The beauty of youth sports is that your 10 favorite stories of the year are likely deeply personal. When you become a parent, your favorite athlete becomes the child that you’re raising. That means the confidence, development and enjoyment your child hopefully receives from sports come in so many different forms.
HSS CEO: We owe parents awareness on sports health risks, benefits
Kobe Bryant Tells Sports Parents to Get Out of the Way
At the Aspen Institute’s 2018 Project Play Summit, NBA legend Kobe Bryant urged adults to “get out of the way” and allow children to enjoy less-structured sports.
“Sometimes the most important thing you can do is just to observe,” Bryant told more than 400 people at the Newseum in Washington, DC. “You just watch and then you can guide. Get out of the way, observe, listen and guide.”
Bryant’s comments came on the heels of an announcement from Nike and the United States Olympic Committee to develop a free, 30-minute training course on coaching kids 12 and under. The course, HowToCoachKids.org, was inspired by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play 2020 effort to increase the quality and quantity of volunteer youth coaches in the US.
There are 6.5 million volunteer youth coaches across the US, yet fewer than 4 in 10 are trained. As a result, too many kids drop out of the sports or activities they once loved – fueling the inactivity crisis instead of helping to reverse it.
Bryant learned the European model of youth sports while spending much of his childhood in Italy. The best coaches he had contained similar traits: They were never condescending, they were not abusive with how they taught the game, and they encouraged questions.
Bryant’s post-NBA career includes coaching his 12-year-old daughter’s basketball team. Youth sports have become very structured, “which is very concerning,” he said. “We don’t have time to bring that imagination out. It’s a really big concern.”
For the first 20 minutes of his daughter’s practices, Bryant tells the children to practice imagine themselves as players. “They do this and I wonder what they’re seeing in their heads, I wonder what they’re imagining,” he said. “But it’s for them.”
Bryant told a story about a friend coaching a boys basketball team and instructing the kids they would have a water break in five minutes. More than five minutes passed without a break and the boys continued playing. When the friend tried the same approach with Bryant’s girls team, the players immediately pushed back.
“I said, ‘Dude, you lost the team already,’” Bryant said. “Mean what you say. They’ll hold you accountable. It’s not good enough to just say, ‘You know what? Do this.’ Boys will like say I’ll do it. Girls will say, ‘I’ll do it, but explain why.’ You have to measure your words because they’re very impactful. You can’t just throw out a comment here or there, boy or girl.”
Watch All Project Play Summit Sessions and Read Companion Content
Quotable
Soundbites from the 2018 Project Play Summit
“I’m trying to help usher [skateboarding] in in the most authentic way, let’s put it that way… I feel like at this point that the Olympics need skateboarding’s ‘cool factor’ more than we need their validation – in the same way snowboarding provided that to the winter games and it’s not all ice skating. Now in the summer games, it’s not going to be all swimming. No offense to swimmers, but enough swimming events.
— Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk on the sport joining the Olympics in 2020
I want [East St. Louis kids] to really know that I walked the same streets. I worked with the same people. And that the impossible is probable.
— Olympic legend Jackie Joyner-Kersee on her foundation’s work with youth
It’s a right for children and all youth in Norway to take part in sport. It’s more or less free to participate in sport from when you are a little kid.
— Inge Andersen, former head of the Norwegian Olympic and Paralympic Committee
I’m quite optimistic [about soccer’s future in the US] because I see a change in our paradigm shift. In the past we were more coach-centered and now we’re more player-centered.
— Nico Romejin, U.S. Soccer Federation chief sport development officer
Project Play Summit Content
State of Play: 2018 National Youth Sports Report
State of Play: Mobile County Report
Project Play Summit Media Coverage
Coach Kobe: Bryant shares philosophies on how to reach kids (Associated Press)
Story originally published here.
10 charts that show progress, challenges to fix youth sports
Flag football surpassed tackle as the most commonly played form of the game for kids ages 6 to 12 in 2017. Fewer kids are physically inactive. Sampling of most major team sports is up. Most coaches are still winging it. And kids from lower-income homes face increasing barriers to sports participation.
Those are among the key findings from the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program’s State of Play: 2018 report released on October 16 at the Project Play Summit. Progress is being made in some areas; much more improvement is needed to realize the goal of every child having access to quality sports, regardless of zip code or ability.
Below is Project Play’s annual release of charts showing the national landscape in youth sports compared to past years. All data are for kids ages 6 to 12 and were provided to the Aspen Institute by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, which in 2017 commissioned a survey of 30,999 individuals through Sports Marketing Surveys.
The biggest news: Flag football (3.3 percent) surpassed tackle football (2.9 percent) for kids ages 6 to 12 who played sports on a regular basis. The sports with the largest three-year participation increase were flag football (38.9 percent) and competitive cheerleading (29.8 percent). Tackle football was down almost 2 percent.
Ten of the 15 sports tracked by Project Play saw increased participation on a regular basis in 2017. That’s progress, though the big three sports for kids (soccer, baseball, and basketball) are still down significantly from a decade ago. In 2017, only bicycling, tackle football, soccer, swimming, and tennis experienced one-year declines.
Churn rate means the difference between the number of kids a sport loses compared to the number who return or try the sport for the first time. In 2017, among the nine sports evaluated by Project Play, cheerleading, baseball, and flag football fared the best in retaining and bringing in new participants. Baseball lost the fewest percentage of kids (18.4 percent). Soccer was at the bottom of the list with a negative 7.7 percent net churn rate.
