida State University men’s swim team, I know firsthand the role sports play in shaping a child’s future — not just academically, but socially, and personally. So, I have spent many years back in my country as a strong advocate for physical activity improvements in the Mexican system.

In November, my colleagues and I presented the Aspen Institute Mexico’s very own “Playbook Mexico.” It’s the culmination of two years of research bringing together kids, parents, trainers, experts in the field, companies, brands, Olympic athletes, NGOs, the academic sector and government officials to identify nine barriers, and their possible solutions, that we face in developing and sustaining youth sport participation. The project was inspired by the framework and methodology of Project Play, which the Sports & Society Program has used to help stakeholders build healthy communities through sports in the US.

The launch event for our report was held at Universidad Anahuac Norte in Mexico City and was made up of a panel of leaders from the Aspen Institute Mexico, the US, contributors from the university’s faculty, as well as past and former Olympic athlete speakers, and a panel of kids. The audience consisted of parents, coaches, education and health professionals, brands such as Nike, media representatives, NGOs, academic experts and government officials.

The interest in our playbook follows the great need for solutions. Mexico, a nation of 126 million with 31.1% of the population below the age of 17, has one of the highest obesity rates in the world. One in three youth, ages 6 to 19, are overweight or obese, and more than half (51%) of the youth between ages 10 and 14 are physically inactive. Sports play a major role in addressing these problems, as the instinct of children is to play – but often in Mexico, they have no place to do so or are discouraged from participating.

We knew we had to identify barriers and develop strategies specific to Mexico, just as the Sports & Society Program developed a framework specific to the structure and culture of youth sports in the US. Below is what we came up with, all mapping to a vision of Mexico, where all children have the opportunity to be active through sports.

Barrier 1: Early discouraging experiences
Strategy 1: Let’s build up a good beginning
By asking kids what they want, and letting them play naturally, we can increase the probability of them staying in sports. Before age 10, if kids have positive experiences in an activity, they are more likely to continue it in the long run.

Barrier 2: Limited options, more of the same
Strategy 2: Motivate them to try new alternatives
We tend to stick to a few mainstream sports, or only those easily accessible, but we can be innovative with the space and tools we have in order to let kids try new things, or even make up a new game. This enhances kids’ abilities, prevents boredom, and allows them pick and choose what they’re good at or like the most.

Barrier 3: Lack of adults as healthy models
Strategy 3: Adults as role models
Often, the problem lies in the households where parents aren’t setting a healthy and active example for their kids. There is a strong correlation between parents that are involved in sports and activities and their kids doing the same.

Barrier 4: Insecure and inaccessible environments for children
Strategy 4: Create adequate public spaces for kids and their characteristics
29 out of 32 entities in Mexico point to lack of security as the main concern. It’s paramount that we have accessible and secure spaces to practice activities, and that the infrastructure is adequate for children (i.e. a basketball hoop scaled to kids’ heights vs. 2 meters tall).

Barrier 5: Deficiencies in educational plans and programs
Strategy 5: Make and design a plan
Mexico’s P.E. programs are quite limited in offering only 50 to 60 minutes a week of physical activity for children. Children between the ages of 5 and 12 should be doing 60 minutes of physical activity a day. Technology is a great avenue to develop apps and online platforms that contain games and activities for kids to play. Also, the education sector can restructure their educational plans to include more P.E. time for the kids during school hours.

Barrier 6: Exclusion and discrimination during sports practice
Strategy 6: The games know no differences
Mexico is among the most diverse countries in the world — with different ways of thinking, interests and cultures, all of which can lead to discrimination and exclusion. Unfortunately, kids with a disability or are part of a minority don’t have the same opportunities in school, sports, and socially. We encourage the implementation of more inclusive programs and teaching kids to be more inclusive. The media and parents play a big role in this change as well.

Barrier 7: Deficiencies in human resources
Strategy 7: Strengthen training programs
Trainers and P.E. teachers should instill self-sufficiency and confidence in children. Emotional support and interpersonal communication from such trainers and role models are key tools for kids to be motivated to participate and continue to be involved in sports over the long run. The development of apps, platforms, and social programs to certify more trainers, as well as the introduction of P.E. teachers in schools, is crucial.

Barrier 8: Deficiencies in the use of media
Strategy 8: Effective use and optimization of media
The support of mass media and new technologies in the diffusion of activities, events, and community opinion in sport is extremely important. The more we generate conversations about the importance of physical activity and a healthy lifestyle, as well as sports campaigns directed to kids and adults to educate them about the benefits, the more we can increase participation and combat the obesity epidemic in Mexico.

Barrier 9: Absence of evaluation, monitoring, and research in Mexico
Strategy 9: Strengthen research for the development of solutions 
We need to create a national evaluation system so that all schools can implement tests that are simple, reliable, and safe to create a control and parameter of advancement in the physical capabilities of children.

To surmount these barriers, it is vital that the key players in our society come together to work symbiotically in service of and for the future of our children. We need engagement from: government, schools, public health organizations, sport associations, businesses, parents, the social sector, the media, and technology organizations.

It is Aspen Mexico´s duty to promote this research and to help permeate these solutions throughout Mexico. In the coming years, we want to develop “local guides,” akin to the community-focused State of Play reports produced in the US, that build on our national report and can help leaders in different areas of the country increase childhood activity levels. Leaders in various cities and states have expressed interest in this goal. We also will work with the Sports & Society Program to adapt and distribute existing resources that may be of use here.

Progress will take time and investment. But we are confident that the work put in by all who contributed to the development of the Aspen Institute Mexico’s work will continue in the coming years, for which I am deeply grateful. This will result in significant changes in the lives of our youth and our society.

Our hope is that everyone who reads or hears about our effort will understand how vital it is that we come together and contribute in whatever capacity we can.

So, please, if you want to believe in the vision we share, reach out if you think you might be able to hop on board and help us implement these solutions.

Dieter Holtz is CEO of Upfield and a board member of The Aspen Institute of Mexico, one of 11 countries where the Institute has affiliates. The project manager for Project Play in Mexico is Tatiana Vertiz, who can be reached at tatianav@aspeninstitutemexico.org. Learn more about how Project Play has begun helping other countries build healthier kids and communities here.

The story was originally posted here.

