PCS Plays at 2024 Project Play Summit
by Lauren R. Nowosatka, Brandon Wallace, Emilio Weber, and Sasha Tolliver
On May 15th, 2024, graduate students within the Physical Cultural Studies program at the University of Maryland served as volunteers for the Project Play Summit, hosted by the Aspen Institute Sports and Society Program in Baltimore, MD. According to the Sports and Society Program, the annual Project Play Summit is “where the nation’s leaders gather to measure progress, share learnings and discover new opportunities to build healthy communities through sport.” Aside from the main sessions, our roles were to observe, annotate, and summarize the breakout sessions, organized around four themes: Coaching (Lauren); Healthy Communities (Brandon); School Sports (Emilio); and Governance (Sasha). As academic scholars who analyze sport from a critical sociocultural lens, as well as thinking about our role in the Kinesiology Department and School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, the summit offered an engaging opportunity. The summit is primarily a gathering for those in the professional or industrial sector of sport, and the Sports and Society Program offers a respected name in sport research and policy. It is a valuable setting to further PCS engagement in a wider variety of fields. Below, we share our reflections on our venture beyond the books and into the “real world” of sport.
Lauren R. Nowosatka: Coaching
I annotated the Summit’s two coaching sessions: Building a National Coaching Strategy, co-directed by Dr. Vincent Minjares (Program Manager, Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program) and Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach (Executive Director, US Center for Coaching Excellence; Professor, West Virginia State University), and From the Huddle: Understanding the Impact of Coach Training moderated by Dr. Vincent Minjares, featuring three presentations delivered by Keely Stern (Vice President of Research, Data and Strategic Initiatives, Resonant Education), Ryan Graff (Vice President of Programs, First Tee Foundation), and Katlin Okomoto, PhD (Director of Coach-Mentor Training, US Soccer Foundation).
Building a National Coaching Strategy built of off the 2022 National Coaching Survey Final Report, collaboratively assembled by LiFEsports at The Ohio State University, the Aspen Institute’s Project Play Initiative, the Susan Crown Exchange, and Nike, presenting key takeaways to a buzzing auditorium of nearly 120 active participants, seeking their insight on youth sports coach recruiting, support and resources, education and training, sport governance, and data and research. Although the session aspired to spark dialogue and ultimately start to build a national coaching strategy, the session had both organizers and attendees asking more questions than answering. For example, Dr. Minjares asked, “Can our coaching system support better quality and access?,” and Dr. Dieffenbach further prompted, “Where is the education in coaching education?,” reflecting concerning gaps amid the broader state of national youth sports coaching in the contemporary moment.
From the Huddle: Understanding the Impact of Coach Training featured three presentations, each of which focused on coaching evaluation strategies, coach training programs, and providing sporting access and mentorship to children from underserved communities. The programs and strategies highlighted, like the previous coaching session, emphasized the importance of coaches’ role(s) in facilitating the development of athletes’ social and emotional skills, relationship building, creating optimal learning environments, and overall improving the lives of underprivileged youth, as opposed to “posture, grip, and alignment,” according to Graff.
From both sessions, I was surprised to see the audience so keen on wanting to learn more about how to better train coaches with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), creating safe spaces, trauma informed training, mental health, communication, parent management, and social emotional learning, among many more topics that were entirely unrelated to the nature of sport(s) and sporting skills and techniques. Furthermore, there was seemingly heavy emphasis on the timeliness of these discussions, despite no direct reference to the series of events that has now resulted in the current crisis-like state of national youth sports coaching. Overall, I found the Summit and the two coaching sessions, specifically, to be extremely insightful and in direct relation to my personal research. While there were more academic attendees than anticipated, I yearn for more opportunities like these, as opposed to them being one-time, coincidental luxuries, for fruitful networking and collaboration between the academy and our industrial counterparts.