Consider this: In 2012, 46.9 percent of kids ages 6-12 in household incomes of under $25,000 played a team sport at least one day. At the time, there was very little difference in participation numbers between those children and kids in homes with incomes of $25,000 to $49,000 (49.3 percent). And even the gap between the lowest- and highest-income kids was “only” 17 percentage points. By 2017, that gap had doubled to 34.9 percentage points. The kids in homes under $25,000 were now 10.5 percentage points behind just the next highest class. Poorer kids are being left behind in all aspects of society, and sports is no different.
Less than four in 10 youth coaches say they are trained in any of the following areas: sport skills and tactics, effective motivational technique, or safety needs (CPR/basic first aid and concussion management). Lacrosse had the highest percentage of trained coaches in four of the six competencies; soccer was last in five categories. For the third straight year, soccer ranked last among coaches trained in concussion management (25 percent). Lacrosse was the highest (48 percent). Lacrosse, flag football, and volleyball coaches were the most trained in general safety.
Women remained an untapped area to develop more youth coaches. In 2017, only 23 percent of adults who coached kids 14 and under in the past five years were female. That was down from 28 percent in 2016 and the lowest on record dating to 2012.
Younger and older citizens also could be recruited as coaches. In 2017, 81 percent of youth coaches were between the ages of 25 and 54. Some of that is natural since that’s the period when people tend to have children playing sports. But high school and college students and retired citizens are available to help too.
The percentage of children who played a team sport at least one day in 2017 slightly increased for the third straight year. But the percentage of kids who played team sports on a regular basis in 2017 (37 percent) remained a far cry from 2011 (41.5 percent).
Children in our age group played an average of 1.85 team sports in 2017 – the first improvement in four years, albeit a slight increase. As recently as 2011, kids were averaging more than two sports (2.11). Still, 2017 marked progress.
This statistic perennially shows a decline. In 2017, only 23.9 percent of kids in our age group regularly participated in high-calorie-burning sports. The figure was as high as 28.7 percent in 2011.
Good news: The percentage of physically inactive children has now fallen for three consecutive years, from 19.5 percent in 2014 to 17 percent in 2017. That’s still too many children not moving, but it’s a major advance. In total, roughly 700,000 more kids are now off the couch and doing something.
To learn more about Project Play, visit www.ProjectPlay.us. Read the entire State of Play: 2018 report at as.pn/Play2018. Watch videos and read companion content from the 2018 Project Play Summit. Project Play released new tools, reports and commitments to help more kids get active through sports.
Story was originally published here.
Meet NBC’s Mary Carillo, emcee of the 2018 Project Play Summit
Risa Isard
Mary Carillo’s voice is synonymous with tennis, the Olympics, and “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” She has worked in sports broadcasting since 1980, spanning jobs with USA Network, PBS, MSG, ESPN, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, and HBO, where she won a Sports Emmy Award.
Soon, she will be inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. But first Carillo will emcee the Project Play Summit on October 16 in Washington, DC. Risa Isard, program manager at the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, recently caught up with Carillo and discussed her concerns about kids turning to technology instead of physical activity, early specialization in sports, and what kind of sport parent she was for her children.
Risa Isard: What excites you about what Project Play is doing, and specifically the Project Play Summit?
Mary Carillo: I recognized at a pretty early age that I was a jock. I will never forget the feeling — the first time my dad threw me a ball and I caught it. I think anything that I’ve ever done after catching that first ball as a little kid has informed how I feel about myself. That is what excites me so much about Project Play. What worries me is that so many kids consider sports something they play on their phones or on their iPad. If there’s something that this country can do to get kids more engaged at a young age, and keep them there, I think we’re going in the right direction.
Isard: What would it mean to have a country in which all kids have the opportunity to be active through sport?
Carillo: The sport I come from, tennis, is a sport that requires grownups to take you to tennis tournaments, get you lessons, [etc.]. But a lot of sports are street sports. You learn how to play hockey and basketball and football, soccer especially, from your friends. We have got to do a better job of opening up sport so that every kid feels like they get a chance.
Isard: What have you seen in your own life and in your broadcasting career as it relates to early specialization in sports?
Carillo: Specializing can be a dangerous business. The unfortunate part is that if you do not specialize you’re way behind. Steffi Graf turned pro and she was 13 years old. Jennifer [Capriati] did too. These are kids who don’t even finish high school, so they separate not only from other sports but they separate from any kind of a formal education. That to me is dangerous.
We didn’t want to be real tennis nerdy parents and force our kids to play.
Isard: We’ll be talking at the Summit about the promise of mixed-gender sport among kids. What were your experiences growing up playing in mixed-gender settings?
Carillo: I love that we’re going to spend some time focusing on this. Mixed doubles is the only [Grand Slam] event I ever won. It was 1977 with a kid I grew up playing with — John McEnroe. I’ve played with a lot of boys from an early age. So often in team sports the girls would be trying to get the football, get the basketball, and the boys would just block them out. “Oh, she’s a girl. She throws like a girl.” Accepting mixed-gender participation at an early age is key. Boys have to know that they can pass to girls.
Isard: Thinking about our theme, which is to Think Global, Play Local, what’s something interesting you’ve seen from your travels that you’d love to see brought to the US in youth sport?