Romania deploys Project Play to get more kids active in sports

Tom Farrey
Executive Director, Sports & Society Program

Among the few buildings in the world larger than the Pentagon, the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest is so colossal, so dense and byzantine in its layout, people here say that only the occupant who commissioned it, the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, knew how to navigate all its marbled hallways.

Who knew one hallway would someday lead to Project Play?

That day, to be exact, was Sept. 26, 2019, when about 130 leaders found their way to a large ballroom two levels up to participate in the Joacă Pentru Viaţă Summit, or the Play for Life Summit. The goal: Rethink the delivery of sport for youth in the former Eastern Bloc country, to get more of them involved.

The president of the Romanian Olympic and Sports Committee was there. So were top politicians, the acting Sports Minister, officials from the Ministry of Education, and Olympic medalists. The day began with a video message from reigning Wimbledon champion Simona Halep, who offered her congratulations to the Aspen Institute Romania, host of the event.

“There’s nothing better for kids than to be encouraged, at first through play, towards exercise, sports and a healthy and productive adult life,” said Halep, the country’s most celebrated athlete. “Not all of today’s kids will end up winning a Grand Slam or Olympic medal, but they will be representing a competitive generation, ready to face life successfully. Good luck to the Play for Life Summit. I am with you!”

Over the past year, Aspen Romania has used our Project Play framework to convene leaders with the aim of developing a national plan for getting more children active through sports. While Project Play was created for U.S. purposes, two of the 11 countries where the Aspen Institute has international affiliates – Aspen Mexico will release its plan in November – are now partnering with their Olympic committees to create strategies to build healthier children and communities through sports.

These are their programs, and we support them where we can.

In Bucharest, that meant sharing the process our Sports & Society Program and its partners have used to build Project Play as an engine of progress in the U.S. It’s our Theory of Change, if you will, for Romanian leaders to borrow from as needed.

Step One: Organize the Thought

Launched in 2013, Project Play spent the first two years convening leaders – 300 of them at roundtables where we posed questions on a range of youth sport topics. We took a lot of notes, surfaced the best ideas, then packaged the best of them into what became our seminal report, Sport for All, Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game, with its eight strategies for the eight sectors that touch the lives of children.

The document was a critical step in laying a foundation for collective impact. It helped define what good looks like in youth sports, and the areas of opportunity for stakeholders. It created the conditions for the energy and money in youth sports – a $17 billion industry, at a minimum – to move less at cross-purposes. While programs that serve low-income youth could use more support, investments need to align with the needs of children and the research around how to build an athlete for life.

As with any country, Romania will need to develop a plan that recognizes its unique assets, limitations, culture and history. In the U.S., for instance, “Train All Coaches” is a key strategy, in recognition that most youth coaches are volunteers who are winging it. In Romania, where government-supported sport clubs provide programs, nearly all coaches are paid, educated and certified.

The training that many of them receive, however, is focused on identifying promising children and developing them into elite athletes – a holdover from the old Soviet-era system. The challenge now is how to train them in competencies like teaching social and emotional skills through sports, in all youth.

Step Two: Organize the Organizations

It’s hard to trigger systems-level change without getting the organizations at the center of that system to develop policies, practices and programs that map to the shared vision. In the U.S., we use a variety of tools to encourage cooperation and action: Project Play 2020 and Project Play Champions, which mobilizes industry leaders and non-profits; our community projects; and the annual Project Play Summit, where last month 550 leaders gathered for two days of panels and workshops.

Romania is well on its way to getting all the right organizations at the table. A key partner is the Romanian Olympic and Sport Committee, whose president, Mihai Covaliu, called for a reboot of the Romanian sport system at the Play for Life Summit.

For a while, Romania was able to rely on the old, authoritarian system to achieve results on the world stage. Romania won 26 medals at the 2000 Olympics, a decade after Ceausescu was executed, ending communist rule. Its female gymnasts dominated the 1990s, building on the legacy of Nadia Comaneci and the authoritarian coach Bela Karolyi in the 1970s.

By the 2016 Rio Olympics, Romania’s medal count had fallen to just four, across all sports. None were in gymnastics, and in Tokyo next year, as in Rio, the women’s team did not qualify.

“Too few of our children know how to run, jump and play,” said Covaliu, a former Olympic champion fencer. “We need to fix that. Mass sport sits at the base of all sport success.”

Step Three: Organize the Gatekeepers

That would be the parents, ultimately the most influential agents in the lives of children. In the U.S., our surveys show that more than 9 of 10 parents appreciate the value of sports and want their child to have positive, sustained experience. But they’re often lost on how to guide their child, leading to high attrition rates. It’s why Project Play 2020 launched the Don’t Retire Kid campaign in August, to drive them to solutions.

Romania faces a different challenge, according to leaders – parents withholding their child from sport activity. Some just don’t appreciate the value of physical activity, sending their children to school with medical notes exempting them from P.E. Others worry about introducing them to sport clubs where coaches demand performance from kids at too early of an age.

“We need to let the children enjoy playing and see what flows from that,” said Ciprian Paraschiv, development manager at the Romanian Football Federation. “As the Pope said last year, ‘Every child has a right not to be a champion.’”

It is impressive to see what Romanian leaders are already putting in place, in support its new vision. A tournament comprised of middle school teams, supported by the Olympic committee. A festival in Bucharest in June where thousands of kids got to sample 40 sports, collect stamps at each station, and connect with local clubs. Downloadable decks of playing cards that coaches can use to talk productively with kids.

Aspen Romania has asked if its staff can translate some of our tools, such as the Project Play Parent Checklists. Here you go. Happy to share, where feasible. Hope it’s useful.

Can’t say any of this was in Project Play’s Theory of Change. Certainly not Romania, 22 hours away by flight from my home in California.

But we’re beyond thrilled to see the framework travels well.

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, home of Project Play. He can be followed on Twitter at @TomFarrey and reached at Tom.Farrey@aspeninstiute.org.

Learn more about the Joacă Pentru Viaţă Summit here.

