December 3, 2024 • 41 mins
In this episode of Youth Inc., Greg Olsen is joined by Tom Farrey of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program to explore how the U.S. compares to other countries in youth sports participation and accessibility. They dive into the impact of commercialization on youth sports and discuss practical solutions to make sports more inclusive and impactful for all kids. This isn’t just about identifying problems—it’s about actionable steps to fix the system. Tune in for a conversation full of insights and strategies to reshape youth sports for the better.
Learn more about our partners at Players Health - https://www.playershealth.com/safety-hub
Thank you to MaxU and Players Health for sponsoring this season of Youth Inc.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey everyone, Greg Olson here. If you're just listening, you're
missing half the experience. Head over to the You Think
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made specifically for parents, coaches and athletes.
Now sit back and enjoy the episode.
On today's episode of Youth Inc,we are joined by Tom Ferry.
(00:20):
Tom is the Executive Director ofthe Aspen Institute's Sports and
Society Program, which aims to create solutions that can help
sports serve the public interest.
Tom gives insights on how America stacks up against other
countries in youth sports, participation, and
accessibility. We also discussed the
commercialization of sport, whatwe can do to fix our model, and
(00:41):
more. Whether you're an athlete ready
to push your limits, a parent looking to support your child,
or a coach helping to guide the way, this episode has the
insights you need. Join us as we break down the
next steps to building the best youth sports experience for our
young athletes. So Tom, why did you dedicate,
(01:01):
you know, so much of your professional time and all of
your intellect prowess to to usesport?
Yeah, look, I was an ESPN reporter for 20 years,
investigator reporter, outside lines, E60, this kind of thing.
And for a long time, I, I, I basically put people in the hot
seat and, you know, use criticalthinking to like, lay out the
(01:22):
problems of sport in our society.
And I kind of got to the point where I wanted to help solve
them. And the problem that I wanted to
solve first and foremost is the one I saw right in front of me.
I was raising kids, three kids, boy, girl, boy.
And my kid was playing. I remember, you know, he's like,
he's like six years old or my daughter was six years old and
(01:45):
she was playing on a team with girls who are in their 9th
season of soccer at that point because they've been playing
three seasons a year since age 4, right?
Greg and I just looked at. This I was doing the math.
I was like wait. How does this work time?
Travelling. Yeah, no, three seasons a year,
I mean you're. Not playing three seasons of
soccer. You're not committed, Mike.
You are falling. You got you got to right with
(02:07):
it. And now it's Four Seasons a
year, you know, a year for thesekids.
So I'm like, whoa, how did this?I mean, how does that because,
like, I played sports as a kid. I played organized sports.
And I think I slipped on a uniform for the first time when
I was 7 or 8 years old. And even after, I played a
variety of sports. But even after that, much of my
childhood was unstructured free play, making up games with my
(02:28):
friends down at the park, hopping on my bike, coming back
at sunset. A lot of us, you know, have this
kind of experience. Like, how did this happen?
Just in one generation, we went from that to this.
And so I just went down this hard rabbit hole and talk to a
lot of people, try to understandhow our our sport ecosystem got
(02:50):
built the way it did. I look at the policies, the
practices, the partnerships, thekey institutions.
I travel to six or seven countries and say, OK, how is
their sport system set up? And I'm like, wow, all right,
now I know all the stuff and I did the lecture tour and people
will say, well, thank you for telling us how we got into this
mess. Now how do we get out of it?
(03:10):
And that's when my interest shifted from breaking down the
problem to working with the Aspen Institute and creating
these roundtables and having thefortune to talk to guys like you
about how do we fix this? And once you once you have that
opportunity, it's it's a very hard thing to walk away from.
So how did we get into it? So what give us the Cliff Notes
(03:32):
version of what that that speaking circuit looked like
when you were informing all these policy makers and everyone
say, hey, in one generation, here's how we went from what you
described that we all kind of grew up in to now what my kids
are going through, which is vastly different.
What is the Cliff Notes version?How did we end up in this spot
where like commercialization andprivate privatization of youth
sports is now entering into elementary school?
(03:56):
Yeah, well, there's no one causeof course things are complex.
We're talking about an entire system here.
But a couple big things that happened were Title 9 became
enforced. So Title 9 was.
It was signed into law in 1972, but really wasn't enforced until
the mid to late 80s. Once it was enforced, then
schools had to create opportunities for girls, girls
(04:17):
playing sports. So it began to push more kids
into the space. And it got parents thinking,
particularly on the girls side, about college scholarships.
The thing that could, you know, the payoff down the road #1 #2
ESPN or Disney created the Wide World of sports out of Orlando.
That was the first megacility. That is what opened the door to
(04:40):
all of this youth sports tourism.
And people are like, whoa, there's a lot of money rolling
through the idea. Yeah.
And now we got these megacilities.
They're everywhere. Everywhere.
Yeah. So those are two big reasons.
Interesting. So that's where like the
commercialization saying, hey, youth sports no longer is just
about the betterment and improvement development of young
kids. We can actually make a business
(05:01):
model around that versus the traditional model.
Even when I was growing up was Parks and Rec, church leagues,
YMCA, PALS, boys and Girls Clubs, like it was all like
youth centers. They weren't necessarily private
businesses running tournaments and events and camps and all
that. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, as the privatized recreation space began to
(05:26):
mature, we had situations like the 2008, you know, economic
crisis, which gutted city budgets.
So park and recs programs, the local low cost programs that's.
That's where club would have. That so they they got out of the
the programming business and those fields were now rented out
to the local clubs. And so during that recession and
(05:49):
even during COVID, the travel club environment did just slow
down, but the privatized local low cost stuff got hurt.
So with those three elements andthen you've got the race or the
race to nowhere. What's that phrase the like the?
Just race to the bottom I guess.To the bottom is what I was
looking for and we've got a a real intensity in the way that
(06:13):
we compete with each other for attention in the modern world.
Now, what would you give the grade for youth sport in
America? Well, we actually did give a
grade and I would base it upon first and foremost the
participation rate we looked at last fall.
(06:34):
We look at the world's leading sports systems, looked at 12
countries and how they set up their sports system.
You looked in several different categories.
How well do they do at creating elite athletes or Olympic
champions and, and this type of thing, number one.
Number two, what is the level ofgovernment support?
I mean, you know, funding and policies and structure.
And the third thing is just the other real outcome, which is
(06:57):
like how many kids are playing sports.
And so in this country, it was when we made that evaluation, it
was about 51% according to the federal government.
And so that merits AC grade. It might even be a C -, I have
to double check. 51% of the US population.
Ages 6 to 17 play an organized sport in some form or another,
(07:19):
according to their parents. And that's AC.
That that correlates to what's? Today, like what?
When you looked at these twelve countries, what's at the top of
the list? Like what does great
participation look? Like Norway, more than 90% of
kids in in Norway come through clubs, play sports.
It's just baked into the, the way they have set up their their
ecosystem there. And oh, and by the way, they
(07:39):
also create a lot of elite athletes they.
Do for a small country. They kill it in the in the
Winter Olympic. Kill Olympic athletes.
So it's kind of there. But even even in the even in the
summer sports, I mean Earling Holland, I mean some of the top
soccer players in the world on the male, on the female side are
from Norway now. Do a nice job in truck and
field. We're Norwegian.
Oh, no big deal. There you go.
Norwegian, the big Olsen with anE always Sweden.
(08:01):
We'll get into that. We'll get into my lineage at
another later date. But so yes, but isn't it?
It's hard for me to believe, though, in a in a country that
just seems so sports crazy, whether it's just as fans and
how popular our professional leagues are and college sports
are and how how we just consume live sports.
(08:21):
Can I mean, I have to imagine it's it's up there with anywhere
in the country maybe aside from the some of those soccer crazy
nations and Mikey. No, we're #1 by far we are.
We are the largest sports marketin the world.
So how are we such a large sports market with a middle of
the road, we'll call it C grade as far as participation doesn't
interest in sport typically Dr. participation?
(08:44):
Yes, the data shows that a that a child who plays sports is 6.4
times according to ESP NS research, 6.4 times more likely
to become an avid fan of that sport.
You know, you know, the avid fanis what you chase, and that is
the that's, that's the person who floats the energy.
That's why all the soccer MLS clubs all have those feeder
(09:04):
minor league, not minor, but like youth organizations like in
Charlotte. When when Charlotte FC made an
expansion team to build the the MLS team, the in the
infrastructure and the investment into the youth soccer
scene in Charlotte was quadrupled.
Because the idea is the more kids playing soccer, the more
fans of soccer there. Are NFL.
(09:24):
It's correlated. Flag.
NFL flag Yeah, they. This feels corrupted to me
though. This feels like it's the exact
wrong reason why we would want youth sport and the wrong
funding source for it. And of the three measures, I
didn't hear the 4th 1, which is like a measure or an estimate of
a measure of well-being, a senseof vigor, you know, sense of
vitality for a person. And so even even what I would
(09:48):
consider the most important variable to measure was not on
that list. It was, it was measured from, I
don't know, some sort of economic impact as opposed to
psychological. Right.