Carillo: Especially in Rio in Brazil, where soccer is king and the women are so tremendous, there is a freedom to their style of play. The flair, the imagination, the freedom that those kids who become great players have is because they teach themselves. It’s like the way the Canadian hockey players play — you can tell that a lot of what they do is just instinctive.
Isard: What kind of sport parent were you?
Carillo: [My kids’] dad and I both came from a tennis-playing society and at an early age we noticed that both our kids preferred team sports. We didn’t want to be real tennis nerdy parents and force them to play. My son played basketball. My daughter was a track star and a volleyball player. I enjoyed watching them play. I had become so inured to the idea that there’s no cheering in the press box that I would pretty much sit on my hands, and I remember the parents of the other kids would say, “Why aren’t you getting more excited?” My kids are still very active … so I don’t think I screwed them up too much. They might give you a different answer!
Isard: You’ve covered the past 14 Olympic Games. What do you think is the role of the US Olympic Committee in protecting athletes from abuse? Or what should it be?
Carillo: The scandal in gymnastics has been an absolute horror, and clearly US Olympic [officials] have to all get better about this. It’s tragic to hear what can happen, what got buried, and what should have come out years and years ago. You hope that we pay far greater attention and take much better care of these young athletes because, you know, kids trust coaches. Kids are taught to trust people with whistles, people in uniform, grownups who are supposed to be doing only the best things for them. We’ve got to make sure that that stays true.
Isard: What’s your advice to kids who say they want to retire from sport before age 12?
Carillo: Even if you’re not a great athlete, if you just stay physical, stay a part of something larger than yourself, understand how to share and how to divide roles and how to follow rules, there is nothing but good that comes from that.
Isard: Who is the best coach you ever had and what made them the best?
Carillo: When I was around 12 years old, I got the chance to be coached by the late, great Harry Hopman. I would say he was more of a coach than a teacher. He didn’t tend to spend a lot of time on your strokes. He just taught you what to do with them. I think there’s a great difference between teaching and coaching. He made me want to be on his court.
Isard: You’re being inducted later this year in the Sports Video Group’s Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame. What are you most proud of in your career?
Carillo: Probably the longevity of it. I’m going in with an unbelievable group of fellows, including the great Bob Costas. Over all this time, I have gotten so much appreciation and respect for all sports, and I’ve been able to tell stories all these years and to get to know the athletic heart of some of the most remarkable athletes of our time.
Tune in to the Project Play Summit on Oct. 16 by watching selected sessions live at as.pn/PPLive. Speakers will include Kobe Bryant, Tony Hawk, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee. See the Summit agenda for approximate livestream times. Learn more about Project Play at www.ProjectPlay.us.
Story was originally published here.
How France really won the World Cup
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.
Reimagining the public value of sports betting
Andre Fountain
In May, the Supreme Court overturned a 25-year old federal law, the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), that prohibited sports betting in every state except for Nevada. With the legalization of sports betting, states are moving swiftly to explore the opportunity to enter the lucrative industry. Since May, four more states – Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, and West Virginia – have introduced this form of gambling. As more states enter the market, an essential question to consider: How can sports betting serve the public interest?
The Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program took on this question to discuss possible solutions by convening experts from gambling, law, politics, professional sports, and health and fitness for our “Future of Sports Betting” conversation on Sept. 14, as part of our Future of Sports conversation series.
During the two-hour discussion at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, DC the six panelists and two moderators helped to identify a path forward on ways sports betting can reimagine its public value for the good of society. Read coverage by USBETS here, an op-ed by Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program Executive Director Tom Farrey here, and research on other countries’ experience with sports betting here.
Below are highlights from the conversation.
MLB Shares its Position
Now that sports betting can be legalized in all US states, this will have massive effects on professional sports. As a creator of the sporting events that influence gambling, pro sports leagues want a cut of the action through a small “integrity fee” from gambling revenues.
“[The sports betting] industry, is 100 percent entirely reliant on the sports leagues to create the events on which the bet takes,” said Morgan Sword, Major League Baseball senior vice president. “So, we think it’s reasonable that the league that is spending all this money to create the events on which the bets are happening, receive some small compensation from the casino that’s offering the bet.”
Morgan Sword, Keith Whyte, Laila Mintas, and James Kilsby
Sword added that other countries have similar models where the sports leagues are receiving compensation. From MLB’s perspective, “it’s good policy,” Sword said.
Right now, out of the five states that offer sports betting, none pay royalties to the leagues. Despite the 0-for-5 start, Sword remains hopeful that an integrity fee will be granted in other states.
“There’s legitimate arguments on both sides … whether or not legalized sports betting is a good thing, in aggregate, for the country,” Sword said. “It no longer matters what our position is on that, because it’s here. So rather than hand-wringing around whether we are for it or against it, we decided that we would do everything we could to study the countries around the world that offer sports betting and [find out] the absolute best way to do this.”
Central Sports Betting Portal
To ensure the integrity of the games, gaming and sports law attorney Daniel Wallach said there is a need for an integrated integrity sports platform. The platform would be a central portal for information sharing on bets by all of the gambling states.
Such a platform would track possible “match-fixing” and in real-time that would help lead to arrests. Ohio state Senator Bill Coley, president of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States (NCLGS), agreed in theory about the suggestion, but doesn’t foresee this type of platform being mandated on the federal level. He argued that states could work together to create a portal.