How France really won the World Cup

Tom Farrey
Executive Director, Sports & Society Program

This was a tough summer for anyone who cares about soccer in the United States. The men’s national team failed to qualify for the World Cup, and on the day of the championship game won by France a front-page story in the New York Times described a participation drop among kids. But the seeds of systems-level reform are starting to take hold. On October 16 at the 2018 Project Play Summit, Ludovic Debru and Nico Romeijn, top officials from the U.S. Soccer Federation and French Football Federation, shared ideas on how to promote both development and participation (WATCH). Can we train more coaches and make more room for late bloomers, kids from lower-income homes, and free play – as France did in transforming its youth model? The session was moderated by Tom Farrey, executive director of our Sports & Society Program, who teed up the conversation with this reflection.

Ten years ago, I wrote a book that altered the trajectory of my life’s work. I was hoping its insights somehow would bend the arc of youth sports in America as well, given what I had learned about the modern-day challenges in providing experiences that align with best practices in child and athletic development. My interests began to shift from breaking down problems as an investigative journalist with ESPN to identifying shared solutions with The Aspen Institute. Walked into the boss’s office, asked off E:60, and started dreaming of what’s possible. How to help sports tell its best story.

The model that France uses to develop soccer players was a catalyst.

I wrote about that model in the fourth chapter of the book, Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. The methods the French deploy to cultivate talent in its youth population were a revelation to me — counter to so many of the features that we had tacitly embraced in the U.S. Upon visiting France and talking with the architects of their system, I came to understand how Les Blues came to win the 1998 World Cup, and why the U.S. had yet to develop even one field player who could be described as world class, despite having more children in soccer uniforms than any nation on the planet.

The knowledge is even more relevant today, with France winning the 2018 World Cup and the U.S. watching from home, eliminated by Trinidad & Tobago in the qualifying round. It hurts to even write that, as an American who loves soccer and really wants us to figure this out — to discover and share with the world our very best selves. Soccer has a way of doing that, expressing national character in its most elegant, physical form.

Photo courtesy of the French Football Federation

At the time of my visit to Clairefontaine, the national training center for France’s soccer federation just outside Paris, most of the players who later played in the 2018 World Cup were between ages 10 and 14. That doesn’t mean all were training at the national center. On the contrary, only three players on France’s roster spent time at Clairefontaine, whose staff selects just 23 players a year — at ages 13, 14 and 15 — to groom full-time at the center. Kylian Mbappe (above), the explosive 19-year-old forward who moves like a NFL running back, was one. The rest came up through clubs elsewhere in the country.

The chief value of Clairefontaine, instead, is its success in creating a coherent development culture that now permeates all levels of the game in France. That starts with a commitment to providing youth coaches in towns and cities across the country with the skills to present the sport in a manner that recognizes what children need to grow in the game, technically and emotionally.

We still don’t have that in the U.S. Here, youth soccer remains a landscape of well-meaning volunteers, winging it. Through our Aspen Institute Project Play initiative, we track the number of coaches trained in the key competencies in working with youth, via data supplied by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s annual household survey. In 2017, just 32 percent of youth  coaches said they had received any training in sport skills and tactics. Only 28 percent claimed to have been taught effective motivational technique with kids. Better coaching is key to stemming attrition in soccer, which gets kids earlier than any other sport and by age 7 or 8 starts losing them in droves.

Soccer has a way of expressing national character in its most elegant, physical form.

But there’s more to learn from the French model than that. Below is what I wrote in Game On and how it contrasts with our model, if we can call it that; how soccer is dispensed in the U.S. varies across states and even communities. As you can see, many features the French put in place are designed to keep adults from acting on their worst impulses. For me, it was a key insight: The best sport systems don’t actually build great athletes – instead, they work with coaches to build a wide base at the grassroots, then let the talent to emerge. It’s more gardening than manufacturing.

Looking back at what I wrote in Game On, I can’t say every observation was spot on. But this chapter certainly was a preview into what would unfold a decade later. I share it in the hope that it helps us finally get right in the U.S. – a true sleeping giant that soccer leaders aim to awaken.

LES RED, WHITE, AND BLUES

Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, France

The Americans, Seriously.

So declared the headline in a New York Times magazine piece a few weeks before the 2006 World Cup was held in Germany.

And Lord, didn’t many of us want to believe it. Anyone who had ever been called unpatriotic for appreciating a well-struck in-swinger, anyone who grew up going to North American Soccer League games as a kid (as I did in Fort Lauderdale), anyone who wanted to see U.S. soccer succeed at the highest level because the game is the global language and cultural fluency matters in the midst of an unpopular, isolating war—all of us, in our hearts, hoped that maybe this was our time. The U.S. had made the quarterfinals in ’02 and now was ranked No. 5 in the world, behind only Brazil, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Sure, there are always raised eyebrows about FIFA’s rankings, whispers and screams that wins against weak teams are given too much weight. But the vibe from national team coach Bruce Arena was one of smoldering confidence, even Long Island cockiness, projecting the sense that while he didn’t want to overpromise and underdeliver, a run deep into the monthlong tournament in Germany would not surprise him and shouldn’t surprise us. The Americans, he suggested, would marshal their traditional strengths—fitness, competitiveness, physical play—to neutralize opponents. Arena said, “One day, when we get it right and become the best, it’s because we did it our way, no one else’s way.” Nike, chief sponsor of the national team, suggested that perhaps that moment was at hand, insisting in print ads that soccer was now as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. The ad noted that the sport’s 17 million U.S. participants—a grassroots juggernaut—was greater than the total population of Holland. “By sheer numbers alone,” the ad read, “we are going to sweep over most of the globe.”

Then the games began.

In the opener, a 3-0 washout to the Czechs, the Americans looked like college kids chasing old pros around the pitch. It was 1998 all over again, with the US failing to muster any kind of offensive attack. Passes were made without precision. Balls skipped off the feet of wide-open teammates. Analysts questioned Arena’s tactics, while Arena in turn blasted his designated star Landon Donovan for a supposed lack of aggressiveness. DaMarcus Beasley, the speedster, was a nonfactor, too often passing back. Goalkeeper Kasey Keller punted into areas of the field populated only by Czechs. In the next game, the U.S. gutted out a 1-1 tie with eventual champion Italy when the Azzuri accidentally knocked the ball into their own net. Nevertheless, the Americans through two games had generated just one shot on goal, fewer than any other team. With a 2-1 loss a few days later to Ghana, an African republic the size of Oregon, the Americans disappeared from the World Cup. Just as dispiriting, there were few, if any, highlight clips to savor, no moments of brilliance to make a fence-sitting sports fan back home fall in love with the team. Once again, theories were advanced for why we just can’t get it right—and why in 30 years of purposeful effort the US has yet to deliver one world-class player. The venerable if soccer-snarky Frank Deford crowed that the game just isn’t in our DNA. Others proposed that soccer doesn’t sort out winners and losers clearly enough to endear itself to athletically gifted American boys who grow up hearing that ties are like kissing your sister. Some pundits wondered if the supposed psychic disconnect flows from the nation long ago having declared its independence from England, the birthplace of soccer.