It seems all economically driven.
Yeah, I mean, that's one reason I like, like I keep talking
about Norway. It's a small country.
You can't really, it's not apples, apples with the US, but
they, you know, they they reallyget sport right at the base.
(10:09):
So they end up creating the top athletes.
But they also have among the healthiest and happiest nations
in the world. What do they do?
Give us an idea of like what does the sports structure of
youth sports look like in Norway?
Well, they weren't always good. That's that's important thing.
In the early 90s, they were not winning like they wanted to.
So the leaders of sports, he goteasier to do in a small country.
They got back together and said we need to kind of rebuild this
(10:30):
thing. And one of the very first things
they did was create a Children'sBill of Rights in sports, which
is a statement that every kid inour country should have an
opportunity to play sports, to play with their friends, and
should be able to develop as a human being.
And love of game, they explicitly put that in there.
The goal of sport for kids should be love of game.
(10:54):
Our job is to help kids fall in love with sport.
And then that'll take care of itself.
And then then as kids move into the teenage years, then we're
going to put them with the really good coaches and the
sport scientists and we're goingto turn them into the Champions
that they they want to be. But we're not going to try and
do that when kids are 6:00 and 8:00.
Years. Is there a filtering process for
that? Like how do when they get to
that appropriate age, whatever they've declared in that, that
(11:16):
athlete Bill of Rights is there when it gets to whatever that
that, you know, 15 years old, 16, whatever the the cut off is,
who's deciding who gets filteredin with the good coaches, who
gets filtered into the academies, who gets the top
level training? Is all of that regulated?
First and foremost is the the first filter is whether the
child wants to do it. OK, if the child wants to be,
(11:39):
he's not champion. It's not China.
It's not China. Where exactly that's a, that's a
so. That's real, I mean.
I'm in black. World jokes.
It's a little bit different. The old Soviet Union.
I mean, it was just you. You didn't have a choice.
You were you were right, it was pre.
Right, right. We tend to conflate these
countries, socialist, communist.But there's a significant
difference in terms of how Chinahas gone about their support
(12:00):
system and the Scandinavian countries have and the
Scandinavian country, all of it is like vote, like the
Children's Bill of Rights support, It was all voted on by
the national governing bodies, by the Olympic Committee, by
representatives from the states.So they create a consensus
around what they want sport to be and then they put the
policies in place to support it.It's not cherry picking A4 and
(12:21):
A5 and A10 roles to get into something called the
Confederation of of Sport. Is that like a bureaucracy?
Is that an element of the federal government?
Yep. So you got like the Olympics
Committee, you've got their national governing bodies,
you've got the states. And sitting on top of that is
something called the confederation.
It reports into the actual government.
We don't have a structure like that here in the US.
(12:41):
We have the Olympic Committee, which has been basically told by
Congress you need to be kind of our sports ministry.
We've kind of outsourced it to the USOPC.
And it's completely amateur in our in our country.
So I've worked across 4 Olympic Games supporting teams and most
of them by the time they get to the games, they're kind of
(13:04):
broke. So we are cheering every four
years or two years depending on whether it's winter or summer
for the, the, the young, most vibrant humans on the planet
representing our country. And they don't have any money,
they're broke. And so it it, and that's not the
case internationally. And so it it is but.
It's only the case for that in America for certain sports,
(13:26):
right? Well, you we need to take
basketball. Is that the only Is that the
only Olympic sport where Americahas professionals?
Basketball, probably hockey. I I think soccer, but I don't
know. They're soccer's not in the
Olympic Games. Yeah, just give you under 23.
They've generally gone to more of a professional title.
But you're right, they do not. We do not subsidized the
(13:48):
training of our athletes a little bit with stipends a
little bit, but it's really, really hard.
Yeah, it's a hard go. They're just surviving off
endorsement dollars, right? That's and, and in some sports
like whatever the winnings and the prizes are, but it's not
enough to keep you alive. So it's mostly endorsements.
And the challenge for these athletes is that they're only
interested in 3 1/2 years, you know, out of a quad.
(14:11):
So every 3 1/2 years they're relevant.
And so it's really quite. Tough.
That's interesting. And that impacts the access
question too. So when you look at the winter
sports, which are overwhelminglydominated by white athletes who
are from upper income families, it's in part because like lower
income kids can't afford these sports or the training that goes
(14:34):
into it. So we we end up pushing aside a
lot of kids and a lot of sports now because they just simply
can't afford the the training, certainly the training to become
an Olympian. It represents your country and.
Where the Nordic countries have that solved because it's a a
right to be able to access whatever the sport is up there.
Well, what's actually about the Nordic countries, or at least
(14:54):
Norway is, is within the Children Bill of Rights and
sports, not just sort of like a statement, they have policy to
backs it. So I know this is sound like a
completely wild idea, but there are no national championships
before the age of 14. There are no regional
championships before the age of 11.
And they do that so that these parents and these clubs don't
(15:15):
try to create little super teamsto win national championships at
8:00 and 10:00 and 12:00, which structurally pushes aside, you
know, kids from homes. Right.
And again and again, not to get overly political, there's no way
that would fly in America, right?
In a capitalist society, the idea that you can't go into the
open market and create A tournament an operate a
(15:36):
volleyball tournament, a baseball perfect game, whatever
it is, that you can't operate a free business, that people can
choose voluntarily whether they enter their tournament, you
would never be able to outlaw any of that.
Yeah, you got to be. You got to have certain
parameters as far as what your government is allowed and not
allowed to do in order to pull something like that off.
We need to create a youth centered sport ecosystem that
(15:58):
serves all in reflects Americansappreciation of sport sport
because I think most Americans would tell you yeah, every kid
should have an opportunity to play sport unless.
Wait, wait, let me interrupt. Unless your kid is in the bottom
third, you probably know this data.
If your kid is in the bottom 3rdat let's say it's school, OK?
(16:19):
Not a club or not, not a high level team.
If they're in the bottom third of sport and they're forced to
play, it's really hard for kids in the US bullying, self esteem,
low confidence, it's really hardfor those kids.
So I, I interrupt you for a specific reason to say like, I'm
(16:39):
not sure everybody that has beenbullied through their
experience. I'm not sure anybody that has
been bullied as a kid because ofthe way that their body felt or
the way what they couldn't do insport because they're just bad
at it, that they would say everybody should be in sport.
This episode of You Think is brought to you by Players
Health, a company that believes youth athletes deserve the
(17:01):
safest and the most accessible environments possible to play
the sports they love. To break this down, I spoke with
Tyree Burks, Players Health's founder and CEO to hear the
mission and principles of Players Health first hand.
We have a really special guest, the founder of Players Health,
Tyree Burks. Tyree, thanks for joining us
(17:22):
here on you think. I'd love to just hear a little
bit about your background, a little bit about starting and
founding of Players Health and really just why you saw a hole
in the youth sports kind of world that you thought needed to
be filled and and it is being filled by your work with your
team at Players Health. Where I grew up, the environment
that I grew up in played a huge part of me creating players.
(17:43):
So I grew up in the South Side of Chicago.
Sports truly saved my life. And when I say that like I had
an opportunity to choose two paths, either it was the streets
of sports. And fortunately enough, I chose
sports. I was invited to come out to a
youth football practice. I showed up early and I stayed
late and it kept me out of the streets.
And so there's been two things that I've been obsessed with,
(18:04):
you know, the past, call it 15 years of my call it professional
career as I've been, I've been focused on safety and I've been
focused on sports. Like I've just been obsessed
with those things. I know what it feels like to
grow up in an environment with safety as a luxury.
And sports was a safe place for me through that experience.
I had all these injuries growingup.
I had, I got 3 bulging discs in my neck.
(18:26):
I end up tearing my hamstrings, broken fingers, ligaments, you
know, just playing sports and and playing football, athletic
trainers growing up with the school I went to and then until
I went to the college level, I really didn't understand
scholars season protocols aroundhow these things were managed.
And so when I look back over my career, I end up playing in the
Canadian Football League for a couple years and I decided to
(18:48):
hang it up. I started to reflect on my
career and go, hey, how these injuries would have been managed
a lot better when I was younger.Like who knows what would have
happened, but maybe I would haveplayed a lot longer.
And so I started to look at the impact that I wanted to make in
in my life and and and also in the world.
And sports was such a he played a huge role in my life.
So I wanted to give back to it and player something was my way
(19:11):
of going about doing that. And so our mission, it's been
the same mission since day one, which is how do we create the
safest environment for an athlete to play the sport that
they love. I think this is something that
the world needs for our youth. And so we've been focused on
leaning into creating those safespaces.
Here what you think we want to bring value.
To you the. Parents, coaches, the athletes
listening in, everything that wedo, check out Players Health
(19:34):
today and let them know. Youth Inc sent you.
Now back to the episode with allthat being said.
All right, so now, OK, let's getnow.
You said your your big transition now is getting to not
only identifying the problem andyou did a great job kind of
laying out those points. And it's actually very
fascinating to hear it broken down.
