Tuesday, 15 September 2015

How should sports organisations react to a new participation agenda

In further consideration of the Strategy for Sport consultation I want to pose some suggestions on what sports participation is or could be?
My View is that government should consider what sports participation activity is popular with the citizens of England and invest in a whole life experience in that sport. For example most adult males have played teams sports at some point in their lives and in many cases this ends in their thirties yet the enthusiasm and love for the sport is maintained. Government should invest in NGBs developing and delivering modified versions of particularly team’s sports to maintain people’s engagement in their favourite sport. Initiatives like walking Football/Basketball would be encouraging to prolong adults engagement in team sport.  Football are reporting considerable growth in "super-vets" football with people well in excess of 60 wanting and engaging in football on a regular basis.
 The challenge for female participation appears to making sure the right offer is available and the ability to move between activities is made easily accessible. For example our research from the Sportivate programme indicates that women like to start participation as an individual but are more likely to sustain participation in a team sport environment. Therefore local sports provision should enable women to move between sporting experiences with a transfer system that does not disadvantage the providers.  
 More longitudinal tracking of different ages should be undertaken to demonstrate how people change their sporting participation through their lives. Sport clubs should be encouraged through financial investment to become bigger and offer wider opportunities for different age groups similar to the western European club model where clubs own and run municipal facilities for the betterment of their towns and communities.  
This investment should be focused on developing local leaders and community groups supported by local business and local authorities to move to greater ownership of community facilities similar to the Castle pool in Birmingham. This is now in community trust ownership following an asset transfer from Birmingham City Council. I am proud to be a Trustee of this organisation and we strive to provide a high quality community based provision.
Through our past work, addressing inequality does not have a short term answer it takes long term investment in people and infrastructure. The development of leaders within communities is critical and the work of Streetgames has started to address these inequalities. However this investment should be invested in building sustainable local communities sporting bodies similar to the Scandinavian model of sustainable “community sports clubs”. 
One of the key discussion points emerging is should governing bodies have a role in developing and delivering participation. This is a fundamental question that needs addressing as many just need funds to governing their sport and have difficulty in expanding the player base. The size and organisation of smaller and new sports is the challenge to growth. We see the process very clearly as we have adopted this approach with a number of smaller sports such as Korfball and Roller sport.
the following process should be undertaken to identify the relevance of sport to British Society. 
  • Undertake research to understand the market  
  • Utilise this insight to develop suitable coaching, leadership and activator education courses to build an infra-structure of coaches and leaders  
  • Reinvest surpluses made into the sport’s development  
 We believe there is a role for a central body that can provide shared services to a range of governing bodies that can through size offer a collective benefit. We have successfully offered this to a number of governing bodies for their coach education provision. This centralisation has enabled governing bodies to concentrate on developing coaches rather than organising courses whereas we have offered a collective planning and booking service at no additional cost to the NGB whilst also giving over £160,000 in royalty return to the NGBs. This has only worked as we have now reached a scale to be able to provide this collective service.
This model could be applied to other NGB services including basic memberships services as we do with Korfball, Development planning and delivery as we previously did for Archery and insight services which we do for Sportivate but also have provided for a range of governing bodies and CSPs.
If you think about building a team of governing body apprenticeships at a local level in line with the government growth model for apprenticeships supporting local sports participation activity linking to ongoing provision with specific targets you can see that a focused company could concentrate solely on that delivery and not be side-lined by other issues that arise from time to time on a day to day basis in governing bodies.
The landscape will change but its how do organisations manage that change and work collectively and use external bodies to help meet their needs but my fear is that many organisation will chase the money as it has been traditionally distributed and not take a semi-commercial view on developing sport specific participation.

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