Sure. Maybe that’s it.

Or maybe it’s just that a country reaps what it sows.

Photo courtesy of the French Football Federation

I know we’re supposed to loathe the French. But they once went to war against the English, too. On our side. And let’s face it, they do soccer pretty well. Maybe there’s a thing or two we can learn in frog land.

Two weeks before the World Cup is set to begin, I take a plane to Paris, then a train to a small village an hour southwest of the city, then an auto- mobile deep into the heart of the Rambouillet Forest. As my cabbie turns his Renault onto the entrance road of the national training center for the French Football Federation, it hardly seems like we have arrived at the world’s foremost soccer academy. The place is perfectly tranquil, save for the chirping of birds and the gentle rustling of leaves. Rhododendron bushes with pink and white flowers line the playing fields that lead to an old castle at the center of the grounds, making the training center feel like an arboretum. There are few signs of grand athletic ambition anywhere until the cabbie reaches the castle and—pow!—we are blinded by the gleam of a humongous, golden, gaudy replica of a World Cup trophy whose design and scale seem more fit for the lobby of some Las Vegas theme hotel. France won the right to hoist the monument during the 1998 World Cup with a 3-0 victory on home soil against Brazil in the championship game.

A few minutes later, I am in the second-floor office of André Mérelle, the sage I have come to see. As the federation’s director of youth development, he oversees the grooming of the next generation of would-be French stars. The wall to the right of his cluttered desk is lined with group photos of boys from the past decade who have been selected for focused training as teenagers. Each year 1,500 13-year-olds around France are identified by scouts as having the most promise, with 650 of them earning tryouts at Clairefontaine, as the training center is commonly called. They come in waves of 50, until a final 24 are offered scholarships to live there and train on weekdays after school.

“Take a look,” Mérelle says, firing up a DVD on his laptop. “This is what we do.”

The video is of the last day of tryouts, the final cut. From its bird’s-eye angle, the camera pans across a row of boys lined up shoulder to shoulder in blue jerseys. Immediately, one of the first characteristics that reveals itself is their ethnicity: The first eight or nine are of African descent and very few after that are of European stock. When I ask Mérelle about this, he takes my notepad and draws a picture of a dough- nut with a small hole in the middle. The hole, he says, represents Paris. The doughnut represents its sprawling suburbs where most immigrant families live. Wealth dominates the inner city, so here the poor—mostly first- and second-generation transplants from former colonies such as Senegal, Cameroon, and Algeria—get pushed out to the ’burbs, with their high-rise concrete blocks and nearby manufacturing jobs.

“This is where we get the gifted players,” Mérelle says, shading in with his pen the eastern side of the doughnut. He draws an X at the bottom. “Henry is from here,” he says.

That would be Thierry Henry, now one of the world’s top strikers. To the basic American sports fan, the face might look familiar. He’s the other guy with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer in those ubiquitous Gillette razor ads. He’s also the “close friend” that Tony Parker enthused about in the press conference after his San Antonio Spurs wrapped up the 2007 NBA title, in which the flashy point guard became the first Euro to be named MVP of the championship series. Henry, on break between seasons, wore Parker’s No. 9 jersey while watching the final game in the stands and posed with Parker later, holding the Spurs’ fourth trophy of the past decade.

Soccer aficionados don’t need any introduction to Henry, as they know the résumé. Two-time MVP of England’s Premier League, where he played before moving to FC Barcelona. Arsenal’s all-time leading scorer. Those familiar with the sport marvel at his prodigious talent: the combination of size,  explosion,  and  invention.  Though  6-foot-2, he is masterful with the ball, with a dribbling style that is not fixed. Defenders are forced to give him space to operate. But left alone, he can be deadly, too, knifing in from the wing to launch a powerful shot controlled for speed, spin, and placement. He’s good with his noggin, too. In a 2006 World Cup semifinal match, Henry elevated near the goalmouth to deflect a pass into the roof of the net for the winning margin in a 1-0 victory against Brazil. He looked like Randy Moss rising for six in the end zone.

The true strength of the French soccer system stems from what happens with players at the local level.

When Henry arrived at Clairefontaine at age 13, he was given access to some of the top coaches in the country. They worked with him to develop the choices he makes when he receives the ball, how to read the game flow, and the mastery of skills such as juggling, kicking with both feet, crossing, heading, and shooting with precision over power. By contrast, there was little emphasis on building strength, speed, and other physical traits that typify the US game. If Henry tried something new with the ball and failed, he was not punished. Experimentation was encouraged as much as good form was, and no matches were played during the two years he was in residence here. That depressurized environment allowed him to develop and refine his talents, which he then put to use in weekend games with his home-area club team. By 17 he was starting at the highest professional level in France, and by 20 he was the leading scorer for the French team when it won the ’98 World Cup.

Every prospect accepted into Clairefontaine receives the same type of intense technical and psychological polishing. It’s two hours a day, five days a week of skills, skills, skills. Since Henry left the academy, more than 80 players who came to train here have gone on to play professionally, including two fellow starters (Louis Saha and William Gallas) on the ’06 World Cup team.

Investing in 13-year-olds is a highly speculative business. At that age, a boy who went through puberty early might dominate a late bloomer who actually has superior talent—and more upside. To understand their growth potential, X-rays are taken of the left wrists of the final 50 prospects to pinpoint their “bone age,” which often differs greatly from their actual age.