What's your message to the parents?
Right. So they at the end of the day,
(19:54):
the parents control the journey,especially up to a certain age
before the kids have the autonomy to start making their
own decisions. Call it high school age.
Anything below that this is a parent driven.
Journey, what is the message to the parents to try to help kind
of recorrect this and kind of bring things back to reality a
little bit, as you said, as it'sgotten so commercialized, so
(20:15):
privatized and kind of off the rails?
I don't spend a whole lot of time in my work blaming parents.
Are there crazy parents? Absolutely.
Nut job parents, Yeah. We've seen them, you know, But I
come in from the perspective of most parents.
They love their kids and they want the best for their kids.
And they're just responding to what's given to them.
(20:36):
And they don't know how to make educated decisions for their
kids. They don't know what quality
athletic development looks like.They don't.
Your kids are so lucky. You know, what kind of
influences they need to have it 6:00 and 8:00 and 10:00 and
12:00. I mean, you're the very best
agent for your kids, but a lot of kids don't have that.
(20:57):
Their parents are just guessing.And so they're presented with
this model of more, more, more travel, travel, travel, spend,
spend, spend just to kind of keep your kid in the system.
And so it's hard. It's really let's acknowledge
that it's really, really hard and that parents alone can't do
this. For me too.
It's hard for me. It's why I started you think,
two years ago. Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not
(21:18):
removed from that challenge. And I've been in pro sport for
25 years and you've been in it your whole life.
I don't. Have a lot of the answers.
Yeah. So this I, I, I really
appreciate that you brought thatup because it's very muddled and
I can't imagine with what everything that I do know about
what it takes to invest to be your very best.
And I'm still like, this isn't right, but there's like I'll see
(21:40):
behaviors from coaches and and other parents and I know that
that's it's off center, but it'slike there's an inertia there
that it's like. What are you going to do?
And, you know, like, I have all the work I've done on this
thing. I've had three kids come through
the system, right? First one played college soccer
at Babson. You know, worked out pretty
well. But he is he also came out of
(22:02):
college soccer with a lot of injuries.
Second one didn't really play travel sports and her body is in
the best shape right now. You know, she's 2526 years old,
hikes all the time. And and my third one played
soccer just like her, his Big Brother did.
And he came out of high school with three ACL injuries on the
same knee. And so he is done with cutting
(22:25):
and pivoting sports the rest of his life, which makes me very
sad because much of my adult life has been playing
basketball, squash, play a lot of beach volleyball right now,
tennis. Like the idea that he can't do
that for the next 40 years makesme sad.
And yet everything I know, I couldn't navigate him to age 18
(22:47):
in a way that avoided that. And that's in part because the
coaches, I'm not blaming the coaches, but the coaches don't
know about knee injury prevention techniques.
They don't know how to handle when a kid does get an injury.
They don't, you know, the clubs are not being held to best
practice standards by the organizations that they're
signed up with. So a lot of this stuff is beyond
(23:11):
really the control of parents. And all you can do is just
educate yourself in quality athletic development, educate
yourself and talk to your child.Talk to your child.
What do you want? What do you want to play?
What does a good experience looklike to you?
Is there? You know what I mean?
It's you design from your home out and and and just keep the
(23:32):
end in mind that it's not a a really about professional sports
or even college sports is about having a kid, you know, develop
the human skills and you know, the social skills and the mental
health and the physical health and desire to be active the rest
of her life. Really keeping that forefront
(23:53):
and understanding. That's the ROI, not the
scholarship. Great insight, great insight.
It's super interesting and, and,and the fact I think what you
brought up is super interesting because I think there is an
element where I think there's a lot of parents and at times I
probably put myself into this, into this bucket.
I think there's a lot of parentsthat don't necessarily want to
(24:13):
take the path they're taking, but they look around and they
see no reasonable alternative And they say, I don't love it.
I don't love specialization. I don't love traveling out of
town every weekend, but my kid loves playing this sport.
There's no real other opportunity to do it at the
level. So there's like a keeping up
(24:34):
with the Joneses effect, right? And then it just it kind of
snowballs. It's OK.
Your kid wants to play on this team.
The expectation if you're going to be on this team, you better
be good. So what do you do in your off
days? You go get private coaching.
You do private workouts and private lessons because if you
don't, you can't be on that team.
And then it so it just keeps snowballing and snowballing.
I think if you ask parents, pause, are you doing this
(24:55):
because you feel like you have no other alternative?
Are you doing this because you really in your heart think this
is the best path? I think their answer, if they're
being honest, was we don't want to do this, but we don't know
what else to do. Everyone else is doing it, so
we're just doing what they're doing. 100% yeah, you're afraid
like and. You just you don't know who the
one starting it. I don't want to fall behind.
You don't want to. Everyone's fearful, their kids
(25:17):
falling behind. And if you find out your
neighbors down the street are doing three days a week of
private shooting practices and they made the top team in travel
basketball, OK, it looks like that's the path to making that
basketball team. My kid says he wants to make it.
We're gonna do the same thing. Yeah.
I don't want to, but I will. Yeah, yeah.
It's like the bullet train. It's like the bullet train is
leaving the station at age 8 andyou're either gonna put your kid
(25:38):
on it or there's they're gonna miss out on all the benefits of
sports. And I think most people
recognize that if you are a Little League pitcher into the
the World Series Little League pitcher, that that means
something. And what we understand is that
what that means is that you are a youth, great kid, you're a
(26:00):
great pitcher as a as a kid. It does not mean you're going to
make it to the pros. If elite 12 year olds meant
elite athletes, every kid in theLittle League World Series,
every kid who was the dominant 7th grade football player that
the the NFL would now, Adrian Peterson was a dominant 7th
grade football player. He was a dominant 12th grade
football player and he's, there's always the exceptions,
(26:22):
LeBron James for 99.9% of the families.
Those are not the paths that you're even, you're even
remotely trying to simulate that.
That does not apply to anyone's kid that you can almost like
carte blanche. They say that across the board,
for the amount of people who that path applies to, it's not
even worth even really considering that.
(26:42):
And I'm that's why I'm grateful to you, Craig.
I don't want to like go hard toohard down this path, but like
you deserve a lot of credit because athletes, former
athletes have incredible credibility.
When you talk about the value ofmulti sport play or you don't
have to specialize early or here's what you want from your
coaches. You have a voice that no one
(27:02):
else does. Parents will listen to athletes
like you. So I, you know, my thoughts,
like how do we bring, how do we basically clone you and like
package this stuff in a way thatparents get it from all angles.
And so they know what to ask of their local program.
Like, Hey, coaches are what are you trained?
Are you trained in this, this and this?
(27:24):
Like, hey, do you like multi sport play?
Do you support my kid at age 10 playing multiple?
You know, I mean, I think, I think athletes can play a huge
game. I agree, double down on that.
There's not a critical mass at this point of former elite
athletes saying what you're suggesting.
And my experience with youth coaches is they tend to say the
(27:46):
right thing, but then their actions are very different.
So you know the the system is supporting a single sport at
this point, which makes it really tricky.
And then there's the mental health side of things, right?
Do you have any data that that is interesting to you about
mental health and sports that you pay attention?
Yeah, I don't have it off the top of my head on the numbers,
but it the research is clear that kids who who move their
(28:11):
body do better in terms of mental health.
It just, it just you, the brain works better if you're moving
your body than you are sitting in your inert.
If you're moving your body and you're doing it with other
people now you get the social benefits.
And so you deal with the social isolation and some of the
problems we see in our society right now.
(28:32):
So all this talk about how we'regoing to address the mental
health crisis. Oh, and by the way, you know
what happens when kids are playing sports?
They're not holding a phone. You actually take it out of
their hand. We've talked about this a lot
today. I never have to remind my kids
to play video games. Right.
So like, if you want to address the mental health crisis in this
country, my thought is like, cancan we?
(28:54):
Can we have some huge national call to action around both
making sport accessible to everykid who wants to play?
Well, both interesting. Both of our kids at at schools
they don't have they just eliminate cell phones on campus.
Yep, for the for the entire day,No, that is a massive gift, I
think to all of us. I'd love to see that nationwide.
(29:16):
That is a really cool movement. And it's at high school.
So club and high school are different.
At my son's high school, they encourage that.
Oh, you have to take a sport every year.
They encourage multiple sports. But then you get into the club
system, which is a fast track tosomewhere nowhere the bottom.
Maybe not, I don't know, but it's in.
(29:36):
But they those philosophies differ.
I think the key to all sport achievement the kids who improve
the longest, not the fastest, not the most severe.
The kids who just continue to creep up in perpetuity, just
forever. I love the frame they win.
When you think about if you, if we wanted to build a tall,
(29:59):
sturdy structure, we'd have a really wide base.
This is an engineering principlethat's been around forever.
And when you play multiple sports, you're building a base.
You're not over conditioning onegrooved set of muscles.
You're also adding psychologically lots of
interesting reference points andexperiences, different cultures,
(30:20):
different standards and expectations, different
sophistications. There's something for the for
the parent who's listening rightnow.
