Michelle Obama on making sports accessible and affordable

First Lady Michelle Obama says play, nutrition, and physical activity aren’t available to every child — and that’s a problem. With the annual cost of sports participation around $2,200 per child, these opportunities are increasingly available only to wealthier families.

A report from the Sports and Society Program at the Aspen Institute shows parents have concerns around risk of injury, the quality or behavior of coaches, time commitment, and the emphasis on winning over having fun. What can be done to ensure children are being physically active and learning team skills? Obama discusses accessibility and affordability of sports with her brother and ESPN analyst Craig Robinson. Michael Wilbon, host of ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” moderates the conversation.

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Project Play Summit 2016 recap: Elevating access to sport

Above, ESPN Analyst Craig Robinson in conversation with his sister, first lady Michelle Obama, at the 2016 Project Play Summit.

More than 450 leaders at the intersection of sport, youth, and health convened yesterday in Washington, DC, for the 2016 Project Play Summit, where panels explored ways to grow youth access to sport and first lady Michelle Obama issued a direct appeal to stakeholders to close the gap for children from low-income homes. A live-stream audience followed along, with the event trending on social media during the day.

Read below for a roundup of highlights from the day.

FLOTUS calls for more investment in access to sports

In perhaps her most extended comments on the topic, Obama marveled at the disparities in resources spent on children and sports across communities. She offered insights as part of a featured conversation with her brother Craig Robinson, moderated by his ESPN colleague Michael Wilbon.

“So many communities are becoming play deserts,” she said. “But, in wealthy communities, there is a wealth of resources. You can be in field hockey, or you can learn how to swim. There are aquatic centers… I’ve seen the difference, the disparities are amazing to me. So are we saying that some kids are worthy of that investment of physical activity and then there are millions of others who aren’t? And what’s the role that we as a society have for making sure that we have equal access?”

With her mother Marian Robinson seated in front of her in the first row, the session felt less like a keynote and more like an intimate living room conversation with reflections on how much the youth sports experience has changed, for the better and worse, since she and her brother were growing up in South Side Chicago in the 1970s. Wilbon also was raised in South Side Chicago.

The three of them reminisced about the days they all spent playing with local neighborhood, engaged in low- or no-cost physical activity — indoors and outdoors — often organized by the children themselves.

“We would play all day long, for hours,” Obama said.

“All you had to do was report back to the house every couple of hours,” Robinson replied.

Today, with increased concern of public safety and many public parks and playgrounds in rapid decline, parents are left with fewer — and more costly — choices for youth sport. That being the case, Obama called on the sports industry and other sectors to find the funding to get more children engaged in sports, describing it as an “investment” in their own future given the relationship between participation and fandom as well as the development of more elite athletes.

“Whatever the dollar figure is, as a society, as taxpayers, as corporate America, we should figure out how much that costs and then pay for it,” she said. “Period.”

Watch video of the full interview on YouTube.

Tennis Legend Billie Jean King calls for more female coaches

Tennis champion, gender equality and gay rights activist Billie Jean King encouraged the audience to not forget about females when thinking about accessibility for sports. “We don’t have enough women coaches,” she said. “I am sorry to say it. Don’t forget about the girls and the women, we are half of the population. I am serious. We are forgotten.”

Only one in four youth sport coaches were women in 2015, according to data in Project Play’s latest report, “State of Play: 2016,” a draft of which was released at the summit. There’s been no growth in the percentage of women coaches in recent years. (A final version of the report will be released in the coming weeks, incorporating insights from the Summit where the crowd used instant polling software to assess the state of play in each of the eight strategies identified in the seminal Project Play report, “Sport for All, Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game”).

The former World No. 1 tennis player also stressed the importance of sports in making communities safer, and its role in making us more resilient and self-aware.

See news coverage in The Washington Post. Also check out our Storify coverage and find the most tweetable moments by searching for #projectplay. The full list of sessions and panels, and associated materials, can be found on the 2016 Project Play Summit event page. Check back later as more video from those sessions is made available.

Tweets of the Day: Read below for some of the most tweetable moments from #projectplay.

How to build multi-sport venues

If you’re a parent of an active child today, you may be familiar with the dilemma. Your kid shows an interest in a sport, flashes some promise, then next thing you know – maybe even before she or he is out of grade school — the message you’re getting from coaches is the pathway to the next level flows through a focused, year-round commitment to that sport. You may even be asked to sign a contract promising to prioritize that team’s training sessions and games over any outside sport activities.

It’s not consistent with what the research says about quality athletic development. “Not one publication says specialized, intense early play will lead to elite-level success,” says Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, an Emory University professor and one of the world’s leading experts on the health implications of youth athletic training. “There are plenty of anecdotal stories” but no data to support that approach as better than just letting children do what most of them naturally want to do, which is to explore a range of activities.

Schools know not to teach kids just one subject. But this is becoming the standard in youth sports, at least among those who can afford the rising economic barriers to entry (which many cannot). In 2015, for the first time since data began to be collected by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the number of team sports that the average child (ages 6 to 17) played dropped below two, to 1.89.

What to do? At the 2015 Project Play Summit where we introduced our seminal report, Sport for All, Play for Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game, we offered to host a follow-up roundtable on the topic that was of most interest to attendees. The winning idea, as submitted by thought leaders and voted upon via electronic, on-site polling: Conceptualize a multi-sport club. It was a response to the fact that increasingly, youth sports is influenced by private clubs that have expertise in just one sport, and if they own facilities, promote year-round play in that sport because, well, their mortgages need to be paid year-round. Structurally, it’s a model that makes sense for entrepreneurs, not kids and families.

So, last September at the invitation of the U.S. Tennis Association, we hosted a roundtable at the U.S. Open that convened senior leaders from organizations with the capacity to change the game. Actually, it was a couple of roundtables, one mostly for leaders from the professional leagues, one for leaders from national sport governing bodies, with a mix of other key groups, including the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. Many had just agreed to a statement in support of multi-sport play at least through age 12, the first shared action around a strategy as identified in the Sport for All, Play for Life report. Their endorsement was featured in a PSA placed by the USTA in the Sports Business Journal.

Step Two was forming a working group focused on creating a resource that sport providers could use to create multi-sport venues. That resource was delivered at the 2016 Project Play Summit, a document offering guidance for not just sport clubs but camps, parks & rec departments, and other providers. It highlights programs from across the U.S. that we identified as exemplars in encouraging multi-sport play and have developed successful models or innovations that can be scaled. We include a brief overview of each organization, its breakthrough strategy or tact, and its financial structure. Ideas also are offered for creating multi-sport programs from scratch.

Check out the first-of-its kind resource here, and please share with your networks.

Because multi-sport play isn’t just what kids need. It’s what the market wants, if given a choice.

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program and founder of the Project Play initiative, which provides thought leaders with the guidance to build healthy communities through sport. The program has produced a series of reports, most recently State of Play: 2016, an annual snapshot of how well stakeholders are serving children and communities through sports, with grades offered in each of the areas of opportunity as identified in the Sport for All, Play for Life report.

This story was originally published here.