Funding Youth Sports Through Sports Betting
Tom Cove, CEO of the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, made the case that the revenue from sports betting should go towards youth sports and physical fitness. Data show that household income is a major factor in whether children are physically active and play sports.
“We have a public policy imperative and there’s a public policy solution here, and there are many historical and particularly current analogies that suggest that we could take resources from this need,” Cove said. “There is a logical and moral relationship between sports betting and youth sports.”
Norway and China have models of using sports betting and lottery revenue to fund youth sports. In the United States, Colorado uses its lottery revenue to be distributed in three ways – 50 percent goes to the Great Outdoors Colorado Trust Fund, 40 percent goes to the Conservation Trust Fund, and 10 percent to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Cove encourages states to develop funding priorities around sports betting and use Norway, China, and Colorado as models.
Aiding Gambling Disorders
Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), brought a unique perspective to the discussion by focusing on finding solutions to help bettors with gambling problems and prevent new bettors from creating bad habits. Still, Whyte mentioned that NCPG is neutral on legalized gambling and hopes to work with all stakeholders – professional sports leagues, states, and bettors.
Nevada only started receiving public funding in 2005 for problem gambling programs, Whyte said. All those years prior, “the gambling capital in America did not put a single cent of public money into problem gambling programs,” he said. “Most of the states that have legalized so far have followed suit. So, we’ve got a fundamental baseline problem here.”
Like Sword, Whyte is dissatisfied with the pace of legalization to adopt some of the methods that the NCPG is advocating for, but he remains hopeful that some of the populous states will build a strong framework soon.
Mobile Gambling Is the Future
The future of sports betting is in mobile and online, and the casinos ought to get ready. “Online is king,” said Wallach, a gaming and sports law attorney. Wallach said that to maximize revenues, casinos for sports betting must have a mobile and online presence.
Daniel Wallach and Tom Farrey
Right now, New Jersey is leading the market with eight online sportsbooks, and the state expects more to become available. The other states that offer sports betting are following the brick-and-mortar method.
The experience that New Jersey has with online casino gaming over the past five years is helping the state stay ahead of the pack. And the true value of the mobile and online sports betting presence will be its impact after one month of the NFL season.
Professional sports leagues like MLB and the NBA support mobile and online betting too. Sword thinks that such a platform will be good to control and monitor the books since a “paper trail” would now be in an electronic format.
“When you walk into a sportsbook and you make a bet at a window, we have no information about who you are, what other bets you’ve made,” Sword said. “And, when you’ve been making a bet on a mobile phone, we know a lot more than that. And, our ability to combine information, across bettors, across casinos, across states is dramatically improved.”
Dr. Laila Mintas, deputy president of Sportradar US, said it’s very important to have a mobile presence because, “people want to place a bet no matter where they are and whenever they want to do it.” In the UK, around 70 percent of betting is done on mobile. If the US lacks mobile options for bettors, they will continue to wager offshore, Mintas said.
Collective Action Among Key Stakeholders
The NCPG has been in talks with MLB and other pro sports leagues about a possible partnership to combat compulsive gambling. “This could be like the United Way [commercials],” Whyte said. “There could be major league stars saying, ‘Hey, bet with your head, but not over it.’”
Another collaborative effort could be between the leagues and the sports betting operators on the different types of sports betting to include.
“Smaller bets that happen during the course of the game … the first pitch of the game [being] a ball or a strike – that is problematic for us, because it’s very easy for an individual player to manipulate the outcome of that bet and very hard for us to detect,” Sword said.
A sports betting operator offered bets on this year’s Home Run Derby, which was won by Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper over the Chicago Cubs’ Kyle Schwarber. There were some questions on whether Harper’s batting practice pitcher threw some pitches too quickly – and against Home Run Derby rules – in order to catch up and win the contest.
Those who placed a bet on Schwarber became furious and blamed the MLB on social media. “If anyone asked us, we would tell you don’t offer bets on the home run derby,” Sword said. “It’s an exhibition event that’s meant for people to enjoy and have fun.”
Biggest Winners and Losers as Sports Betting Expands
Five years from now, who will be the biggest winners and losers as sports betting expands? Predictions varied across panelists, with the leagues perhaps seen as the biggest winners should sports betting be structured well. Cove, meanwhile, focused on the revenue it could produce for defined public purposes, such as building healthy kids and communities through community sports and recreation.
“States that institute programs to deliver back for the generations in perpetuity, focused on a social good, particularly for physical activity and health of kids [will be a winner],” Cove said.
You can read a full transcript of the event here.
Find the original story published here.
What's next for youth sports?
Let’s start with the end in mind. Ten years from now, the US will host the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and two years prior our nation will have hosted the men’s World Cup. By then, sports betting likely will have been legalized in most of the country, generating at minimum $5 billion a year in revenue for states — and perhaps the federal government if it gets involved — to distribute. If the trends of today continue, the sports industry could be twice the size, in revenue if not cultural influence.
Barring major missteps, it’s fair to assume the top of our sports pyramid will be categorized as somewhere between robust and very robust.
The bottom? That’s entirely TBD, depending on how much stakeholders commit to building healthy communities through sports, starting with quality experiences for all children regardless of ZIP code or ability.
There is a great story to be told. But it will take vision, leadership, and systems-level adjustments in the provision of sport opportunities.