Mérelle, hunkered over his laptop, points to a tall boy in the lineup. “This one is 17,” he says of the boy’s bone age. “This one is 11 … This one is 13 … ”

He smiles, marveling at the biological differences. “Incredible, huh?” Elsewhere, early bloomers gain access to elite teams simply because they’re bigger, stronger, and faster than their age peers. One study of Portuguese prospects found that soccer “systematically excludes late maturing boys,” who often drop out of the game as a result. Even a few months of physical maturity can make a difference in access to select teams, and thus, to top coaches. The phenomenon is called the Relative Age Effect. Children born in the last three months of a selection year—just before the cut-off date in assigning kids to age-specific teams—are significantly underrepresented at the youth levels when compared with those born in the first three months. The downstream effect of that discriminatory process can be seen at the pro level, where players born in the first three months of a given year are far more common. The pattern of skewed birth date distributions has been documented in other sports as well.

The careful identification and development procedures at Clairefontaine inevitably get much of the credit for delivering world-class athletes. But a high-end soccer laboratory isn’t primarily what sets France apart—there is a similar, if less sophisticated, under-17 residency camp in Florida affiliated with US Soccer that has helped groom such players as Donovan and Beasley. Indeed, the true strength of the French system stems from what happens with players at the local level, even before they get selected for special training at national and regional centers. As Mérelle says, with equal parts emphasis and acknowledgment, “Henry was already good in front of the goal when he came to us.”

Photo courtesy of the French Football Federation

It all starts with falling in love. Which isn’t just a French thing

In 1985, the University of Chicago educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom studied the development histories of 150 elite athletes, musicians, artists, and academics going back to their early childhood. He found striking similarities in their paths to excellence. He wrote that “no matter what the initial characteristics of the individual, unless there is a long and intensive process of encouragement, nurturance, education, and training, the individuals will not attain extreme levels of capability in the particular fields.” They worked hard. They benefited from the guidance of high-quality mentors. They were given opportunities to achieve mastery.

But before any of that could happen, at the entry phase the sport or activity had to capture their imagination. A wild romance was born somehow. The same development was later found in a survey of US Olympians, whose affection for their sport would serve as fuel for self-improvement throughout their careers.

How to spark such passion? The impulse of many modern parents—even those with the most modest of hopes for their child athlete—is to attempt to arrange the marriage through early, persistent doses of organized team sports. In many US communities, the process is set into motion around age 4.

Let’s head back to Connecticut for a minute. Just across the inter-state west of New Britain is the more affluent, middle-class-and-up Farmington Valley. Here parents deluged with marketing messages about providing children with the “very best” enrichment programs often have the resources for a series of sign-ups, sports-related or otherwise. Stay-at-home moms ferry their tots from Gymboree classes to sing-along music sessions to infant swimming lessons, hoping to give their Little Einsteins every developmental advantage. (Set aside for a minute the fact that Albert Einstein himself didn’t talk until age 3.) The Saturday-morning soccer program for preschoolers at the area YMCA—with its chalked fields, regulation-size balls, and structured drills—is just another manifestation of that thinking.

For the final 30 minutes of the hourlong session, the blue team matches up against the orange team in a “noncompetitive”—that’s what the catalog says, at least—match. Play is dominated by the two or three most physically advanced kids, who kick the ball hard and give chase, the pack forming behind them in the shape of a teardrop. Some of them keep dribbling right past the end line toward the neighboring grave- yard, until a parent corrals and redirects the flock back onto the miniature pitch. Some of the kids seem engaged. Most seem bewildered or even bored. A girl standing in the goalmouth makes like an airplane, altogether uninterested in stopping a ball from slowly rolling into the net. A boy in cleats pouts as his father tries to nudge him off the sideline, frustrated at his son’s lack of aggression. “He just needs to get more of that killer instinct,” the father says to me. The boy had spent much of the game hugging his dad’s leg, uncomfortable with the idea of stealing the ball from other kids. “He’s used to sharing. He tells me, ‘It’s their turn to kick it, Daddy.’ ” Hey, on children’s TV, that’s what Franklin the turtle might do.

When the referee tweets his whistle at the end of the nongame, the parents whose children happen to be enjoying the action let out a collective deflated “Awww.”

The preschool exercise at the Y serves as a portal into a system that regards competition as the preeminent training tool. Starting next year, when these kids are in kindergarten, they will be able to start in the town’s recreational leagues, with their once-a-weekend games and sideline orange slices. But with fall and spring outdoor sessions, many kids will be playing dual seasons. At age 8, travel ball begins, with its select groups of boys and girls playing outside the structure of the rec league and representing their towns in tournaments and games around the state. By age 9, some teams will be playing as many as four games a weekend during the fall and spring. They play on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day; there are few holidays from organized soccer. A couple of years later, some of those kids also will get invited to join private, often for-profit “premier” clubs that draw talent from a wider area. By the end of elementary school, the very best child athletes could be playing 100 outdoor and indoor games a year—twice as many as the best French teenagers.

This is not the way great players are made, Mérelle says.

“Everyone wants to win games. That’s good,” he says. “But how do you win? If you’re too focused on winning games, you don’t learn to play well. You get too nervous, because you’re always afraid to make errors.” The French system recognizes the value of unstructured play. And that innovation and passion bloom when children are given the time and space to create games on their own. Without uniforms. Or league standings. Or game clocks. Or emotionally invested adults. It’s an inspired place in which improvisation rules, rewards are intrinsic, playing personalities are developed—and a child learns to see things that don’t reveal themselves as readily in formal games.

At ESPN The Magazine, we arranged a conversation between Henry and Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash, who has twice been voted NBA MVP. The French soccer star was well aware of the talents of Nash, who compensates for his relative lack of height (6-3) with brilliant play- making and an ability to create space where none seemed to exist a split second earlier. Henry—who once gave Nash a tour of Clairefontaine (“one of the best days of my life,” Nash says)—told Nash that he and Parker were among his favorite athletes to watch.

“Tony has the same view you have on the court—that soccer player’s view,” Henry said.

“I’m excited to hear you say that,” said Nash, who had the advantage in both nature (he’s the son of a former soccer pro) and nurture (he grew up playing lots of soccer, hockey, lacrosse, and basketball, both organized and pickup) working for him.

“You see more than what is in front of you,” Henry said. “I hear people watch you and say, ‘What a pass!’ And I’m like, What do you mean? Because for me, it was obvious.”

