Benefits of Youth Sports for Kids, Communities, and Country - NCYS[Podcast Series]

• [:56] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Wayne Moss

  • Wayne is the Executive Director at the National Council of Youth Sports. 

  • Wayne has a long history of working on youth sports, fitness and recreation. 

• [1:18] Youth sports as essential

  • “I see it as three really important reasons why it's important. You know, first of all, there are benefits to young people. And we can talk about the benefits shortly.  Secondly, there are benefits to community, like it builds community. Youth sports and communities is like apple pie. And then the third thing is it really has benefits for our national interest in a lot of ways.” 

• [2:11] Benefits of youth sports for kids

  • “And what's funny is...adults think about exercise, being active through exercise by and large,  Young people just like to go out and play. And so sports is an easy way to really engage young people in that respect.”

• [4:11] Impact of COVID on the youth sports sector

  • “The youth sports sector has been extraordinarily impacted.  And so, many organizations that were operating and, operating on a shoestring when COVID came in, they shuttered, shut down. And, oftentimes these are organizations that were in the communities that really, that young people needed it most.  So young people have been disproportionately impacted in those particular communities.”

• [6:27] Youth sports and mental health

  • “So if we know that youth sport provides protective factors around mental health and around risky behavior—whether we're talking about premature sex or drugs or alcohol—if we know this to be a fact—and we do—we collectively need to be framing youth sports up in that way so that the public in general gets that this is not just fun and games.”

• [8:49] Benefits of youth sports over a lifetime

  • “But all of these benefits really transfer over the course of a lifetime.  And that’s why I think that it is really important for all young people to be involved in sport and really to find whatever it is, is their particular interest, the thing that they like to do, and the thing that they can continue to do over the course of a lifetime. And they should be engaged in a lot of things, experiment with lots of different sports, just to see what's of, what's of interest to them.”

• [10:53] Youth sports and academic performance

  • “If we think about just the nature of sport, what happens physiologically in terms of the body, blood flow to the brain and all of those kind of things.  We know that that also helps from a cognitive kind of development perspective.  And so as young people are more active, they're in a position to do better in school.”

• [13:37] Access to youth sports for girls

  • “And so I think we need to be sensitive to those things and ensure that when we're developing programs, we're also developing those programs that allow for young girls to feel comfortable, to feel welcome, to want to participate.”

• [16:48] Diversity in leadership

  • “[A]s we think about diversity, with diverse thinking, with diverse engagement, you then bring those kinds of issue to the table where a man may not necessarily be thinking about that, because that's just not our or his experience. A woman may bring that kind of experience.”

• [19:25] Access to youth sports for underserved communities

  • “So that's one of the things that we need to do is to provide support from brands that have a vested interest in youth sports. If they're able to provide funding, we're able to get that to the local level, and then to provide wraparound services.” 

• [23:35] Benefits of youth sports for country

  • “We know that there are many young people for whom they're not physically fit enough to join the military. And so that then has national security implications in terms of the pool of people that are eligible to serve.” 

• [25:08] National Youth Sports Day

  • “One of the things that we're doing, we're putting together National Youth Sports Day, which is going to take place on November the 13th, that's a Saturday. And what we're doing is we're calling on all organizations to really do what they do best, which is to serve young people, to have fun and that kind of thing. But it really is a platform for us to all begin to talk about the importance and the benefits of youth sports.”

• [28:05] Calls to action

  • “I think at the end of the day, it really just comes back to being an advocate for, for young people, for their experience, and then looking to see how we can support them in a way that's authentic for each of us.”