Re-Designing Youth Sport

Change the Game

John McCarthy, Lou Bergholz, Megan Bartlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317273899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Many observers have pointed out what is wrong with youth sport: an emphasis on winning at all costs; parental over-involvement; high participation costs that exclude many families; lack of vigorous physical activity; lack of player engagement; and no focus on development. Currently, most attempts at righting the wrongs of youth sport have focused on coach education and curriculum, but in this book, the authors offer a different approach—one that involves changing the game itself.

Re-Designing Youth Sport combines vivid examples and case studies of innovative sport programs who are re-designing their sport with a comprehensive toolkit for practitioners on how to change their game for bigger and better outcomes. It offers a fresh and exciting perspective on the seemingly intractable issues in sport. It presents a practical and empowering pathway for readers to apply the examples and tools to the outcomes that they aspire to achieve in their sport, such as increased fun and excitement, life-skills building, gender inclusion, increased sportspersonship, greater parity and avoidance of one-sided competition, and positive parental roles. The book also reveals how community leagues as well as national and international sport governing bodies are using re-design to accelerate player skill development, tactical awareness, and physical fitness.

1
What is Sport System Re-Design?

Lacrosse is a sport that is difficult for most to pick up quickly. In order to even get in a lacrosse game, you have to be able to keep the ball in the pocket of your stick or to scoop it off the ground, which is not an easy skill to master, especially if someone is defending you. MetroLacrosse is an organization that brings the sport of lacrosse to kids in Boston’s underserved neighborhoods. If MetroLacrosse wants to get kids excited about playing lacrosse, they have to help them learn this skill quickly so that the kids will experience some success and be motivated to continue to play the sport.

The Struggle to Achieve Positive Outcomes

It’s not surprising, then, that when Megan started working with MetroLacrosse a few years ago, their coach training focused heavily on providing coaches with tools and techniques to help kids master this and other skills that are key to game success. Nor is it surprising that the MetroLacrosse curriculum has many activities that give kids the chance to practice these skills. Unfortunately, no matter how many iterations of curriculum they designed and hours of coach training their coaches participate in, they continue to encounter the same challenge: some of the teams see great improvements, and some of them just don’t progress at the same rate.

Improving stick skills is a challenge that novice lacrosse players, whether in underserved communities or not, face all the time. We know that kids can develop this skill through repetition of the right drills and good instruction from a coach. But even this straightforward sports-based outcome isn’t universally achieved across MetroLacrosse’s teams. Each coach implements the curriculum presented to them and activates the training they receive through their own individual filter. Their experience as a lacrosse player, their background in coaching, their ability to relate to and work with youth, as well as many other variables, all affect the way the coach coaches.

Beyond Stick Skills

At MetroLacrosse, an overarching goal is to influence each player’s self-efficacy. In simple terms, self-efficacy is the belief that you can do something. And they hope that later on, the players’ newfound sense of mastery from overcoming a difficult learning task might generalize to other parts of their lives. For Metro-Lacrosse kids, and all kids for that matter, learning new things can seem intimidating and difficult. But because sport can give us such a safe environment to practice skills, it’s fertile ground for changing our sense of self-efficacy in one task or domain at a time.

Noted psychologist Albert Bandura (1997) explains that the sources for building a resolute sense of self-efficacy include performance accomplishment—seeing evidence that you have succeeded; vicarious learning—watching and learning from others; and verbal persuasion—hearing positive statements from trusted others (including even self-persuasion). MetroLacrosse believes that one of the ways that the kids in their programs will develop self-efficacy is if coaches help them witness their own progress and focus on that progress instead of absolute performance.

And just as with stick skills, MetroLacrosse trains its coaches in this philosophy and provides curriculum that helps coaches find opportunities to put this philosophy into practice. But just as with players’ stick skills, MetroLacrosse finds that some coaches do what they are trained to do, but many coaches don’t. Accordingly, some players benefit, and some do not.