There's this is before we get into formalized sport.
OK, so that the younger ages, there's two things that you can
do if you want to help somebody get better at something.
It's called formal instruction or guided discovery.
(30:41):
Formal, Formal instruction is let's say that I'm going to
teach your kid Greg how to roll down a hill.
Okay, put your chin to your chest, tuck your head and then
look at your belly button kind of archo, and then roll.
Okay, good, good, do that again.Okay, come up here, let's do it
again. Now this time keep your arms in
(31:02):
and roll. Okay, so formal instruction,
they will get better faster, OK,But they're missing the guided
discovery. And so the guided discovery is
you offer a suggestion to somebody and you say, hey, let's
roll down this. You go first.
Now this is not supposed to be adangerous thing, but sometimes
(31:22):
it is. OK, And then what's going to
happen to that kid? They're going to roll sideways,
they're going to roll on an angle, they're going to roll
backwards. They're going to try all these
different dimensions, which in return creates a bigger base of
reference points, a bigger base of internal trust.
You're getting so many different, like sensory
(31:42):
information from that. But that kid takes longer to get
good, but they'll stay longer because they have all the
reference points. And what do we do in the US?
For sure, flat out. I'm going to use the brace to
the bottom one more time. Formal and structure instruction
over and over and over again until they burn out or blow out.
(32:03):
So that's the scenario that if there's one little thing that
the the parent can hear here or the youth coach is encourage
guided discovery, encourage playing in that unknown space
where you figure out and innovate and create something
net new both for your brain and maybe for the industry if you
stay in it long enough. Have you ever read Talent Code?
(32:24):
Oh yeah, that's. Exactly what it dives into like
the Brazilians playing. Dan Coyle, right?
Yeah, Dan Coyle. Not soccer, but futsal makes my
soccer aficionado over there, Mikey off camera, but he dives
into exactly that. Like what is it about these
certain hotbeds and what do theydo?
And he talks about foot soil anddeep learning and how there's no
(32:45):
coach telling these kids they'rethey put them in a small little
concentrated environment. A lot of touches, small ball,
small field play, figure it out.And now more from my
conversation with the team at Players Health, what would you
say has been probably the most impactful policy that you guys
have consulted on? You've been part of the
(33:06):
conversation implementing and and kind of outlining like was
it the concussion stuff? Is there something else?
Like where is there one conversation and big movement
that you guys have been a part of that you feel like has made a
significant impact on the youth sports landscape?
I, I have to hyper focus specifically around our abuse
prevention policies and the reason why I, we, we, why I
(33:28):
gravitate to that. And, and not that concussions
are not a big deal because they are, but an, an, an incident
specifically around emotional, physical, sexual abuse within a
youth athlete will change their life forever.
And so I always like to say thatif players help, our focus is to
make sure that the transaction between an athlete and their
(33:49):
sports organization, we wanted to be positive.
We want them to be depositing good things into kids and not
taking things away from them. And so when we look at abuse
prevention policies, we recognize that this is a life on
the line. And so when when we look at how
we prepare and credential coaches, we need to make sure
(34:09):
that these adults are actually, you know, being credentialed
before they come in contact withan athlete.
And what are the signs should webe looking for around bad
behavior, around communication? What are the things should we
should we be making sure that weunderstand?
And then do we have a reporting mechanism in place so that we
the athlete has a voice, their parents, all of the folks around
(34:31):
that are our eyes and ears. Do they have now have a
mechanism to communicate that this is happening?
And then do we have preventativemeasures or, or temporary
measures are being put in place to stop the bleeding if we do
find it a behavioral issue with a coach or staff member, have
you removed them? Do we have an investigative
process in place? Like all that policy changes
(34:54):
everything and, and it limits the likelihood that something
that will change a life forever from happening.
We only want sports to be positive, but we recognize that
there are experiences that kids are having that, that are
negatively impacting their livesforever.
So I'd say that that's the definitely the number one
policy. Health, of course, is a big
(35:14):
focus, but I think on the safetypiece, it can't get bigger than
that. It's a shame how much is going
on in the world of youth sports,but people like yourself that
are passionate and, and companies like, like players
health that are very passionate about improving the experience
for all people, adults but mostly children in youth sports.
I my hats off to you, man. What what you guys are building
(35:36):
the services and the and the policies you guys are
implementing and creating are changing the landscape of youth
sports for thousands of kids allacross the country.
And you guys should be applaudedfor it.
So I appreciate you joining us here on on you think.
I appreciate you sharing your vision, your journey and look
forward to continuing to work with you guys going forward.
Absolutely appreciate you, Greg.Talk to you soon.
(35:58):
Here at you think we want to bring value.
To you the. Parents, coaches, the athletes
listening in, everything that wedo.
Check out Players Health today and let them know Youth Inc sent
you. Now back to the episode.
Tom, I think you'll really appreciate this is that I didn't
fit in traditional stick and ball sport as a young kid.
(36:18):
I didn't understand these man made rules and these adults
screaming at me. I didn't get it.
I thought, I thought you guys were wack.
And I found action sports and inaction sports, surfing,
skateboarding, motocross, there's really no rules other
than what Mother Nature will demand of you.
So and there's no formal coaching, but the and it takes a
(36:40):
long time to get good at those sports because it's not a
repetitive environment. I'll tell you what I learned so
much about how to trust myself, how to stand on in my own self,
how to face down and give an assessment of risk.
And when we got these adults, I asked my son the other day, hey,
how are we doing? My wife and I, how are we doing?
(37:01):
Like helicopter parenting, you know, like my wife is second
generation. So there's a little bit more
hovering. You know, she's in her family's
an immigrant. And he said you guys are not
helicopters, but I can hear the drone that's.
Good. Right I'm like that's a good way
to put it I'll take a drone. I'll.
Take a drone right now, right? Yeah, take a drone.
(37:21):
I'll take that. Yeah, so, so anyways, I'm having
fun with it. But the point is for the, the
the listener of viewer like encourage environments where
they're taking risks and they'redoing it in the safest possible
way. But things can go wrong.
And when they learn how to know how to, when they learn how to
work within themselves, it's a lifelong lesson as.
(37:42):
Well, the name of my book I deliberately names away as game
on the All American race to makechampions of our children.
And what I was trying to do is be ironic and say you actually
can't make a champion, you can'tmanufacture an elite athlete.
They come out with good clay andfrom there you can just not
screw it up. But you can put them with good
(38:04):
coaches and you can put them in environments where they can
problem solve. And that's what you were doing.
You were learning to be a problem solver.
And isn't that what we want withall of our kids?
We want our kids to be in an uncertain environment and not
have someone tell them how to solve a problem, them to read,
react and come up with a solution.
So how do we, I mean, how do we get more kids and to have your
(38:24):
kind of experience? Well, that that and I'll add a
little bit more nuanced piece here.
By the age of 15, I probably almost drowned 10 times.
So like there's real danger in those types of environments.
So you can't manufacture the type of risk I'm talking about.
And we're so afraid of that. Like, my parents didn't want me
to die, of course, but they wanted me to be a fully informed
(38:47):
human and go for it. And I was the kid that was
always zigging when the world was zagging.
I didn't want to be coached by these adults that were screaming
like, that's about you. Yeah, this is not about me.
I'm going to a place where it can be about me.
And so I'm. I'm not encouraging danger, but
to a point. He's on record.
Kids don't. Michael Gervais, I'm not
(39:07):
encouraging danger. That's gonna be his new saying.
The thing is, parents, the undersay they don't own the lives of
their children, their children. They have their own lives.
And so how do you strike that balance of letting them have
enough risk? You'll never hear me like say
bubble wrap kids avoid every safety, you know, every safety
you got to, you got to manage this.
(39:27):
Are you guys OK if your kids came home with a broken bone?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess it depends what
they did. Fell out of a tree?
Well, you don't like that one. Well, I wouldn't love them
getting hurt right before a football game climbed a tree.
Yeah, but but there's there's a response we have like there's, I
think there's a case to be made for broken bones.
And like, it sounds like I'm, I'm callous here.
(39:49):
I'm joking. You're not joking.
No, you're. Serious, I tell my kids after
every football practice, be careful tomorrow and pee.
Do not get hurt. Oh.
My God. OK encourage.
How about you encourage them to like get after it, have a blast?
Cuz when they're really getting after it, they're more likely to
be focused and not hesitating. It's a hesitation that gets us
(40:09):
hurt. Yeah, lean into it.
Lean into the. Turn said don't get hurt, we got
7 more games. There's a truth in that too.
There is a truth. Just being honest, it's cool,
but this was awesome. Tom, appreciate you, man.
Our conversations, I feel like we cover a lot of we cover a lot
of ground every time we chat. We do, and I appreciate you.
(40:30):
Appreciate you. Yeah.
Well done, Tom. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to today's episode with Tom Ferry.
Now let's cover the key takeaways from our conversation.
