where we convene leaders around the important challenges of our time, help them find common ground, and inspire solutions that aim to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number. My focus is on how sport, broadly defined, can serve the public interest, starting with the building of healthy communities.
This book makes a great contribution to that dialogue. David Ridpath recognizes the essential role that sport plays in the vitality of the nation and its people, then asks whether the sport system we have in place, drawn up more than a hundred years ago as a tool of nation-building, is serving the needs of Americans in the twenty-first century. Better yet, with research and courage, he identifies several potential paths forward.
We should not be afraid to explore systems-level change in the development and delivery of sport programs in the United States, but rather understand it as an opportunity to respond to the marketplace.
Consider: More than four out of five parents of youth under age eighteen say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that their child play sports, and a full 96 percent see some value, according to household surveys conducted in 2017 for our Aspen Institute program, Project Play, a multistage initiative to provide stakeholders with tools to build what we call “Sport for All, Play for Life” communities. Americans get sports, and not just as spectators. It’s a physical expression of the spirit, and a site of self-learning and social connection. No one wants their kid stuck on the couch, glued to a screen, all but thumbs inert.
Yet today, as early as first grade in some communities, the structure of our sport system begins to push aside kids. We create tryout-based travel teams, sorting the weak from the strong well before children grow into their bodies, minds, and true interests. Those who don’t make the cut, or don’t receive the playing time, get the message that they are not a priority and begin checking out of the system. Meanwhile, the kids at the center of the system—those told they are the next generation of athlete-entertainers—are increasingly encouraged to train year-round. They often play too many games for their developing bodies, risking overuse injuries, unnecessary concussions, and burnout.
For each of the past five years, the number of youth who are “active to a healthy level” through sports has fallen, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Only 24.8 percent of kids ages six to twelve, and 38.4 percent of youth thirteen to seventeen, play at least three days a week. Further, only 27.1 percent are physically active one hour daily, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, even as participation on high school teams has held steady at about half of all students.
To date, Project Play has been focused on ages twelve and under, given the mountain of research on the physical, mental, social-emotional and educational benefits that flow to physically active kids. Getting them moving early unleashes a virtuous cycle—they go on to college more often, stay active into adulthood more often, make higher incomes in the workplace, enjoy lower health care costs, and are twice as likely to have active children. As a society, we must make quality, regular sport activity accessible to every child, regardless of zip code or ability.
At the same time, we recognize that the landscape of youth sports has been transformed over the past generation by the priorities of the two institutions that Ridpath explores in this book—school sports and college sports. NCAA member institutions today offer $3 billion in athletic aid, up from $250 million in the early 1990s, according to the NCAA. That’s a lot of chum tossed into the sea of youth sports. Even for the well-positioned, it’s rarely a meal, as full-ride athletic scholarships are confined to just a few sports; rather, it’s just enough to induce a feeding frenzy among parents, terrified about how they one day must pay hefty college tuitions. So they invest, at ever-earlier ages for kids, in private trainers, traveling club teams, and $300 cleats or bats.
If they can.
They seek return on investment, even if it’s just playing time for their kid on the high school team. Not an easy thing to come by today. Intramurals are largely a thing of the past, as is regular PE past middle school. At large, public high schools, eighty kids might try out for the varsity basketball team. Thirteen might make the team, with eight or nine seeing real minutes in games. It’s hardly a recipe for broad-based provision of the health and other benefits that sports participation can provide.
In places, school-based sports works beautifully. Go to just about any prep school. They usually create as many teams in a sport as necessary to accommodate the kids in the school who want to play that sport—an A, B, C, and D team if necessary. They allow the supply of sport opportunities to meet the demand. And they ask that every student participate in that economy, by playing at least one sport. Often, sports are not extracurricular but cocurricular, in recognition of the educational value they can provide.
Write me if you think that’s an awful model, one that leaves US students less prepared to compete in a global economy. I’m guessing that my inbox isn’t about to explode.
So, to me, the question becomes: Can that model be adapted to high schools with larger student bodies and/or smaller budgets? If so, how? This is where the conversation that Ridpath seeds gets very interesting—and promising, if we allow it. Given schools’ responsibility to serve all students, can they work more effectively with local clubs to identify participation opportunities for students? Can they allow them to use campus facilities more readily, if clubs embrace policies and practices that are inclusive and model best practices? Can the role of the athletic director or PE teacher be reimagined, making it less a provider of sport opportunities and more a connector to community programs?
One level up is the hard question to ask: Do NCAA Division I member universities need to continue to position themselves as the pathway to the pros? To fill their stadiums and arenas, do they need the very best emerging athletes—or should they turn over the training of the top 1 percent of the major sport pipelines to leagues like the NBA starting at age sixteen or even fourteen? And, if the model adjusts in that direction, could the NCAA amend its rules to make room for prospects who, after spending time with such a club, realize college is likely their best option?
What’s clear to me, having studied our sports system as an author and journalist for thirty years, is that the day will come when the role of sports in schools gets reappraised and updated by its key stakeholders.
This day could come suddenly, and from any of several angles. The catalyst could be a legal ruling, changing the economic relationship between universities and athletes. It could be a legislative action, akin to Title IX, which with a stroke of a pen in 1972 opened up sports opportunities for one disenfranchised group, women. It could be an administrative action, a meatier version of the Dear Colleague letter issued by the Obama administration prohibiting discrimination of disabled students in school sports. It could be a unilateral industry action, such as the NBA embracing a version of the European club model described above. It could be a collective industry action—a serious push to legalize and tax sports betting, with a cut dedicated to investments in parks and other recreation infrastructure.
When that day comes, you will hear doomsday scenarios about the end of sports as we know it, and maybe the loss of American values. Sports participation is too easily conflated with participation trophies, which no one outside the trophy industry is really all that big a fan of but have become a great tool anyway to grouse about millennials and liberals. It’s ironic, given that the original vision of school sports in America, by its founders more than a century ago, was of mass participation, of sport as a tool of public health and educational achievement.
The way you can support renewal of this vision is to be open to new ideas. Do not buy the theory that if change is made, our games will go away. The sports entertainment industry will be just fine; the market demands that Alabama play Auburn on one Saturday each fall. Nor is anyone going to start tearing down the gyms and fields attached to schools; the physical infrastructure of sports in our country remains. What is in play is the software