At the core, Sport System Re-Design (SSRD) is about giving MetroLacrosse another way to obtain both these outcomes: the stick skills and the growing sense of self-efficacy. This isn’t to say that MetroLacrosse should stop doing coach education or writing curriculum. On the contrary, SSRD is about filling in the gaps where coach education and curriculum fall short, so that the three approaches might work together to have maximum impact. It’s about helping MetroLacrosse overcome the individual differences that each coach brings, thereby creating an environment that consistently points kids towards the outcomes they want, whether those outcomes are better stick skills or a deeper sense of self-efficacy for their kids.

Changing the Game Itself

Whereas coach education focuses on the capacity of the coach to effect change in a player, and curriculum focuses on the power of thoughtfully organized learning activities and lessons to effect change, SSRD turns to the game itself, to the arrangement of interrelated elements of the sport system to effect change. It involves looking at the actual structure and design of the whole sport experience and purposefully altering elements of the game that we usually consider fixed. What’s unique about the elements that we examine in SSRD is that they are aspects of the sport experience that are universal to everyone involved—the coaches, players, referees and fans. Making changes to these aspects of the game means changing the sport experience for everyone; it becomes impossible for participants to “not do” that aspect of the game. If the right changes are identified, all participants get the benefit of that change.

Before we go any further, it’s important to introduce working definitions of some core concepts:

• Sport System: The sum total of all the core elements of the sport experience, including, but not limited to, the location or venue, equipment and gear, practices, competition, rules of play, participants (players, coaches, fans, referees, other teams, etc.) and the structures that support the play.
• Outcome: A specific goal you want to achieve through the sport experience. The thing that you are intending for participants to do, know, learn or think because of their participation in the sport experience.
• Re-Design: Thinking about the sport in a new way that leads to experimenting with and making changes to discrete elements in your sport system in order to achieve a specific outcome.

Using the terms defined above, Sport System Re-Design (SSRD) can be defined as follows: re-Designing the sport experience to get a desired outcome by changing or tinkering with core elements of the sport system.

Changing the Seemingly Unchangeable

What, exactly, are we talking about here? Let’s consider basketball. Whether you are player, coach, spectator, referee or cheerleader, there are some things about basketball that are always the same, no matter what level of basketball you play, coach or watch. You can expect that people will be dribbling the ball instead of holding and running with it. There will be a hoop, a ball, and some area in space designated for the game. There will be players on two sides trying to get the ball into their hoops. There will probably be someone making “calls” about what is allowable and what isn’t allowable in the game. These elements, universal and commonly understood things about the game, are the targets of SSRD. And they are targeted exactly because they are so commonly understood and abided by.

The goal of SSRD is to look at the things that are seemingly unchangeable in a sport and put in place changes that would better serve the outcome we want to achieve. For example, if the goal is to make golf accessible for younger kids, then as SSRD practitioners, we might suggest giving them a shorter club that’s easier to swing. We might move their tee closer to the hole so they don’t have to hit the ball as far. Or, we might even put much bigger holes into our golf course so that it is easier for players who are just learning to control their clubs and balls to get the ball in the hole. If a soccer program were to ask an SSRD practitioner how to ensure that all the games that their participants play are evenly matched, the SSRD practitioner might suggest that instead of playing two 45-minute halves, the program schedule two 45-minute games during that time. That way, the score and the teams can reset after the first game and have a chance to be victorious in the second. And if one team is considerably better than the other, games that end 3–0 and 4–1 may seem more in reach and less discouraging than one game that ends 7–1. Less discouragement could result in players playing harder to the end of the match. An SSRD practitioner might also suggest that teams wear reversible jerseys so that team rosters can be shuffled at half-time to have more parity in the second half. After all, making the sides even is what kids will often do in pick-up games without prompting or adult supervision. Finally, an SSRD practitioner might suggest that the league rules be changed so that every time a team is winning by two or more goals, that team has to take one player off the field.

The Five Domains of SSRD

The above examples highlight changes to elements in sports that are often considered fixed. These elements of sport, these things that everyone usually takes for granted, fall into five categories. We call them the “five domains” of SSRD.¹ They are:

• Playing space: The physical layout of the space.
• Equipment: The gear used to play the sport.
• Rules of the game: Guidelines that dictate what you can and can’t do before, during and after the run of play.
• Rules of the league: The structure around the games, the way the teams are organized, the rules teams follow throughout a season or year.
• Roles: The responsibilities of any of the stakeholders involved with the game, including but not limited to players, coaches, referees and fans.