Tom shared his insights on how are youth sports environment
stacks up against other countries and how the United
States lacks and youth participation rates and
accessibility. We also discussed the
(40:51):
commercialization of sport in the US and ways we can work to
fix its problems. Finally, we covered the immense
benefits that staying active hason mental health and the
importance of youth involvement in sport.
Thanks as always for listening. We'll catch you again soon,
right here, here on You Think.
Hey everyone, Greg Olson here. If you're just listening, you're
missing half the experience. Head over to the You Think
YouTube channel right now for daily must see content that is
made specifically for parents, coaches and athletes.
Now sit back and enjoy the episode.
On today's episode of Youth Inc,we are joined by Tom Ferry.
(00:20):
Tom is the Executive Director ofthe Aspen Institute's Sports and
Society Program, which aims to create solutions that can help
sports serve the public interest.
Tom gives insights on how America stacks up against other
countries in youth sports, participation, and
accessibility. We also discussed the
commercialization of sport, whatwe can do to fix our model, and
(00:41):
more. Whether you're an athlete ready
to push your limits, a parent looking to support your child,
or a coach helping to guide the way, this episode has the
insights you need. Join us as we break down the
next steps to building the best youth sports experience for our
young athletes. So Tom, why did you dedicate,
(01:01):
you know, so much of your professional time and all of
your intellect prowess to to usesport?
Yeah, look, I was an ESPN reporter for 20 years,
investigator reporter, outside lines, E60, this kind of thing.
And for a long time, I, I, I basically put people in the hot
seat and, you know, use criticalthinking to like, lay out the
(01:22):
problems of sport in our society.
And I kind of got to the point where I wanted to help solve
them. And the problem that I wanted to
solve first and foremost is the one I saw right in front of me.
I was raising kids, three kids, boy, girl, boy.
And my kid was playing. I remember, you know, he's like,
he's like six years old or my daughter was six years old and
(01:45):
she was playing on a team with girls who are in their 9th
season of soccer at that point because they've been playing
three seasons a year since age 4, right?
Greg and I just looked at. This I was doing the math.
I was like wait. How does this work time?
Travelling. Yeah, no, three seasons a year,
I mean you're. Not playing three seasons of
soccer. You're not committed, Mike.
You are falling. You got you got to right with
(02:07):
it. And now it's Four Seasons a
year, you know, a year for thesekids.
So I'm like, whoa, how did this?I mean, how does that because,
like, I played sports as a kid. I played organized sports.
And I think I slipped on a uniform for the first time when
I was 7 or 8 years old. And even after, I played a
variety of sports. But even after that, much of my
childhood was unstructured free play, making up games with my
(02:28):
friends down at the park, hopping on my bike, coming back
at sunset. A lot of us, you know, have this
kind of experience. Like, how did this happen?
Just in one generation, we went from that to this.
And so I just went down this hard rabbit hole and talk to a
lot of people, try to understandhow our our sport ecosystem got
(02:50):
built the way it did. I look at the policies, the
practices, the partnerships, thekey institutions.
I travel to six or seven countries and say, OK, how is
their sport system set up? And I'm like, wow, all right,
now I know all the stuff and I did the lecture tour and people
will say, well, thank you for telling us how we got into this
mess. Now how do we get out of it?
(03:10):
And that's when my interest shifted from breaking down the
problem to working with the Aspen Institute and creating
these roundtables and having thefortune to talk to guys like you
about how do we fix this? And once you once you have that
opportunity, it's it's a very hard thing to walk away from.
So how did we get into it? So what give us the Cliff Notes
(03:32):
version of what that that speaking circuit looked like
when you were informing all these policy makers and everyone
say, hey, in one generation, here's how we went from what you
described that we all kind of grew up in to now what my kids
are going through, which is vastly different.
What is the Cliff Notes version?How did we end up in this spot
where like commercialization andprivate privatization of youth
sports is now entering into elementary school?
(03:56):
Yeah, well, there's no one causeof course things are complex.
We're talking about an entire system here.
But a couple big things that happened were Title 9 became
enforced. So Title 9 was.
It was signed into law in 1972, but really wasn't enforced until
the mid to late 80s. Once it was enforced, then
schools had to create opportunities for girls, girls
(04:17):
playing sports. So it began to push more kids
into the space. And it got parents thinking,
particularly on the girls side, about college scholarships.
The thing that could, you know, the payoff down the road #1 #2
ESPN or Disney created the Wide World of sports out of Orlando.
That was the first megacility. That is what opened the door to
(04:40):
all of this youth sports tourism.
And people are like, whoa, there's a lot of money rolling
through the idea. Yeah.
And now we got these megacilities.
They're everywhere. Everywhere.
Yeah. So those are two big reasons.
Interesting. So that's where like the
commercialization saying, hey, youth sports no longer is just
about the betterment and improvement development of young
kids. We can actually make a business
(05:01):
model around that versus the traditional model.
Even when I was growing up was Parks and Rec, church leagues,
YMCA, PALS, boys and Girls Clubs, like it was all like
youth centers. They weren't necessarily private
businesses running tournaments and events and camps and all
that. Yeah, exactly.
And you know, as the privatized recreation space began to
(05:26):
mature, we had situations like the 2008, you know, economic
crisis, which gutted city budgets.
So park and recs programs, the local low cost programs that's.
That's where club would have. That so they they got out of the
the programming business and those fields were now rented out
to the local clubs. And so during that recession and
(05:49):
even during COVID, the travel club environment did just slow
down, but the privatized local low cost stuff got hurt.
So with those three elements andthen you've got the race or the
race to nowhere. What's that phrase the like the?
Just race to the bottom I guess.To the bottom is what I was
looking for and we've got a a real intensity in the way that
(06:13):
we compete with each other for attention in the modern world.
Now, what would you give the grade for youth sport in
America? Well, we actually did give a
grade and I would base it upon first and foremost the
participation rate we looked at last fall.
(06:34):
We look at the world's leading sports systems, looked at 12
countries and how they set up their sports system.
You looked in several different categories.
How well do they do at creating elite athletes or Olympic
champions and, and this type of thing, number one.
Number two, what is the level ofgovernment support?
I mean, you know, funding and policies and structure.
And the third thing is just the other real outcome, which is
(06:57):
like how many kids are playing sports.
And so in this country, it was when we made that evaluation, it
was about 51% according to the federal government.
And so that merits AC grade. It might even be a C -, I have
to double check. 51% of the US population.
Ages 6 to 17 play an organized sport in some form or another,
(07:19):
according to their parents. And that's AC.
That that correlates to what's? Today, like what?
When you looked at these twelve countries, what's at the top of
the list? Like what does great
participation look? Like Norway, more than 90% of
kids in in Norway come through clubs, play sports.
It's just baked into the, the way they have set up their their
ecosystem there. And oh, and by the way, they
(07:39):
also create a lot of elite athletes they.
Do for a small country. They kill it in the in the
Winter Olympic. Kill Olympic athletes.
So it's kind of there. But even even in the even in the
summer sports, I mean Earling Holland, I mean some of the top
soccer players in the world on the male, on the female side are
from Norway now. Do a nice job in truck and
field. We're Norwegian.
Oh, no big deal. There you go.
Norwegian, the big Olsen with anE always Sweden.
(08:01):
We'll get into that. We'll get into my lineage at
another later date. But so yes, but isn't it?
It's hard for me to believe, though, in a in a country that
just seems so sports crazy, whether it's just as fans and
how popular our professional leagues are and college sports
are and how how we just consume live sports.
(08:21):
Can I mean, I have to imagine it's it's up there with anywhere
in the country maybe aside from the some of those soccer crazy
nations and Mikey. No, we're #1 by far we are.
We are the largest sports marketin the world.
So how are we such a large sports market with a middle of
the road, we'll call it C grade as far as participation doesn't
interest in sport typically Dr. participation?
(08:44):
Yes, the data shows that a that a child who plays sports is 6.4
times according to ESP NS research, 6.4 times more likely
to become an avid fan of that sport.
You know, you know, the avid fanis what you chase, and that is
the that's, that's the person who floats the energy.
That's why all the soccer MLS clubs all have those feeder
(09:04):
minor league, not minor, but like youth organizations like in
Charlotte. When when Charlotte FC made an
expansion team to build the the MLS team, the in the
infrastructure and the investment into the youth soccer
scene in Charlotte was quadrupled.
Because the idea is the more kids playing soccer, the more
fans of soccer there. Are NFL.
(09:24):
It's correlated. Flag.
NFL flag Yeah, they. This feels corrupted to me
though. This feels like it's the exact
wrong reason why we would want youth sport and the wrong
funding source for it. And of the three measures, I
didn't hear the 4th 1, which is like a measure or an estimate of
a measure of well-being, a senseof vigor, you know, sense of
vitality for a person. And so even even what I would
(09:48):
consider the most important variable to measure was not on
that list. It was, it was measured from, I
don't know, some sort of economic impact as opposed to
psychological. Right.
It seems all economically driven.
Yeah, I mean, that's one reason I like, like I keep talking
about Norway. It's a small country.
You can't really, it's not apples, apples with the US, but
they, you know, they they reallyget sport right at the base.