The next year will be critical in designing that future, with new chiefs setting new courses at key governing bodies (US Olympic Committee, US Soccer Federation), leagues such as the NBA taking more control of their youth pipelines, the introduction of sports betting in more states, and industry-aligning grassroots efforts via Project Play 2020.
Here are five questions that the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program plans to keep in mind as we help stakeholders identify opportunities:
What are we as a nation trying to achieve here?
There are lots of reasons Americans are drawn to sports. The desire to be entertained. To witness the limits of human physical expression. To have something to talk about with the in-law who annoys you or your neighbor on the other side of political divide. Common cause, even if it’s around something as superficial as a favorite team, has value.
But what people want even more is to live in vibrant communities that foster the well-being of their families. The most desirable communities are active communities with ample bike paths, recreation spaces, and sport activities (both organized and unstructured) for kids through seniors.
Developing more policies and partnerships that place health and inclusion — the core values of Project Play — at the center of our sport system will be essential in aligning the interests of stakeholders and addressing myriad other issues, including the health care crisis.
Who gets defined as an athlete?
One of the key developments of the past year was the National Federation of State High School Associations embracing e-sports. Other traditional sport entities are investing in competitive video gaming as well, and as they chase the dollars, the public will be asked to expand the notion of an athlete to include those whose body movements are largely limited to a few fingers. The argument has been proffered: That’s a couple more fingers than are used in riflery.
That is true, though there are hazards in adjusting our common cultural understanding of sport as activity that involves physical activity. We know that good things happen when bodies are in motion. By the week it seems, the research grows about the physiological, mental, academic, social, and emotional benefits of being active and/or playing sports.
More essential is expanding our scope of the athletes served by key institutions. The US Olympic Committee (USOC) is a critical player. In 1978, the Amateur Sports Act placed the USOC in charge of developing our sport system for athletes at all levels, including youth. Since the 1990s, and increasingly over the past decade, energies have shifted more toward the tippy-top of our sport system in an effort to turn Olympic hopefuls into Olympic stars.
There is a great story to be told. But it will take vision, leadership, and systems-level adjustments in the provision of sport opportunities.
That extreme focus on medals laid the groundwork for the abuses that emerged in USA Gymnastics and which have caused deep soul-searching at the USOC and the sport-specific national governing bodies it oversees. Moving forward, there will be a push to redefine Team USA as inclusive of any athlete playing on any surface anywhere; new USOC CEO Sarah Hirshland has signaled as much in early comments, though what that means practically is to be determined.
What’s the role of schools?
This year B. David Ridpath, a professor of sport business at Ohio University, published Alternative Models of Sports Development in America, in which he examined the model for school sports in the US that has been in place for more than a century. He compared it to the model favored in Europe, in which clubs provide most of the sport development opportunities for youth and schools are focused more exclusively on academics, plus some physical education.
The influence of club sports has grown in the US with some even prohibiting athletes from playing for school sports teams. Ironically, it’s driven by the chase for college athletic scholarships. As that trend marches forward, it presents a nice opportunity to reimagine the role of sports in schools. Given the body of research showing the cognitive and other benefits of physical activity, what school-based models best serve the broadest array of students? How can schools partner with community organizations to share resources? Do we need to rethink the role of the P.E. teacher, from provider of sport experiences to connector to local sport options?
School sport is a treasured American institution. But there’s room for innovation, and we will encourage conversation that inspires solutions.
What’s the role of the federal government?
The United States is one of the few nations in the world without a sports ministry or similarly situated body that can guide, coordinate or facilitate sport development. Some argue this is a good thing, skeptical that the federal government, especially amid the partisan warfare of today, can get anything done that is smart or sustainable.
President Trump is diving in anyway, asking his renamed President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, & Nutrition to develop a national strategy on youth sports. Progress to date has been slow; his nominees to the council, from Bill Belichick to Lou Ferrigno, still were awaiting confirmation as of early September, more than 17 months after Trump took office. The council remains buried within the Department of Health and Human Services, with a small budget and staff. Efforts to raise money from the private sector to support Trump’s agenda are underway.
Time will tell if the marketplace responds, or if Trump can get more done by focusing on the levers that the White House controls. Federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could be tasked to gather better data on sport participation so states can create their own “state of play” reports that will mobilize leaders. Grant criteria across federal agencies could be adjusted to align with youth sports needs. Proposed legislation, infrastructure bills or otherwise, could be reviewed with an eye toward the impact that the language may have on community sports.
How do we pay for it all?
This is a major question — but with a major opportunity before us. That would be legalized sports betting, which the Supreme Court opened the door to in May by ruling that the federal government could no longer prohibit states from authorizing (and taxing) such activity. New Jersey was the first mover, but no less than two dozen states are now taking steps to allow gambling on sports events. Within five years, that market could generate between $3.1 billion and $5.2 billion per year in annual revenue, according to one projection.
In Norway, revenues from sports betting are used to fund community sports and recreation. In 2016, $330 million was pumped back into communities for new projects, from facilities to equipment purchases. The support has played no small part in making Norway one of the most active and healthy nations in the world, with more than its fair share of elite athletes emerging at the top of the pyramid. At the 2018 Winter Games, Norway finished atop the medal count — not bad for a nation of 5.2 million people.
Further inspiration comes from Colorado, which has used lottery revenues to fund recreation projects. There, 24 cents of every dollar spent on the lottery goes back to the state, which since 1992 has generated $3.1 billion to build 900 miles of trails and 1,000 parks, skate parks, pools, and ballfields. The funds have improved facilities at some underfunded schools and preserved more than 700 miles of rivers. Small wonder Colorado has among the nation’s most active citizens and the state is one of the fastest-growing in the nation.