Sports scientists have a name for this seemingly supernatural talent: field sense. It’s the ability to anticipate the movements of people and objects in motion, and it takes many forms. It could be the act of finding the open man just before the player breaks free. Or flicking a puck into the corner of a net guarded by a goalie who fatefully leans a quarter- inch the wrong way. Or predicting the trajectory of a Beckham bender in a soccer game. And while some people may have more of an innate capacity to develop the skill than others, researchers now believe that it’s a talent that can be trained for—through, ironically, free-form play.

One of the leading scientists in this area is Australian skills-acquisition expert Damien Farrow, who, in interviewing elite athletes, discovered the value of loosely organized games in the development of flexible thinking and acute spatial awareness. “We should be modeling our programs on that,” Farrow has said. “And what do we do instead? We put children in regimented, very structured programs, where their perceptual abilities are corralled and limited.”

In Brazil, the legendary home to jogo bonito (Portuguese for the beautiful game), unstructured play is the standard when young. Poverty is widespread, so children kick balls and makeshift balls in alleys, on beaches, on small, enclosed courts, anywhere, with friends and neighbors and parents and grandparents. This is how most of the Brazilian greats, from Pelé to Ronaldinho, were introduced to the sport. Organized games are delayed until age 8 or 9. The result? Brazil has such an abundance of talent that soccer observers say the South American nation could probably field four separate teams all of which would be competitive in the World Cup.

France, like the US, is happily burdened by wealth in most areas. Parents can enroll their children in soccer clubs at just about any age and often do starting around age 6. So to protect the development of child athletes from the natural impulse of adults to have kids compete immediately—“We suffer from that here too,” Mérelle says—the French push coaching education, perhaps more vigorously than any soccer federation in the world. Nearly 20,000 coaches from the youth level up have received certificates for completing classes at the federation’s Paris training center. Training isn’t mandatory at the lowest levels, but it’s common. And information gets pushed down the pipeline 340 days a year to the thousands of local clubs that work with kids. A youth coach would have to be a recluse not to know the federation believes players must be allowed the freedom to express themselves with the ball. That ball control while moving is the basis of the French game. That the focus must be on attacking skills. That 7-year-olds shouldn’t play in formats any larger than five-on-five, to maximize touches and keep everyone involved. That no child should get slotted into one position until well into his teenage years. That individual technique is far more important to teach through age 16 than tactics are. That coaches need to be quality demonstrators, so that kids can visually lock down the fundamentals. That yelling at players should not be tolerated. And, above all, that training must be fun.

French children typically play no more than one game a week, and the seasons aren’t endless. Even as high as the 13-and-under level, most club teams play 30 or 35 games a year, max. Such restraint leaves ample time, energy, and motivation for kids to kick a ball around in the neighborhood, the sort of unsupervised environment where imaginations soar most effortlessly. It’s been this way for decades. Henry, when not being coached on a well-worn pitch, spent many hours booting a ball against concrete walls in his suburban ghetto. Zinédine Zidane, the three-time World Player of the Year who retired after the ’06 World Cup, received instruction as a teenager in one of the French federation’s regional training facilities—but no one, including Zizou, would suggest that the origins of his sorcery began there. His exquisite feel for the ball was developed years earlier in the crowded, government-built projects of Marseille, messing around on the gravel of his town’s central square and in the living room of his family’s apartment where, through his trial and error, all the lights got smashed out.

The highlights these players would go on to deliver are the kind that creates soccer devotees.

“Remember when I came to France for your game against Ukraine?” Nash asked Henry in their conversation. “At one point, Zizou played it to you, and you played it back. You hit it hard, and it was heading between his knee and his waist. He let the ball hit him, but the way he rotated his hips, it stopped on the grass. Didn’t bounce, didn’t do anything. He was like a martial artist. I can’t even explain it.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” Henry responded. “To receive the ball that way you need to relax the right part of your body.”

Relax. A foreign word to those caught up in the maelstrom of American youth sports.

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program and author of Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. The book has been used in university courses across the country and led to the creation of Project Play, which develops, applies and shares knowledge to build healthy communities through sports. In the coming months, look for a 10th anniversary edition that includes updates on the book’s themes and characters, including the child athletes who were profiled. Tom can be reached at tom.farrey@aspeninstitute.org and followed @tomfarrey.

How Norway won the Winter Olympics

Tom Farrey
Executive Director, Sports & Society Program

Apart from that little North Korea diplomacy thing, the transcendent story of the PyeongChang Games was Norway, which performed better than any nation in the history of the Winter Olympics. Its athletes earned a record 39 medals, a stunning 16 more than the United States, reaching the podium not just in its traditional strengths of cross-country skiing and biathlon but also in alpine skiing, speed skating, ski jumping, and freestyle skiing.

The Norwegians won so much, modesty finally escaped them.

“Incredible,” said Johann Olav Koss, the Norwegian speed skater who won four gold medals at the 1992 and ’94 Olympics. “This has been the most incredible Olympics ever from a performance perspective.”

The haul is made all the more extraordinary by the relative size of the western-most Scandinavian country. Norway is a nation of just 5.3 million people, a population not much larger than Greater Detroit. Norway won 7.3 medals for every one million residents, according to research by NBC Sports. The only nation with a better ratio was Lichtenstein, which is more a hamlet than a country and won a bronze in alpine skiing.

One caveat before we move on: Countries with large populations can only rise so high on the above list. If the US won every possible medal in events that its athletes qualified for (228 medals), its ratio would max out at 0.70. The best pound-for-pound fighters are never heavyweights.

Still, the chart is a useful entry point into understanding the quality of a nation’s sport system. How it organizes its assets and confronts the challenges that other nations face. How it introduces children to sports, identifies and develops talent, and moves them through the lifecycle of an athlete. After these 2018 Winter Games, it is both natural and healthy to ask: What in the world have the Norwegians figured out?

That’s what I did for the past week from the advantaged perch of the International Broadcast Center in PyeongChang. It’s a like a sport-focused United Nations, with sport chiefs, journalists, and athletes from all over the globe passing through its cavernous hallways on the way to guest spots, happy to share insights. The Norwegians were particularly generous because, well, they’re Norwegians, who quite often are really nice people. (You can listen to my interviews on The Podium, the Olympics podcast from Vox Media and NBC Sports.)