(10:09):
So they end up creating the top athletes.
But they also have among the healthiest and happiest nations
in the world. What do they do?
Give us an idea of like what does the sports structure of
youth sports look like in Norway?
Well, they weren't always good. That's that's important thing.
In the early 90s, they were not winning like they wanted to.
So the leaders of sports, he goteasier to do in a small country.
They got back together and said we need to kind of rebuild this
(10:30):
thing. And one of the very first things
they did was create a Children'sBill of Rights in sports, which
is a statement that every kid inour country should have an
opportunity to play sports, to play with their friends, and
should be able to develop as a human being.
And love of game, they explicitly put that in there.
The goal of sport for kids should be love of game.
(10:54):
Our job is to help kids fall in love with sport.
And then that'll take care of itself.
And then then as kids move into the teenage years, then we're
going to put them with the really good coaches and the
sport scientists and we're goingto turn them into the Champions
that they they want to be. But we're not going to try and
do that when kids are 6:00 and 8:00.
Years. Is there a filtering process for
that? Like how do when they get to
that appropriate age, whatever they've declared in that, that
(11:16):
athlete Bill of Rights is there when it gets to whatever that
that, you know, 15 years old, 16, whatever the the cut off is,
who's deciding who gets filteredin with the good coaches, who
gets filtered into the academies, who gets the top
level training? Is all of that regulated?
First and foremost is the the first filter is whether the
child wants to do it. OK, if the child wants to be,
(11:39):
he's not champion. It's not China.
It's not China. Where exactly that's a, that's a
so. That's real, I mean.
I'm in black. World jokes.
It's a little bit different. The old Soviet Union.
I mean, it was just you. You didn't have a choice.
You were you were right, it was pre.
Right, right. We tend to conflate these
countries, socialist, communist.But there's a significant
difference in terms of how Chinahas gone about their support
(12:00):
system and the Scandinavian countries have and the
Scandinavian country, all of it is like vote, like the
Children's Bill of Rights support, It was all voted on by
the national governing bodies, by the Olympic Committee, by
representatives from the states.So they create a consensus
around what they want sport to be and then they put the
policies in place to support it.It's not cherry picking A4 and
(12:21):
A5 and A10 roles to get into something called the
Confederation of of Sport. Is that like a bureaucracy?
Is that an element of the federal government?
Yep. So you got like the Olympics
Committee, you've got their national governing bodies,
you've got the states. And sitting on top of that is
something called the confederation.
It reports into the actual government.
We don't have a structure like that here in the US.
(12:41):
We have the Olympic Committee, which has been basically told by
Congress you need to be kind of our sports ministry.
We've kind of outsourced it to the USOPC.
And it's completely amateur in our in our country.
So I've worked across 4 Olympic Games supporting teams and most
of them by the time they get to the games, they're kind of
(13:04):
broke. So we are cheering every four
years or two years depending on whether it's winter or summer
for the, the, the young, most vibrant humans on the planet
representing our country. And they don't have any money,
they're broke. And so it it, and that's not the
case internationally. And so it it is but.
It's only the case for that in America for certain sports,
(13:26):
right? Well, you we need to take
basketball. Is that the only Is that the
only Olympic sport where Americahas professionals?
Basketball, probably hockey. I I think soccer, but I don't
know. They're soccer's not in the
Olympic Games. Yeah, just give you under 23.
They've generally gone to more of a professional title.
But you're right, they do not. We do not subsidized the
(13:48):
training of our athletes a little bit with stipends a
little bit, but it's really, really hard.
Yeah, it's a hard go. They're just surviving off
endorsement dollars, right? That's and, and in some sports
like whatever the winnings and the prizes are, but it's not
enough to keep you alive. So it's mostly endorsements.
And the challenge for these athletes is that they're only
interested in 3 1/2 years, you know, out of a quad.
(14:11):
So every 3 1/2 years they're relevant.
And so it's really quite. Tough.
That's interesting. And that impacts the access
question too. So when you look at the winter
sports, which are overwhelminglydominated by white athletes who
are from upper income families, it's in part because like lower
income kids can't afford these sports or the training that goes
(14:34):
into it. So we we end up pushing aside a
lot of kids and a lot of sports now because they just simply
can't afford the the training, certainly the training to become
an Olympian. It represents your country and.
Where the Nordic countries have that solved because it's a a
right to be able to access whatever the sport is up there.
Well, what's actually about the Nordic countries, or at least
(14:54):
Norway is, is within the Children Bill of Rights and
sports, not just sort of like a statement, they have policy to
backs it. So I know this is sound like a
completely wild idea, but there are no national championships
before the age of 14. There are no regional
championships before the age of 11.
And they do that so that these parents and these clubs don't
(15:15):
try to create little super teamsto win national championships at
8:00 and 10:00 and 12:00, which structurally pushes aside, you
know, kids from homes. Right.
And again and again, not to get overly political, there's no way
that would fly in America, right?
In a capitalist society, the idea that you can't go into the
open market and create A tournament an operate a
(15:36):
volleyball tournament, a baseball perfect game, whatever
it is, that you can't operate a free business, that people can
choose voluntarily whether they enter their tournament, you
would never be able to outlaw any of that.
Yeah, you got to be. You got to have certain
parameters as far as what your government is allowed and not
allowed to do in order to pull something like that off.
We need to create a youth centered sport ecosystem that
(15:58):
serves all in reflects Americansappreciation of sport sport
because I think most Americans would tell you yeah, every kid
should have an opportunity to play sport unless.
Wait, wait, let me interrupt. Unless your kid is in the bottom
third, you probably know this data.
If your kid is in the bottom 3rdat let's say it's school, OK?
(16:19):
Not a club or not, not a high level team.
If they're in the bottom third of sport and they're forced to
play, it's really hard for kids in the US bullying, self esteem,
low confidence, it's really hardfor those kids.
So I, I interrupt you for a specific reason to say like, I'm
(16:39):
not sure everybody that has beenbullied through their
experience. I'm not sure anybody that has
been bullied as a kid because ofthe way that their body felt or
the way what they couldn't do insport because they're just bad
at it, that they would say everybody should be in sport.
This episode of You Think is brought to you by Players
Health, a company that believes youth athletes deserve the
(17:01):
safest and the most accessible environments possible to play
the sports they love. To break this down, I spoke with
Tyree Burks, Players Health's founder and CEO to hear the
mission and principles of Players Health first hand.
We have a really special guest, the founder of Players Health,
Tyree Burks. Tyree, thanks for joining us
(17:22):
here on you think. I'd love to just hear a little
bit about your background, a little bit about starting and
founding of Players Health and really just why you saw a hole
in the youth sports kind of world that you thought needed to
be filled and and it is being filled by your work with your
team at Players Health. Where I grew up, the environment
that I grew up in played a huge part of me creating players.
(17:43):
So I grew up in the South Side of Chicago.
Sports truly saved my life. And when I say that like I had
an opportunity to choose two paths, either it was the streets
of sports. And fortunately enough, I chose
sports. I was invited to come out to a
youth football practice. I showed up early and I stayed
late and it kept me out of the streets.
And so there's been two things that I've been obsessed with,
(18:04):
you know, the past, call it 15 years of my call it professional
career as I've been, I've been focused on safety and I've been
focused on sports. Like I've just been obsessed
with those things. I know what it feels like to
grow up in an environment with safety as a luxury.
And sports was a safe place for me through that experience.
I had all these injuries growingup.
I had, I got 3 bulging discs in my neck.
(18:26):
I end up tearing my hamstrings, broken fingers, ligaments, you
know, just playing sports and and playing football, athletic
trainers growing up with the school I went to and then until
I went to the college level, I really didn't understand
scholars season protocols aroundhow these things were managed.
And so when I look back over my career, I end up playing in the
Canadian Football League for a couple years and I decided to
(18:48):
hang it up. I started to reflect on my
career and go, hey, how these injuries would have been managed
a lot better when I was younger.Like who knows what would have
happened, but maybe I would haveplayed a lot longer.
And so I started to look at the impact that I wanted to make in
in my life and and and also in the world.
And sports was such a he played a huge role in my life.
So I wanted to give back to it and player something was my way
(19:11):
of going about doing that. And so our mission, it's been
the same mission since day one, which is how do we create the
safest environment for an athlete to play the sport that
they love. I think this is something that
the world needs for our youth. And so we've been focused on
leaning into creating those safespaces.
Here what you think we want to bring value.
To you the. Parents, coaches, the athletes
listening in, everything that wedo, check out Players Health
(19:34):
today and let them know. Youth Inc sent you.
Now back to the episode with allthat being said.
All right, so now, OK, let's getnow.
You said your your big transition now is getting to not
only identifying the problem andyou did a great job kind of
laying out those points. And it's actually very
fascinating to hear it broken down.
What's your message to the parents?
Right. So they at the end of the day,
(19:54):
the parents control the journey,especially up to a certain age
before the kids have the autonomy to start making their
own decisions. Call it high school age.
Anything below that this is a parent driven.