Brandon Wallace: Healthy Communities
I had the pleasure of annotating two breakout sessions in the Healthy Communities theme. The first, entitled How to Partner with Philanthropy, featured professionals who work in the non-profit sector discussing the role of philanthropy in promoting sport, health equity, and building (physically active) communities. The second, entitled Beyond Baltimore: Learnings from Project Play Communities, featured panelists affiliated with the Aspen Institute Sports and Society Program who have conducted research on the state of sport, health, and physical activity in local communities across the United States.
I was particularly interested in these sessions because the latest shift in my dissertation research with Colin Kaepernick’s non-profit Know Your Rights Camp has been towards the complex relationship between non-profit organizations and structural social change. To crudely summarize the complexities: non-profits can be (and have been) a key tool for facilitating the strategy, funding, and on-the-ground work necessary to attend to a host of social issues, even while the ‘necessary evil’ of attracting funding, quantifying community impact/outcomes, and generally navigating an extensive non-profit bureaucracy can ironically deprive time, attention, and funding away from the communities that they exist to serve (see University of Maryland Professor Claire Dunning’s short piece on the “nonprofit industrial complex”). In the first session in particular, panelists grappled with balancing organizational commitments to promoting health and access to sport for youth with the practical and structural challenges associated with doing so. Despite sometimes getting bogged down in the language of investment capital and financialization, I was pleased with how attuned panelists were to the structural barriers that needed to be addressed to achieve their goals (rather than, say, attributing lack of health to individuals choices or merit), along with a willingness to pair micro-level community intervention with macro-level strategies to address the broader economic, political, cultural, and technological contexts that produce inequities in health and sport.
Throughout the Summit as a whole, there were indeed some well-intentioned but common cliches about sport loosely circulated that critical scholars have come to question (such as claims that “sport has the power to change the world” and “sport inherently instills values that makes people into good members of society” for example). It is not that these are incorrect or misguided; rather, these cliches are so common because they justify our intuitive feeling that there is something “special” about sport. Scholars critical of these cliches do not disagree, but urge us to show how these claims are evident in the real world so that we can best fulfill them and use sport to direct youth development in a holistic and beneficial manner (see Forde & Kota, 2016 and Hartmann, 2016). Nonetheless, it is clear that the scholarly priorities of placing sport into its broader context – and, in turn, using sport as a vehicle for social justice – have been adopted by industry professionals who are dedicated to implementing critical academic directives across a range of issues. Beyond the opportunities for synergetic collaboration, perhaps the tangible impacts – to both sport and society – being proffered by the professionals at the Project Play Summit can re-ignite the interventionist ethos that is at the heart of Physical Cultural Studies.
Emilio Weber: School Sports
I had the opportunity to sit in on and take notes for two sessions focused on middle school sports at the Project Play Summit. I will highlight my takeaways and notes from the Middle School Sports session while also noting that the Partnering with Schools session provided insights into how a successful soccer-based program and partnership has been growing in elementary schools across Maryland and DC:
Flynn Burch, Under Armour’s (UA’s) director of Global Community Impact and Executive Director of the UA foundation, moderated a motivational and informative session on middle school sports with two school district officials: Sonya Goodwyn, the director of Whole Child Services and Support with the Baltimore City Public Schools and Lamont Robinson, the assistant commissioner for middle school athletics and activities with the Oakland Unified School District and the Oakland Athletic League. The offices and titles of the participants in the panel offer a behind-the-scenes insight into partnering and executing middle school sports programs. The complex web of partnerships and collaboration required to have enriching sports for children ages 11-14 encompasses children, families, schools, teachers, coaches, school districts, and any third party associated with running the logistics of a league.
Both Lamont and Sonya spoke of the positive impact that participating in sports offers children and the importance of being able to offer robust programs. A successful partnership between UA and both school districts is important, and Flynn spoke highly of the “collaboration” between the organizations. However, what remains clear from the discussion, and my experience working in middle schools in Philadelphia as an educator and coach, is that successful school-based sports teams are challenging in and of themselves, but especially to build and sustain.