In September, our Future of Sports series put the question on the table of whether US states should use sports betting to fund the base of our sport system. It’s a conversation we’ll stay with as states make their plans.
Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. On October 16, the Sports & Society Program will host the 2018 Project Play Summit, the nation’s premier gathering of leaders at the intersection of youth, sport, and health.
The original story was published here.
The benefits of shifting from tackle to flag football for youth
It’s football season again. With it comes Friday Night Lights, weekend tailgates, acts of soaring athleticism in the face of danger – and the inevitable, and growing, conversation about the game’s future. Many parents have real concerns about introducing tackle football to their children, given the mounting research on head injuries and their potential long-term impact on cognitive and emotional function.
Last year, in a milestone development that flew beneath the radar of national media, flag football surpassed tackle football as the most commonly played form of the game among children ages 6 to 12, according to annual survey data by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Last week, the LA84 Foundation, a major grant-maker to youth sports programs in Southern California, announced that it would no longer fund programs that offer tackle football before age 14.
Today, our Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program releases a 27-page white paper that explores the consequences of this trend continuing. Eight months in the making, it asks: What if flag football becomes the standard way of playing the sport until high school? What are the implications for the sport, its stakeholders, and most importantly, the children who play the game?
We analyze this potential development from five angles:
Public health: Would delaying tackle football until high school make players safer?
Youth participation: Would flag bring more children into the sport, or drive them away?
Friday Night Lights: What impact, if any, might there be on high school football?
Football industry: What could this mean for the NFL and college football, in terms of talent development, fan cultivation, and long-term bottom line?
Civic life: How would a shift to flag impact the values promoted through the sport?
We peer into the crystal ball on these questions with the aid of a diverse set of experts convened in January at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC. The inaugural event in our Future of Sports conversation series, Future of Football: Reimagining the Game’s Pipeline, featured panels that included Dr. Robert Cantu, co-founder of the CTE Center at Boston University; Scott Hallenbeck, executive director, USA Football; former NFL players Chris Borland and Domonique Foxworth; Buddy Teevens, Dartmouth College coach; Jennifer Brown-Lerner, policy manager for the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, and mother of a grade-school boy who plays football; Tom Green, a high school coach in Maryland; and Dr. Andrew Peterson, representing the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Their insights were supplemented with perspectives gleaned from a post-event online survey distributed to attendees of the event and members of the public, including those who watched on livestream. Survey results and comments shown in this report come from 62 responses by parents, high school and youth coaches, athletic trainers, medical professionals and others. Those perspectives — plus Aspen Institute research — form the basis of this report. Each topic includes a discussion of the points of view shared, plus Aspen Institute analysis.
Our overarching conclusion: Children, the game and communities are likely to benefit if flag football becomes the standard way of playing before high school, with modifications. A key modification: Proper tackling technique is taught in in practice settings, and in a controlled manner, in the age group leading into it.
Among other factors, our conclusion is informed by the experience of hockey. A decade ago, USA Hockey recognized that it had a participation problem, with parents concerned about head injuries and kids quitting the game prematurely. The national governing body banned body-checking through age 12, and doubled-down on coach training, describing for stakeholders a clear pathway of progression through the sport. Since then, hockey is one of the few team sports to experience youth participation growth. Tough policy decisions were made that challenged the habits and notions of traditionalists, and the sport benefitted.
We hope this paper provides the necessary thought leadership to advance the game of football, helping parents, sport leaders, educators, policymakers and other stakeholders make reasoned and ethical decisions about improving the delivery of the game for youth, our society’s most valuable resource.
You can read the report here. We welcome your thoughts.
Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program. He can be reached at tom.farrey@aspeninstitute.org. Follow him on Twitter @TomFarrey and the program @AspenInstSport. The Future of Sports series continues Friday, Sept. 14, at 12:30pmET with a livestreamed discussion on the Future of Sports Betting.
The original story was published here.
NBA exec: Youth guidelines changing the game
Sports betting in the public interest
This article originally appeared in the Denver Post
Once in a generation, maybe once in a century, an opportunity comes along to deliver on the full promise of sports as a tool of nation-building. Not just entertainment. Not just an opportunity to reflect on our culture. But actual nation-building, meaning the use of sport to develop healthy children and communities, which in turn can help address a range of well-established challenges, from obesity to crime, and mental health to military readiness.
That opportunity is now before us, and I’d like to put it on the table.
It flows from legalized sports betting, which in May the Supreme Court opened the door to in ruling the federal government could no longer prohibit states from authorizing (and taxing) such activity. New Jersey was the first mover, but no less than two dozen states are now taking steps to allow gambling on sports events. Within five years, that market could generate between $3.1 billion and $5.2 billion a year in annual revenue, according to one projection.
The exact locations where such betting may occur, and the types of bets allowed, will be worked out, state by state, in the coming months and years. First in the door with their lobbyists were the casinos, who aim to limit sports betting to their facilities so they can hoard the winnings. Behind them are the professional sports leagues, who argue they need a cut of action — a so-called “integrity fee” — to have the resources to keep gamblers from compromising the results of games.
Within five years, the sports betting market could generate between $3.1 billion and $5.2 billion a year in annual revenue.