“We have some responsibilities when we have this medal count,” said Tore Øvrebø, head of the Norwegian Olympic Committee delegation, as we sat down for our second interview in three days. “We want to talk about systems and how we do things, but not brag about it.”

He’ll leave the gushing to others, like Angela Ruggiero. The hockey hall of famer sits on the board of the US Olympic Committee and the executive board of the International Olympic Committee. Over the past few years, she became acquainted with Norway’s system as chair of the coordinating committee for the IOC’s Youth Winter Olympic Games, held in 2016 in Lillehammer.

“I was blown away and started sharing it,” she told me last week. “But the conversation is bigger now that we are at the Games.”

The good news: Many of the ideas underpinning Norway’s sport system have begun taking hold in the US, especially those at the base of the pipeline. Stakeholders who have engaged with the Aspen Institute Project Play initiative will recognize most of them. The better news: Norway offers a road map on taking next steps.

Here are five things to know about Norway’s sport system.

It wasn’t always a model

For more than a half century after winter sports were added to the Olympic Games in 1924, Norway performed well, thanks largely to a nature-loving culture in which families get kids on cross-country skis and skates before they are old enough to start school. Then, at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Norway won just five medals, none gold, and finished 11th in the medal table. For all that snow and ice that Norwegians grow up on most of the year, the land of vikings could produce no conquerors in the sports played on those surfaces. It stung.

“A national trauma,” Øvrebø told me with a smile.

But it was a highly productive national trauma. Opportunity is often born from crisis, and the failure to show at those Games – with Norway set to host the Winter Games in Lillehammer in 1994 – prompted sport, government, and other leaders to get around the table and begin collaborating in ways they had not done previously. They began to fully embrace ideas that had been percolating since Norway had underperformed in the 1984 Winter and Summer Olympics.

Moving forward, Norway took a more coordinated approach to advancing sport at every level. Sport science increasingly guided the design of the system and activities of the federations responsible for developing athletes, whose holistic needs (psychological, intellectual, and social) were now emphasized. World-class research on best practices was produced by universities and, rather than languish in academic journals, moved with purpose into the field. Coaches at every level were encouraged to apply key principles, and top coaches were brought together regularly to share knowledge across sports.

Sport for All is the governing ethos

The concept is baked into the policies and leadership structures that guide sport activity in Norway. The Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Confederation of Sports has under its purview the responsibility to develop athletes of all ability levels, including those with physical and intellectual disabilities, and the sport activity for all communities and all citizens at every point over the lifespan. The integrated approach facilitates engagement with the widest swath of the population through its member clubs, of which there are 12,000.

“Sport should be a human development program,” Øvrebø said, noting that 93 percent of young adults have participated in the system.

He said the way Norwegian society organizes itself encourages participation. “We have a social democracy model, which means that all kids have more or less the same opportunities,” he said. “They have good health care supported by the government and sufficient food and shelter growing up. They have a good education system and university system that is free. So when they start doing sport, they don’t need so much extra support because they’re already taken care of.”

Sport is seen less as a means to better life than it is in the US, where the chase for college athletic scholarships has reshaped the youth sport landscape over the past generation. Free to play for intrinsic rewards, most Norwegian youth still choose sports. It’s just more on their terms.

“(Youth) are literate and know how things work, and they learn to stand up and they can have a reflective conversation with teachers and coaches,” Øvrebø said. “The coaches cannot bully them because they have choice. If you have a child who chooses to be in sports, has ambition and understands hard work, then you can have a top athlete.”

Youth are the most important athletes in the system

The very best adult athletes are provided a renowned national training center, Olympiatoppen, to advance their talents. But unlike some European countries, Norway spends little on direct financial support for its elite athletes. About 250 athletes, across all winter and summer sports, receive an annual stipend of $10,000 to $15,000, Øvrebø said.

That doesn’t go very far on a per-capita income basis in the sixth-wealthiest nation in the world. (Norway, adjacent to the North Sea, is one of the world’s top oil producers.)

Instead, much of the focus of the Norwegian sport system is on the base of its pipeline. “Everything starts with the kids, the parents and the clubs,” Øvrebø said. Due to Norway’s small population and potential talent pool, sport leaders embrace policies that maximize enjoyment and limit attrition as youth move into adolescence.

They recognize that childhood is a time of exploration. So, youth are encouraged to sample a variety of sports through age 15; no less important, community clubs support that type of engagement. As a result, Norway has underwhelmed on the international stage in early specialization sports like gymnastics, which ask that children train in one sport well before adolescence to advance to elite competition. But youth also develop the overall athleticism that facilitates entry into a wide array of sports, and, research shows, creates athletes for life.

“People [in countries such as the US] are having a discussion about specialization at 6, 7 and 8, which is an absurd discussion in Norway,” said Koss, who now lives in Toronto. “It’s not like [Norwegian children] are not spending a lot of time in sport. They’re very physically active. They’re just practicing different things. They get a much broader base technically and physically than if they specialize early.”

This approach makes sense even for those who chase Olympic dreams, he said. “There’s a 10-year high intensity period [in elite development]. If you specialize from ages 7 to 17, you might not ever get that level. If you do it from 17 to 27, you peak at the right time.”

The latest example: Johannes Klaebo, 21. Considered a great all-around athlete who could have done well in soccer or other sports, he is one of the breakout stars of these Olympics, with three gold medals in cross country skiing. Øvrebø noted that until a year ago, few even in Norway had heard of him.

Competition structures are carefully introduced

Obviously, based on the PyeongChang results, Norwegian athletes know how to compete. But sport leaders in the country are judicious about when and how they introduce game and race formats, to align with best practices in athletic and child development.

One key feature: Clubs do not record game scores until age 13, to focus Norway’s network of mostly volunteer coaches on the personal development of each child rather than team success propelled often by early-blooming children who have a size advantage. Kids and adults keep scores in their heads, of course, but clubs are prohibited from publishing the results online or in the newspaper or using them to keep standings. In cross country skiing and other races, the time of the child may be posted but not their relative rank to other children.

“We like to win and lose, but it shouldn’t follow you and define you as an individual when you are a kid,” Øvrebø said. “We like it to be [about] play and having fun. They should learn social skills. Learn to take instructions, and think by themselves. Learn to know what the rules are. Learn why we are doing these things together. So there is a value system going through the [activity] that is actually about developing people. That’s the main goal of sport, to develop people.”

