Economic disparities are causing 'artificial elimination' from youth sport programs
Will a new Office of Sports and Fitness be able to change the economic headwinds battering youth sport?
This is Part 3 of a series examining the Final Report from the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics and Paralympics.
Read the series:
Part 2: Is SafeSport working?
Read the Commission's 277-page final report
Youth sport opportunities throughout the United States are increasingly expensive, and for rural families the chance to participate in what many believe is a universal good might not exist at all. This is one of the findings of the Commission on the State of the Olympics and Paralympics.
Finding: Since 1978, USOPC has been unable to achieve its congressional mandate to “coordinate and develop'' youth and grassroots sports across the country, which has led to the development of a youth-sports landscape that has hampered safety, limited equitable access, and jeopardized our long-term Olympic and Paralympic pipeline. (Passing the Torch, p. 77)
Not being able to achieve this mandate has resulted in youth sport taking on a commercial flavor leading to "...the explosive growth of a pay-to-play, privatized youth-sports world, making the American sports ecosystem not one of sports for all, but one of restricted access and privilege," according to Victoria Jackson, a sport historian at Arizona State University.
Jackson is right about the commercialization of youth sport, but is it because the USOPC failed its mandate? How could the USOPC have prevented this commercialization? The sport system in the United States evolved into what we have today; commercialization is just one part of this evolution.
Apparently the Commission didn't know what to do about it either, so to address this particular finding it recommended that the mandate remain the same but to split it between two different bodies:
Recommendation #1: Congress should limit USOPC's purpose to focusing on high-performance athletes and create a new federal office to coordinate and develop youth and grassroots movement sports. (Passing the Torch, p. 120)
The Commission suggests that the new Office of Sports and Fitness be organized under the Department of Health and Human Services, and that it be tasked with "setting standards and practices, research and publish participation data and trends, and provide assistance to governing bodies in their responsibilities toward youth and grassroots sports” (Passing the Torch, p. 120). It calls for a "new architecture" for youth sport that will create talent for high performance and an environment for the healthy benefits of sport.
This is an exciting idea, but is it realistic? Having never worked in government, I have a hard time imagining what a new architecture could look like or how a government agency would understand the workings of our decentralized sport system. Most sport administrators know the verticals involved with their own sports i.e. where they stand in the administrative and development hierarchy. For instance, college sport typically features higher performance levels than those found in high schools, and for obvious reasons. But few practitioners understand how these verticals work together, and their interdependencies.
In swimming, recreational teams, clubs, high schools, colleges, and professional training groups, combine to produce a number of athletes capable of high performance. It would be foolish to opine that one context is more important than another, or that these high performers all come from the same source. Summertime community swimming may be at the bottom of the competitive totem pole but it is a crucial element in the sports talent pipeline. If youngsters don't have an opportunity to participate at this basic level they may never progress to a higher one such as a club or a high school team. They would be eliminated from the sport because the context that would get them started was missing.
Other sports, of course, might have different verticals. American football would not exist at the professional level if the game wasn't played in high schools across the country. The cascade of talent would never make it to the professional level if the youth, high school, or college context was missing or was somehow damaged. Recall the panic over the future of football when concussions and long term traumatic brain injuries caught the nation's attention.
Concussion could have spelt the end of football if medical and administrative officials didn't act quickly to establish safety protocols. This managed to quell a tsunami of parental disfavor and prohibitive insurance costs. A government office created to look after "sport" in general would not be able to do as effective a job as the current group of administrative bodies.
Finding: As USOPC withdrew from its mandate to “coordinate and develop” youth- and grassroots-sports, participation levels in movement sports nationally have dropped, with the pandemic exacerbating gaps in access. Fitness and activity levels have also been impacted. (Passing the Torch, p. 83.)
It's wrong to think that youth sport participation dropped due to inaction by the USOPC. Economic forces, the pandemic, and other factors unique to individual sports have impacted participation. The pandemic may be over but many sport clubs have closed and athletes have found other interests.
Finding: USOPC’s decision to focus away from its mandate to “coordinate and develop'' youth and grassroots sports has had a negative impact on our long-term Olympic and Paralympic talent pipeline. (Passing the Torch, p. 86)
This is almost right but not quite. Let's think about this in another way: There never was a practical way the USOPC could achieve its mandate. It admitted as much and the Commission agreed. The USOPC didn't "focus away" from developing grassroots sport, that task has been part of NGB responsibilities from the start.
Focusing on high performance over grassroots development was not only the correct choice, it was the only sensible choice. Developing grassroots sport is far too large a task for a single governing body, congressionally appointed or not.
But, as the Finding notes, the high performance pipeline has been negatively impacted by dwindling participation. This has been happening for many years due to the rising cost of participation, and recently due to the pandemic, which caused a number of calamities in the sport world overall. Negative economic conditions cause a form of artificial elimination from the talent pipeline.
As I've written several times in this letter, economic challenges prevent an increasing number of youngsters from participating in youth sport programs. Many sports, especially at the club level, have become middle- to upper-class activities and the cost of admission rises each year.
Artificial elimination is a term used by sport sociologists to describe “cutting” or limiting participation due to factors other than performance. Limiting the number of athletes to achieve non-sport goals, or limiting sport teams themselves, in the case of some collegiate programs, are good examples. Regarding the previous Finding, long term damage is done to the talent pipeline when youngsters are eliminated because they cannot afford the fees.
Considering just how big the sports landscape is in the United States, corralling the numerous contexts, each with its own set of administrative rules, into a functioning whole is a big task, some would say an impossible one. Community recreation, YMCAs, schools and colleges, sport clubs; all contribute to the performance juggernaut that is United States sport.
What many don't consider is how we got to what we have now. Unlike some other countries, the U.S. sport system is not designed, it evolved organically and mostly without direction other than what was dictated by circumstance. Club, college, and school sport happened naturally and the administrative infrastructure for these contexts was created on the go. Local and national bodies gradually established their own contextual rules as they grew. Only later did some form of standardization appear under the jurisdiction of international federations, and this was limited mostly to the technical side of the sports.
The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act is what some might point to when thinking about government involvement in sport but that too was a reaction to well-established practices within the U.S. sport environment. It didn't so much as change sport as it reorganized parts of it, established a definitive hierarchy, and put a congressionally charged body (USOPC) at the top of the structure. It brought some order to an otherwise ad hoc system.
Curiously, its ad hoc nature is the system's main strength. No one questions its effectiveness although the Report does focus on several weaknesses. In changing it though, one must understand how it actually functions. This is a lot harder than it sounds since each Olympic sport has its own unique infrastructure and sociology of knowledge. Some sports benefit from a robust collegiate presence, others don't exist at all at the collegiate level.
Of the three main points made in the Report this is the weakest and most generic. The cost of participation in youth sport and the resulting exclusion of low income families from what used to be a typical part of an American childhood is not a new phenomenon. It's been happening for quite a while. This part of the report could have been written anytime in the last 20 years.
Can a new government office fix this? What tools does the government have to lower participation costs? And if it's able to do it, can it last?