Those who lawmakers really should be hearing from are their peers in Norway, who have no vested interest in our policies, just a powerful example to share. With a population of 5.3 million, the westernmost Scandinavian nation is the size of many US states. It’s also among the healthiest nations in the world, which starts with a commitment to get children out of the house. Though Norway is bone cold most of the year that close to the Arctic Circle, most youths are physically active at least 60 minutes daily, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. They engage in a wide range of activities, from cross-country skiing to speed skating, soccer to team handball, and cycling to swimming.
Sports betting helps make all this possible. Along with other forms of gambling, sports betting is legal in Norway, controlled by a government-sanctioned non-profit company, Norsk Tipping. When placing a wager, a bettor is given the option of directing 7 percent of the company’s take to an approved local organization — sport, humanitarian or cultural — of their choice. In 2017, the “Grassroots Share” generated $58 million for such organizations, said spokesman Roar Jodahl.
Then, at the end of each year, Norsk Tipping sends its surplus to the government, which distributes the funds based on a formula determined by Parliament. Currently, sport and recreation groups get 64 percent of those funds, which in 2016 generated $330 million for new projects, most at the community level. Since inception in 1948 when Norsk Tipping was created to finance the rebuilding of the country after World War II, the fund has delivered $6.4 billion (in 2016 value) to sport providers alone, who have used the support to build local facilities, buy equipment, and train their mostly volunteer coaches.
“This is critical to the stability and health of the Norwegian people,” the great Olympic speed skater and humanitarian Johann Olav Koss told me recently.
States would be wise to draw on this model. Americans, like Norwegians, want to live in active, vibrant communities — and most of us understand intuitively the essential role of parks, bike paths, and recreation programs in creating them. Overwhelmingly, parents want their kids involved in organized and unstructured activities that lay the groundwork for healthy lifestyles into adulthood. And right now, that’s just not happening as much it needs to. Fewer than 3 in 10 high school students are physically active daily, and 39.8 percent of adults are obese.
Money alone won’t solve the problem. But as someone who has studied our sport delivery system for two decades, I can assure you that only so much progress can be made without greater investment in the hardware (nearby places to play) and software (better youth coaches, quality P.E. programs) of community recreation, especially in low-income urban and rural areas. In places like Harlem, Buffalo, Detroit, and Mobile County, Alabama, where our Aspen Institute program has landscaped the state of play, we’ve found no lack of desire by kids to play sports or adults who want to help – just a lack of resources to scale the best programs or provide safe places to go between the hours of 3 and 6 pm when parents are still at work. Baltimore had 130 neighborhood rec centers in 1990. Today, there are just 42. Neighborhoods without them have some of the highest crime rates.
Earmarking funds derived from sports betting to get more kids active turns a threat into a clearly articulated opportunity.
For states right now, the argument to legalize sports gambling lacks any defined public purpose. Former Senator Bill Bradley worries that turning every game into a betting opportunity, with the inevitable barrage of related ads, will change our relationship with sports and make it more transactional, less values-driven. So why do it? To prop up failing casinos? Grow franchise values and player salaries? Pump new revenue into a state’s general treasury, for legislators to argue over and spend who-knows-where, from government pensions to road construction?
Earmarking funds derived from sports betting to get more kids active through sports turns a threat into a clearly articulated opportunity. It’s coherent policy, leveraging the top of the sports pyramid – big-time entertainment – to underwrite the base. And we know the potential downstream results. For instance in Western New York, where we’re working, 16 percent of youth are active daily. If that number can be pushed to just half of all youth, the region will have 27,845 fewer overweight and obese children, which, if they stay active, projects to $472 million in direct medical costs saved and $500 million in economic productivity losses averted, according to Johns Hopkins University.
If that’s the value proposition, states should fully if carefully exploit the opportunity. Don’t force bettors to drive to casinos or race tracks to place wagers. Allow it on mobile devices so those who are inclined to bet (I’m not one of them) can do so from sports bars and living rooms. The more revenue derived, the greater chance states have to build healthier communities through sports, as well as develop the resources to limit problem gambling, behavior that certainly could grow. Agree to work only with companies that restrict bets to pro and perhaps college games, and with the leagues to keep game integrity issues from growing.
Then, watch your state flourish, as Colorado has with the aid of lottery revenues dedicated to funding recreation projects. There, 24 cents of every dollar spent on the lottery goes back to the state, which since 1992 has generated $3.1 billion to build 900 miles of trails and 1,000 parks, skate parks, pools, and ballfields. The funds improved facilities at some underfunded schools and preserved more than 700 miles of rivers. Small wonder Colorado has among the nation’s most active citizens, and the state is one of the fastest-growing in the nation.
Any state could take the leap into sports betting, smartly deployed. But I nominate Minnesota. It’s the same size population of Norway. Similar climate. History of investing in community sports. Scandinavian heritage, even. At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Team USA was practically Team Minnesota, whose hockey, curling and ski athletes helped our delegation win 23 medals, fourth-best in the medal count. The nation that finished on top? Norway, which won a record 39.
Amazing what grows at treetops when the grassroots get fed.
Tom Farrey (@TomFarrey) is a journalist and executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program. On Sept. 14, the Aspen Institute held panel discussions on the topic titled “Future of Sports Betting: Reimagining its Public Value.” Read the recap and transcript from the event. Learn how
other countries handle sports gambling.