And if a club violates the no-keeping-score rule? “You get expelled from the Norwegian confederation of sports,” he said.

That might seem like a draconian penalty to people who only know the US model for youth sports, with its landscape of travel tournaments and AAU national championships down the second-grade level. Deeply held cultural notions that some have about the role of winning and losing in sports as a way to prepare children for life  have sparked fierce, philosophical debates about the provision of “participation trophies” to little kids.

We learn from the kids that everything is about having fun, so we try to put that into all our systems

In Norway, there’s no real debate. Kids through age 12 get trophies at the end of each season.“Everyone should see themselves as winners, just for participating,” said Øvrebø. They regard a participation ethos as key to, among other strategies, making room for late bloomers who don’t grow into their bodies, true interests, or talents until the teenage years. In the US system, there’s more pressure to achieve early as a means of gaining access to club teams that aggregate talent.

“I’m not saying the US is doing it wrong, because you have Olympic success and incredible, impressive professional sports,” Koss said. “We don’t have the talent base, so we have to do it different. Personally, I like the Norwegian model because I’m the result of it. I was not good at 15. I didn’t break through until 16 or 17, and if I would have been excluded before then, I might not have made it.”

Øvrebø said the Norwegians consider ambition to be “natural” and that that coaches are expected to teach psychological “competition skills,” especially as athletes begin training for elite competition. But the values and benefits of cooperation are promoted as well. It’s been a defining feature of the Norwegian teams in PyeongChang, rivals on the same team training together – and playing off steam together. Time’s Sean Gregory noted in a piece last week how members of the team have been playing cards and charades before competitions.

“We came here with three objectives,” Øvrebø told me last week. “One was to have fun. That’s very important. We learn from the kids and the freestyle [athletes] that everything is about having fun, so we try to put that into all our systems. We also should leave Korea being at least as good of friends as we were coming in. We’re planning another Olympics, so let’s not break too many relationships.

“The last ambition is to take 30 medals. To be top three.”Mission accomplished there. And then some.

The model is funded – by gambling

The US is one of the few nations without a sports ministry or similar federal entity charged with coordinating sport development. In 1978, the Congress asked the U.S. Olympic Committee to take on that role, with oversight over the sport-specific National Governing Bodies (NGBs) in charge of each pipeline. The challenge: It was an unfunded mandate. Without dedicated resources, the USOC relies on sponsorships, media revenues, and individual donations to support operations. Those funds largely go to NGBs and athletes with the best prospects of delivering Olympic medals, which in turn drives commercial opportunities.

Norway has the grassroots piece covered, thanks to gambling.

Sports betting and other forms of gambling are legal in Norway, and controlled by a government-sanctioned non-profit company, Norsk Tipping. When placing a bet, players may direct 7 percent of their stake to a local club, humanitarian organization, or cultural organization of their choice. This doesn’t affect their possible prize but is a distribution of a small share of Norsk Tipping’s annual surplus. In 2017, the “Grass Root Share” generated $58 million, said Roar Jodahl, spokesman for Norsk Tipping.

At the end of the year, Norsk Tipping sends the rest of its surplus to the government, which distributes the funds to an array of organizations based on a formula determined by the country’s parliament. The current distribution cut is 64 percent to sports, 18 percent to culture, and 18 percent for social/humanitarian purposes. In 2016, that generated $330 million for sport organizations, most of them at the community level.

The next step for Norway is to improve its international performance in summer Olympics.

Since inception in 1948, when Norsk Tipping was created as a means of financing the rebuilding of the country after World War II, the fund has delivered $6.4 billion (in 2016 value) to sports.

“The funds from Norsk Tipping are and have been vital to the financing of sports in Norway for many years,” Jodahl wrote in an email. “As explained above, the financing is reasonably large and the only annual contribution from government to the sports movement. This means it finances a large breadth of sports purposes close to home to the regular Norwegian – like the building of sports arenas all around the country for various sports, soccer balls, training gear and kids’ activities. But it also provides the main financing for the professional sports programs, like the anti-doping program, the Olympiatoppen program, mentorship and scholarships for professional athletes.”

Those funds also allow the government to drive adoption of best practices by sport providers, through the setting of grant criteria. “That provides opportunity for mostly sport-for-all projects,” Koss said. “This is critical to the stability and health of the Norwegian people.”

The results are hard to argue with. Norway is ranked No. 1 in the world on the Human Development Index, a measure of public health. It also ranked first on the World Happiness Report and first in the Democracy Index. One could argue those measures are unrelated to sport, but the Norwegians I spoke with disagree. They view sport as an all-purpose tool to build better citizens and more cohesive communities.

Now, they’re No. 1 in elite sports, at least in winter disciplines.

“It’s something that intuitively (makes sense),” said Ruggiero, of the strategy of growing access to quality sport activity for youth as a means of delivering better health outcomes and ultimately better Olympians. “But when you see results, people notice. It’s just taken a while for that youth structure to bubble up and produce results at the elite level.”

The next step for Norway, Øvrebø said, is to improve its international performance in summer Olympics. The country won just four medals, all bronze, at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But progress is being made there, too. In 2017, Norway rose to No. 1 as the greatest “per-capita sports nation in the world,” according to a website that issues annual rankings based on results in international competitions. Norway scored points throughout the year in 21 different sports, including track and field, handball, rowing, road cycling, and swimming.

“So it’s not the food, and it’s not the genes,” Øvrebø said. “It’s how we organize things.”

Alan Ashley, chief of sport performance for the USOC, is intrigued. The US won 23 medals in PyeongChang, down from 28 in Sochi in 2014 and 37 in Vancouver in 2010 when it set the Winter Games record. Displacing the US at the top of the medal table was not just Norway but Germany (31) and Canada (29) – all countries that have embraced sport-for-all policies and greater coherence in athlete development.

“We have something of a fractured system in our country,” Ashley said. “We have high school sports, club sports, college sports. You’ve got elite sport through NGBs, all these players in the mix. If we can figure out a way to be more systematic and consistent in how we introduce children to sport, get them to love sport, give them skills, and how we train our coaches, then we can use that as a springboard.”

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. At the 2018 Project Play Summit, the program will explore ways to improve the US sports system, drawing in part upon lessons learned from Norway’s model.