Journey, what is the message to the parents to try to help kind
of recorrect this and kind of bring things back to reality a
little bit, as you said, as it'sgotten so commercialized, so
(20:15):
privatized and kind of off the rails?
I don't spend a whole lot of time in my work blaming parents.
Are there crazy parents? Absolutely.
Nut job parents, Yeah. We've seen them, you know, But I
come in from the perspective of most parents.
They love their kids and they want the best for their kids.
And they're just responding to what's given to them.
(20:36):
And they don't know how to make educated decisions for their
kids. They don't know what quality
athletic development looks like.They don't.
Your kids are so lucky. You know, what kind of
influences they need to have it 6:00 and 8:00 and 10:00 and
12:00. I mean, you're the very best
agent for your kids, but a lot of kids don't have that.
(20:57):
Their parents are just guessing.And so they're presented with
this model of more, more, more travel, travel, travel, spend,
spend, spend just to kind of keep your kid in the system.
And so it's hard. It's really let's acknowledge
that it's really, really hard and that parents alone can't do
this. For me too.
It's hard for me. It's why I started you think,
two years ago. Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not
(21:18):
removed from that challenge. And I've been in pro sport for
25 years and you've been in it your whole life.
I don't. Have a lot of the answers.
Yeah. So this I, I, I really
appreciate that you brought thatup because it's very muddled and
I can't imagine with what everything that I do know about
what it takes to invest to be your very best.
And I'm still like, this isn't right, but there's like I'll see
(21:40):
behaviors from coaches and and other parents and I know that
that's it's off center, but it'slike there's an inertia there
that it's like. What are you going to do?
And, you know, like, I have all the work I've done on this
thing. I've had three kids come through
the system, right? First one played college soccer
at Babson. You know, worked out pretty
well. But he is he also came out of
(22:02):
college soccer with a lot of injuries.
Second one didn't really play travel sports and her body is in
the best shape right now. You know, she's 2526 years old,
hikes all the time. And and my third one played
soccer just like her, his Big Brother did.
And he came out of high school with three ACL injuries on the
same knee. And so he is done with cutting
(22:25):
and pivoting sports the rest of his life, which makes me very
sad because much of my adult life has been playing
basketball, squash, play a lot of beach volleyball right now,
tennis. Like the idea that he can't do
that for the next 40 years makesme sad.
And yet everything I know, I couldn't navigate him to age 18
(22:47):
in a way that avoided that. And that's in part because the
coaches, I'm not blaming the coaches, but the coaches don't
know about knee injury prevention techniques.
They don't know how to handle when a kid does get an injury.
They don't, you know, the clubs are not being held to best
practice standards by the organizations that they're
signed up with. So a lot of this stuff is beyond
(23:11):
really the control of parents. And all you can do is just
educate yourself in quality athletic development, educate
yourself and talk to your child.Talk to your child.
What do you want? What do you want to play?
What does a good experience looklike to you?
Is there? You know what I mean?
It's you design from your home out and and and just keep the
(23:32):
end in mind that it's not a a really about professional sports
or even college sports is about having a kid, you know, develop
the human skills and you know, the social skills and the mental
health and the physical health and desire to be active the rest
of her life. Really keeping that forefront
(23:53):
and understanding. That's the ROI, not the
scholarship. Great insight, great insight.
It's super interesting and, and,and the fact I think what you
brought up is super interesting because I think there is an
element where I think there's a lot of parents and at times I
probably put myself into this, into this bucket.
I think there's a lot of parentsthat don't necessarily want to
(24:13):
take the path they're taking, but they look around and they
see no reasonable alternative And they say, I don't love it.
I don't love specialization. I don't love traveling out of
town every weekend, but my kid loves playing this sport.
There's no real other opportunity to do it at the
level. So there's like a keeping up
(24:34):
with the Joneses effect, right? And then it just it kind of
snowballs. It's OK.
Your kid wants to play on this team.
The expectation if you're going to be on this team, you better
be good. So what do you do in your off
days? You go get private coaching.
You do private workouts and private lessons because if you
don't, you can't be on that team.
And then it so it just keeps snowballing and snowballing.
I think if you ask parents, pause, are you doing this
(24:55):
because you feel like you have no other alternative?
Are you doing this because you really in your heart think this
is the best path? I think their answer, if they're
being honest, was we don't want to do this, but we don't know
what else to do. Everyone else is doing it, so
we're just doing what they're doing. 100% yeah, you're afraid
like and. You just you don't know who the
one starting it. I don't want to fall behind.
You don't want to. Everyone's fearful, their kids
(25:17):
falling behind. And if you find out your
neighbors down the street are doing three days a week of
private shooting practices and they made the top team in travel
basketball, OK, it looks like that's the path to making that
basketball team. My kid says he wants to make it.
We're gonna do the same thing. Yeah.
I don't want to, but I will. Yeah, yeah.
It's like the bullet train. It's like the bullet train is
leaving the station at age 8 andyou're either gonna put your kid
(25:38):
on it or there's they're gonna miss out on all the benefits of
sports. And I think most people
recognize that if you are a Little League pitcher into the
the World Series Little League pitcher, that that means
something. And what we understand is that
what that means is that you are a youth, great kid, you're a
(26:00):
great pitcher as a as a kid. It does not mean you're going to
make it to the pros. If elite 12 year olds meant
elite athletes, every kid in theLittle League World Series,
every kid who was the dominant 7th grade football player that
the the NFL would now, Adrian Peterson was a dominant 7th
grade football player. He was a dominant 12th grade
football player and he's, there's always the exceptions,
(26:22):
LeBron James for 99.9% of the families.
Those are not the paths that you're even, you're even
remotely trying to simulate that.
That does not apply to anyone's kid that you can almost like
carte blanche. They say that across the board,
for the amount of people who that path applies to, it's not
even worth even really considering that.
(26:42):
And I'm that's why I'm grateful to you, Craig.
I don't want to like go hard toohard down this path, but like
you deserve a lot of credit because athletes, former
athletes have incredible credibility.
When you talk about the value ofmulti sport play or you don't
have to specialize early or here's what you want from your
coaches. You have a voice that no one
(27:02):
else does. Parents will listen to athletes
like you. So I, you know, my thoughts,
like how do we bring, how do we basically clone you and like
package this stuff in a way thatparents get it from all angles.
And so they know what to ask of their local program.
Like, Hey, coaches are what are you trained?
Are you trained in this, this and this?
(27:24):
Like, hey, do you like multi sport play?
Do you support my kid at age 10 playing multiple?
You know, I mean, I think, I think athletes can play a huge
game. I agree, double down on that.
There's not a critical mass at this point of former elite
athletes saying what you're suggesting.
And my experience with youth coaches is they tend to say the
(27:46):
right thing, but then their actions are very different.
So you know the the system is supporting a single sport at
this point, which makes it really tricky.
And then there's the mental health side of things, right?
Do you have any data that that is interesting to you about
mental health and sports that you pay attention?
Yeah, I don't have it off the top of my head on the numbers,
but it the research is clear that kids who who move their
(28:11):
body do better in terms of mental health.
It just, it just you, the brain works better if you're moving
your body than you are sitting in your inert.
If you're moving your body and you're doing it with other
people now you get the social benefits.
And so you deal with the social isolation and some of the
problems we see in our society right now.
(28:32):
So all this talk about how we'regoing to address the mental
health crisis. Oh, and by the way, you know
what happens when kids are playing sports?
They're not holding a phone. You actually take it out of
their hand. We've talked about this a lot
today. I never have to remind my kids
to play video games. Right.
So like, if you want to address the mental health crisis in this
country, my thought is like, cancan we?
(28:54):
Can we have some huge national call to action around both
making sport accessible to everykid who wants to play?
Well, both interesting. Both of our kids at at schools
they don't have they just eliminate cell phones on campus.
Yep, for the for the entire day,No, that is a massive gift, I
think to all of us. I'd love to see that nationwide.
(29:16):
That is a really cool movement. And it's at high school.
So club and high school are different.
At my son's high school, they encourage that.
Oh, you have to take a sport every year.
They encourage multiple sports. But then you get into the club
system, which is a fast track tosomewhere nowhere the bottom.
Maybe not, I don't know, but it's in.
(29:36):
But they those philosophies differ.
I think the key to all sport achievement the kids who improve
the longest, not the fastest, not the most severe.
The kids who just continue to creep up in perpetuity, just
forever. I love the frame they win.
When you think about if you, if we wanted to build a tall,
(29:59):
sturdy structure, we'd have a really wide base.
This is an engineering principlethat's been around forever.
And when you play multiple sports, you're building a base.
You're not over conditioning onegrooved set of muscles.
You're also adding psychologically lots of
interesting reference points andexperiences, different cultures,
(30:20):
different standards and expectations, different
sophistications. There's something for the for
the parent who's listening rightnow.
There's this is before we get into formalized sport.
OK, so that the younger ages, there's two things that you can
do if you want to help somebody get better at something.
It's called formal instruction or guided discovery.
(30:41):
Formal, Formal instruction is let's say that I'm going to
teach your kid Greg how to roll down a hill.