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Revisiting Title IX 46 years later
Caitlin Morris
Title IX, signed on June 23, 1972, was a game changer. It altered the rules for federally funded activities in education, making it illegal to discriminate against women and girls in this area. It also gave them the opportunity to participate in sports and physical activities, creating a path for some of our greatest athletes, like Mia Hamm and Sheryl Swoopes.
Title IX built a strong policy-based foundation, but 46 years later, we know that our work has really only just begun. While many systemic and cultural changes — from reductions in physical education programs in public schools to increasingly higher costs of participation in competitive sports — have led to a drop in physical activity among all kids, girls are still getting the short end of the stick.
At Nike, we believe if you have a body, you’re an athlete. But fewer and fewer girls hold that statement to be true about themselves. More than 38 percent of girls (versus 25 percent of boys) in America don’t participate in sport. Girls are consistently two years behind boys in physical literacy skills. We may not be entirely sure why this gap exists, but we know the scale of its impact. Generally speaking, when girls lack the competence, they also lack the confidence to engage in sports. Children as young as 8 years old begin defining themselves as athletes, or not.
When girls walk away from sport this early in life, it affects more than just their health and happiness. Research shows that physically active kids are 15 percent more likely to attend college, and earn 7 to 8 percent more money, on average. Essentially, play equals power.
So, the big question today is, how can we all come together to truly, finally deliver on the promise of Title IX to promote gender equality in sports? For starters, we’d love to share some important lessons we’ve learned from our investments with community and school-based partners that we believe could have implications for all stakeholders:
1. Smart program design and coaching are key. If we don’t design programs specifically for and with girls in mind, they will sit on the sidelines, or worse, stop showing up. Also, If we don’t offer the presence and expertise of female coaches, girls will be less inclined to participate. We know that strong women make good role models for girls and help boost their confidence both on and off the court/field/track, yet only 28 percent of youth coaches are female. Programs like the Mamba League have shown us what’s possible in this context. Inspired by Kobe Bryant’s own youth experiences and coaching philosophy, the Mamba League was created to inspire girls and boys to learn basketball fundamentals and to build self-assuredness through leading an active, healthy lifestyle. Nike worked closely with the Los Angeles Boys and Girls Club to create a program that encouraged an equal number of boys and girls teams at every site and targeted female coaches to lead the girls-only teams. Every single girls’ team was led by female coaches, which drew girls to participate in record numbers — they made up 48 percent of the League in its first year. Those numbers held up in year two as well, even after the Mamba League doubled in size.
2. Data gaps will continue to hinder us. We know that what gets measured, gets done. While there is some data available on adolescent and teenage participation in sports in after-school programs, like the Boys and Girls Clubs, the current data sets do not fully capture sports participation for younger kids (12 years of age and under). They also don’t adequately cover gender breakdowns. And we know that physical activity does more than create good health. It contributes to leadership, productivity and innovation. It lowers depression and crime, increases educational achievement and income levels, and generates returns to businesses. This is why it is so critical to create access for girls — and all kids — to have early positive experiences with sport, so they may reap the benefits over their lifetime. More research needs to be performed in order for all of us to better understand — and address — the issues at hand. Without a baseline for how many girls are participating in sports and other physical activities, or details on where and how we are falling short, we will not be able to successfully evaluate any of our current efforts and investments. Once fueled with this information, as program funders, we may better examine and better channel/invest our time, energy and resources toward creating innovative, proven solutions to get more girls — and kids, in general — active.
3. This is everyone’s issue. No one organization or sector can increase girls’ sports participation alone. This has to be a team effort in order to succeed. We need multi-stakeholder engagement — and we need to visit this subject together on an ongoing basis. We applaud the continuing collaboration between the City of Los Angeles, The Getty Foundation, and non-profit as well as corporate institutions who are gathering in L.A. on June 23 to help get more girls moving across the city. The Aspen Institute Project Play 2020 initiative is another great example of multi-stakeholder engagement in the United States. The consortium of organizations — of which Nike is a founding member — aims to develop shared goals and advance collective action around making sports accessible to all kids in the US, regardless of zip code, ability or gender.
Title IX Day is more than just a moment for reflection and celebration on how far we’ve come to build gender equity in athletics. It’s a call to action to break down the existing barriers for girls so they can confidently get in the game. Because we know that once they start, they won’t want to stop.
Caitlin Morris is the General Manager of Global Community Impact at Nike, where she focuses on getting kids active and reversing the physically inactive epidemic. Nike is a founding member of the Aspen Institute Project Play 2020 initiative, which is a multiyear effort by leading organizations to grow national sport participation rates and related metrics among youth. Learn more about Project Play at www.ProjectPlay.us.
Find the original story published here.
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Five years ago this spring, Project Play was launched. We invited more than 80 leaders from sport, health, media, philanthropy and other sectors to the Aspen Institute’s campus in Colorado to take measure of how well children were being served through sports and to consider ways to improve the state of play.
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Too many Baltimore youth coaches use political connections to avoid proper training that could keep more kids active in sports, Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott said.
Speaking at the Project Play: Baltimore Huddle in June 2017, Scott called for unifying language in Baltimore that stipulates training and background checks as requirements to be a youth sports coach – whether at a city school or recreation program. Scott recently announced he is running for Maryland lieutenant governor alongside Jim Shea in the Democratic primary for governor.
How Norway won the Winter Olympics
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.