It’s important to understand how this methodology is different from the current ways that youth sports practitioners think about changing the game—through curriculum and coach education. Using our MetroLacrosse example, we can examine the differences between coach education, curriculum and SSRD:

Coach Education in MetroLacrosse: As we saw above, MetroLacrosse has invested a lot of time and energy in training their coaches to give good instruction so that they can help their players develop strong stick skills.

Curriculum in MetroLacrosse: To achieve the same goal, they have written curriculum that includes myriad drills and activities that help kids learn these skills. The activities in the curriculum are prioritized at the beginning of the season and are accompanied by step-by-step directions so coaches know exactly how the activities should be implemented.

Sport System Re-Design in MetroLacrosse: If MetroLacrosse wanted to develop their players’ stick skills using SSRD, they might consider any of the following strategies across at least three domains:

• Modifying the Equipment: In lacrosse, goalkeepers have larger pockets on their sticks. What if all beginners used goalkeeper sticks so that they have larger pockets? Wouldn’t that be a way that every coach could help beginners see more success in catching and holding the ball in the pocket?
• Changing the Rules of the Game: Or what if, in every MetroLacrosse game, kids who dropped the ball while running down the field were able to stop, pick it up, and keep going without the threat of a player from the other team scooping it up?
• Changing the Rules of the League: Like in Brian McCormick’s Playmakers basketball league (described in the Introduction), what if lacrosse games in the entire “beginners” division were played three on three with one goal and one goalkeeper? Wouldn’t that mean more touches with the stick and, therefore, additional opportunities to improve this vital skill?

Let’s look at another example—USA Football: a youth sport organization that uses coach education and curriculum to achieve its outcomes, but is now facing another challenge. The football community is now mobilizing to respond to the research about player safety at all levels of the game. As more evidence points to the devastating impact that concussions can have on the brain, people at all levels of the football community have been looking at ways to minimize the number of player concussions and other head injuries. USA Football has done this through all three approaches—coach education, curriculum and Sport System Re-Design.

Coach Education in USA Football: Through USA Football’s “Head’s Up” initiative, coaches receive training in concussion recognition and response, proper equipment fitting, strategies for teaching the “Head’s Up tackling and blocking techniques,” heat preparedness, proper hydration and recognition of the signs of sudden cardiac arrest. Many leagues, and even states, are now requiring that youth football coaches receive this certification.

Curriculum in USA Football: “Head’s Up” also provides a curriculum of activities that youth can do to practice techniques that will help keep them safe while tackling and blocking.

Sport System Re-Design in USA Football: USA Football has made changes to the game in order to try to minimize the number of concussions per season by working with two domains:

• Changing the Rules of the Game: In 2013, a rule change stated that “at least four members of a kickoff team must be on each side of the kicker. This prohibits a kicking team from bunching up … to create significant mismatches when trying to recover a free kick.”² This is intended to protect players from concussion.
• Changing the Equipment: Advances in technology spurred changes to helmets. An example of this newsworthy shift is reported by USA Today: “Rid-dell, official helmet maker of the NFL and a co-defendant in the concussion lawsuits, is introducing this season a sensor system in the helmet that transmits when impacts exceed a player’s history on hits, geared for youth and high school teams.”³

Re-Design Is at the League Level

Sport System Re-Design is about putting into place things that everyone must adhere to—whether it is playing with the same equipment, following the same rules or engaging in the game through a prescribed role. In order for this to be true, changes to the game have to be administered at a “league” level. This is part of w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Changing the Game
• 1 What Is Sport System Re-Design?
• 2 The Five Domains of Sport System Re-Design
• 3 Why Change the Game … and Why Now?
• 4 Sources of Inspiration
• 5 Case Studies
• 6 The Sport System Re-Design Toolkit: Part One
• 7 The Sport System Re-Design Toolkit: Part Two
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix A: Sport System Re-Design: Historical Timelines of Popular Sports
• Appendix B: Examples of Invented and Adapted Sports
• Appendix C: Matrix of Sport System Re-Designs
• Index