Okay, put your chin to your chest, tuck your head and then
look at your belly button kind of archo, and then roll.
Okay, good, good, do that again.Okay, come up here, let's do it
again. Now this time keep your arms in
(31:02):
and roll. Okay, so formal instruction,
they will get better faster, OK,But they're missing the guided
discovery. And so the guided discovery is
you offer a suggestion to somebody and you say, hey, let's
roll down this. You go first.
Now this is not supposed to be adangerous thing, but sometimes
(31:22):
it is. OK, And then what's going to
happen to that kid? They're going to roll sideways,
they're going to roll on an angle, they're going to roll
backwards. They're going to try all these
different dimensions, which in return creates a bigger base of
reference points, a bigger base of internal trust.
You're getting so many different, like sensory
(31:42):
information from that. But that kid takes longer to get
good, but they'll stay longer because they have all the
reference points. And what do we do in the US?
For sure, flat out. I'm going to use the brace to
the bottom one more time. Formal and structure instruction
over and over and over again until they burn out or blow out.
(32:03):
So that's the scenario that if there's one little thing that
the the parent can hear here or the youth coach is encourage
guided discovery, encourage playing in that unknown space
where you figure out and innovate and create something
net new both for your brain and maybe for the industry if you
stay in it long enough. Have you ever read Talent Code?
(32:24):
Oh yeah, that's. Exactly what it dives into like
the Brazilians playing. Dan Coyle, right?
Yeah, Dan Coyle. Not soccer, but futsal makes my
soccer aficionado over there, Mikey off camera, but he dives
into exactly that. Like what is it about these
certain hotbeds and what do theydo?
And he talks about foot soil anddeep learning and how there's no
(32:45):
coach telling these kids they'rethey put them in a small little
concentrated environment. A lot of touches, small ball,
small field play, figure it out.And now more from my
conversation with the team at Players Health, what would you
say has been probably the most impactful policy that you guys
have consulted on? You've been part of the
(33:06):
conversation implementing and and kind of outlining like was
it the concussion stuff? Is there something else?
Like where is there one conversation and big movement
that you guys have been a part of that you feel like has made a
significant impact on the youth sports landscape?
I, I have to hyper focus specifically around our abuse
prevention policies and the reason why I, we, we, why I
(33:28):
gravitate to that. And, and not that concussions
are not a big deal because they are, but an, an, an incident
specifically around emotional, physical, sexual abuse within a
youth athlete will change their life forever.
And so I always like to say thatif players help, our focus is to
make sure that the transaction between an athlete and their
(33:49):
sports organization, we wanted to be positive.
We want them to be depositing good things into kids and not
taking things away from them. And so when we look at abuse
prevention policies, we recognize that this is a life on
the line. And so when when we look at how
we prepare and credential coaches, we need to make sure
(34:09):
that these adults are actually, you know, being credentialed
before they come in contact withan athlete.
And what are the signs should webe looking for around bad
behavior, around communication? What are the things should we
should we be making sure that weunderstand?
And then do we have a reporting mechanism in place so that we
the athlete has a voice, their parents, all of the folks around
(34:31):
that are our eyes and ears. Do they have now have a
mechanism to communicate that this is happening?
And then do we have preventativemeasures or, or temporary
measures are being put in place to stop the bleeding if we do
find it a behavioral issue with a coach or staff member, have
you removed them? Do we have an investigative
process in place? Like all that policy changes
(34:54):
everything and, and it limits the likelihood that something
that will change a life forever from happening.
We only want sports to be positive, but we recognize that
there are experiences that kids are having that, that are
negatively impacting their livesforever.
So I'd say that that's the definitely the number one
policy. Health, of course, is a big
(35:14):
focus, but I think on the safetypiece, it can't get bigger than
that. It's a shame how much is going
on in the world of youth sports,but people like yourself that
are passionate and, and companies like, like players
health that are very passionate about improving the experience
for all people, adults but mostly children in youth sports.
I my hats off to you, man. What what you guys are building
(35:36):
the services and the and the policies you guys are
implementing and creating are changing the landscape of youth
sports for thousands of kids allacross the country.
And you guys should be applaudedfor it.
So I appreciate you joining us here on on you think.
I appreciate you sharing your vision, your journey and look
forward to continuing to work with you guys going forward.
Absolutely appreciate you, Greg.Talk to you soon.
(35:58):
Here at you think we want to bring value.
To you the. Parents, coaches, the athletes
listening in, everything that wedo.
Check out Players Health today and let them know Youth Inc sent
you. Now back to the episode.
Tom, I think you'll really appreciate this is that I didn't
fit in traditional stick and ball sport as a young kid.
(36:18):
I didn't understand these man made rules and these adults
screaming at me. I didn't get it.
I thought, I thought you guys were wack.
And I found action sports and inaction sports, surfing,
skateboarding, motocross, there's really no rules other
than what Mother Nature will demand of you.
So and there's no formal coaching, but the and it takes a
(36:40):
long time to get good at those sports because it's not a
repetitive environment. I'll tell you what I learned so
much about how to trust myself, how to stand on in my own self,
how to face down and give an assessment of risk.
And when we got these adults, I asked my son the other day, hey,
how are we doing? My wife and I, how are we doing?
(37:01):
Like helicopter parenting, you know, like my wife is second
generation. So there's a little bit more
hovering. You know, she's in her family's
an immigrant. And he said you guys are not
helicopters, but I can hear the drone that's.
Good. Right I'm like that's a good way
to put it I'll take a drone. I'll.
Take a drone right now, right? Yeah, take a drone.
(37:21):
I'll take that. Yeah, so, so anyways, I'm having
fun with it. But the point is for the, the
the listener of viewer like encourage environments where
they're taking risks and they'redoing it in the safest possible
way. But things can go wrong.
And when they learn how to know how to, when they learn how to
work within themselves, it's a lifelong lesson as.
(37:42):
Well, the name of my book I deliberately names away as game
on the All American race to makechampions of our children.
And what I was trying to do is be ironic and say you actually
can't make a champion, you can'tmanufacture an elite athlete.
They come out with good clay andfrom there you can just not
screw it up. But you can put them with good
(38:04):
coaches and you can put them in environments where they can
problem solve. And that's what you were doing.
You were learning to be a problem solver.
And isn't that what we want withall of our kids?
We want our kids to be in an uncertain environment and not
have someone tell them how to solve a problem, them to read,
react and come up with a solution.
So how do we, I mean, how do we get more kids and to have your
(38:24):
kind of experience? Well, that that and I'll add a
little bit more nuanced piece here.
By the age of 15, I probably almost drowned 10 times.
So like there's real danger in those types of environments.
So you can't manufacture the type of risk I'm talking about.
And we're so afraid of that. Like, my parents didn't want me
to die, of course, but they wanted me to be a fully informed
(38:47):
human and go for it. And I was the kid that was
always zigging when the world was zagging.
I didn't want to be coached by these adults that were screaming
like, that's about you. Yeah, this is not about me.
I'm going to a place where it can be about me.
And so I'm. I'm not encouraging danger, but
to a point. He's on record.
Kids don't. Michael Gervais, I'm not
(39:07):
encouraging danger. That's gonna be his new saying.
The thing is, parents, the undersay they don't own the lives of
their children, their children. They have their own lives.
And so how do you strike that balance of letting them have
enough risk? You'll never hear me like say
bubble wrap kids avoid every safety, you know, every safety
you got to, you got to manage this.
(39:27):
Are you guys OK if your kids came home with a broken bone?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess it depends what
they did. Fell out of a tree?
Well, you don't like that one. Well, I wouldn't love them
getting hurt right before a football game climbed a tree.
Yeah, but but there's there's a response we have like there's, I
think there's a case to be made for broken bones.
And like, it sounds like I'm, I'm callous here.
(39:49):
I'm joking. You're not joking.
No, you're. Serious, I tell my kids after
every football practice, be careful tomorrow and pee.
Do not get hurt. Oh.
My God. OK encourage.
How about you encourage them to like get after it, have a blast?
Cuz when they're really getting after it, they're more likely to
be focused and not hesitating. It's a hesitation that gets us
(40:09):
hurt. Yeah, lean into it.
Lean into the. Turn said don't get hurt, we got
7 more games. There's a truth in that too.
There is a truth. Just being honest, it's cool,
but this was awesome. Tom, appreciate you, man.
Our conversations, I feel like we cover a lot of we cover a lot
of ground every time we chat. We do, and I appreciate you.
(40:30):
Appreciate you. Yeah.
Well done, Tom. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to today's episode with Tom Ferry.
Now let's cover the key takeaways from our conversation.
Tom shared his insights on how are youth sports environment
stacks up against other countries and how the United
States lacks and youth participation rates and
accessibility. We also discussed the
(40:51):
commercialization of sport in the US and ways we can work to
fix its problems. Finally, we covered the immense
benefits that staying active hason mental health and the
importance of youth involvement in sport.
Thanks as always for listening. We'll catch you again soon,
right here, here on You Think.
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