Lamont discussed the important context of pay-to-play models which siphon and specialize students at younger and younger ages. The reality of cities and school districts facing tighter budgets was apparent as well, with education funding often a political debate at state levels. This hints at the limits to philanthropic or private funding when funding as a whole needs larger federal and state funding. Nonetheless, the mission and important work of providing activities and extracurricular experiences which build stronger communities was amplified: “We don’t look at that as a job, rather a duty.”
The positive impacts of improving the athletic experience for children left the session with an inspiring feel, though one dependent on UA’s support to create the fullest experience. To end on a quote about the benefits of targeted and thoughtful sports and community programming for middle school children, Sonya offered a different consideration of winning: “When I talk about winning I’m talking about the faces of the kids when they come out. And they come out as winners. The coaches, AD’s and especially the students feel like we are investing in them.”
Sasha Tolliver: Governance
I had the opportunity to annotate two sessions at the Project Play Summit. The first session, World Cup Cities and World Sport Systems, was moderated by Minal Davis, CEO of the HeneKom organization. The second session, How to Organize and Support Youth Sports - Part I Cities/Counties, was moderated by Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game. Both sessions gave insights into the topic of governance in the realm of youth sports, which I am excited to share below.
Joining Davis for the discussion on World Cup Cities and World Sport Systems was a diverse panel representing three different countries. Leaders included Marco Di Buono, President of Jumpstart Canadian Tire Charities, Dr. Margarita Safdie, Director of Project Play in México, Brianna Keys, Director of Human Rights and Sustainability for the FIFA World Cup in 2026 covering the New York and New Jersey regions, and Adam Lewis, Executive Fellow for Human Rights and Sustainability for the FIFA World Cup 2026 in Kansas City.
Much of the conversation revolved around the human rights of the youth across the world, creating avenues for their voices to be heard at the levels of decision making, and the importance of adopting the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports. The bill states that “every child has the right to play sports and, when in the care of adults, the human rights they are born with need to be respected”. Capturing the essence of the bill itself, Lewis stated that “human rights and play are not two different things, they are one in the same; play is not a tool but a human right itself”. Panelists also discussed how children deserve to be part of conversations when it comes to play, sports engagement, and development processes. Often, their voices get lost and/or forgotten, ultimately allowing adults to make the decisions for what is best for them. Not taking their wants and needs into consideration, this creates many barriers to activity for children. As stated by Dr. Safdie, “as adults it is important that we create spaces for children where barriers do not exist if we expect them to be engaged and feel empowered to participate in sport.” In the next 20 years, panelists discussed how they hope that from their work, each child that they have impacted looks back on the FIFA World Cup and see’s how they were truly part of the games, and not just a bystander.
Session two boasted an influential panel of speakers as well. These leaders included Katherine Quinn, the Director of the Project Play Summit and Member-at-large for the Fairfax County Athletic Council, Tom Cove, Chair of the Montgomery County Sports Advisory Committee, and Jon Stehle, Council Member for the City of Fairfax.
This conversation directly addressed the importance of governing bodies in the promotion of youth activity development, highlighting that “democracy itself is a full contact sport,” as stated by Stehle. The primary aim of the majority of governing bodies is to help communities meet their needs. As discussed by Flanagan, governance itself means funding and grants, partnerships with youth sports organizations, and facility management. Often however, these bureaucratic systems are looked at only in a negative light. If individuals take active involvement in volunteering with the entities, they may begin to see the true change that can be produced from these entities. If volunteering is not feasible, panelists discussed how engaging with one's political champions that speak on their behalf is another way to instill change. But of the most importance, Quinn brought the conversation back full circle, reminding everyone in the room that councils do more than problem solving and addressing points of contention: “They honor our kids' characters and celebrate all of the good that comes from the work being done, reminding us not to get stuck in the weeds of the work but to also find the joy that comes with it.” This closing remark from Quinn truly summed up the underlying message of the Project Play Summit as a whole.
