2 months on and what's happening?

Its' coming up to 2 months since the Olympics began.

We had 5 weeks of inspiring sport.

But what is being done to convert all that enthusiasm and passion amongst our youngsters?

Tonight on ITV4, we had a 30 minute programme where Mark Austin addressed a few of the issues which were there before London 2012 and ones which it appears, are certainly there now.

It would seem that despite covenants in existence to protect many playing fields across the nation, including the Clitterhouse playing field in Hendon and the Claremont Road ground of Hendon FC where I spent many a happy hour watching them play in the 1970's (the ground is derelict now - another story), there are moves amongst Councils to sell off these fields to developers (Claremont Road is about to become a housing development).

Another huge issue is the cutting of the £162m School Sports Partnership where after nearly a decade of good work in the state schools sector, the money for coaches and the provision of many different sports has been swept away. It has been replaced in part by a £50m fund which is being administered by the Youth Sports Trust but it's not to be spent in the the same way.

I think the most striking segment of the programme was listening to the Head Teacher of an inner London school which actually has very good facilities including a a proper athletics track. The thing is that due to budget cuts, this school has just sacked its' athletics coach and also, 4 other coaches and a competitions manager whose job has been to do exactly what David Cameron in his interview on school sport said should be happening.

I got severely irritated by Hugh Robertson, the Minister of Sport, who in the smug way that many Ministers seem to either posses or adopt, intimated that it was the fault of the school's top man for allocating his funds that way.

Robertson did not answer one question in a straight way. When Austin asked him if he had fought the SSP cuts, he replied, 'No-one involved in the provision of sport would want to see many monies cut'. So, is that a yes or a no?

I know politics is a dirty business and someone's got to do it but my patience is severely tested by arrogant and superior people like Robertson.

This is the man who spent time cajoling his fellow minister from Australia about the Aussies' lack of gold medals and then tried to create a media photo opportunity out of it instead of sitting her down and squeezing every ounce of her experience as to how the Australians tried to create a sporting legacy post games amongst their kids.

Australia has had many problems since holding the games. Does Hugh Robertson know what they were and how we can avoid them?

He finished off by saying that so many people who complain about money that is cut never suggest as to where that money might come from elsewhere. I shouted at the TV, 'As Minister of Sport, that's what YOU have to do'.

And really, even just a mere £162m is actually chicken feed in the context of total Government expenditure of around £650 billion and I'd start by cutting the £4b a year poured into the sands of Afghanistan to continue a completely pointless occupation (aside from the fact that it was illegal at the time of its' launch in the shocked wake of 9/11 with no UN Security Council resolution - again, another story).

Disagree? No problem. We can look elsewhere. Or, Mr Robertson, you and 'your Government' (as he kept reminding us) can look. Somehow, the wheels of Westminster will keep turning despite a sliver of £40m in cash being wasted over the West Coast Franchise bidding fiasco, so don't sit there with your wide eyed and patronising look as if we are kids insisting on a new toy when the bailiff is at the door.

I really did think as I watched him, who's side are you on?

We were then shown the sports facilities at Harrow School. 13 rugby and football pitches. 12 cricket squares and an indoor swimming facility that would make Loughborough weep. One of the school's masters seemed just a bit embarrassed at being in command of such a vast wealth of sporting fields and facilities for 800 boys.

How is it that we have such a divide? Is it really the case that if you've got the cash, you're OK. If you haven't, well tough.

For anyone who disputes that we have an elitist society, just get them to watch those 5 minutes. It's hardly a surprise that a disproportionate number of our medal winning athletes across many sports are educated in the Public Schools. Looking at those facilities, I'd almost say why aren't there more?

12 cricket squares; it's almost obscene. How many pairs of jeans does one school need?

The saving grace of this situation is that these playing fields are accessed and used by other local schools, we are told.

But perhaps the most insightful conclusion was that it's not just about facilities; in fact, facilities, although a key component of playing sports are always secondary to having decent coaches. A point I'd agree with wholeheartedly.

Helen Glover, our Olympic Gold medalist whose sculling victory was perhaps the high point for me after her back story, a woman who only took up the sport a few years back winning gold at her home games, made the point that it's about having inspiring coaches to lead our kids. I'd agree with this. But are they to do everything for free?

In the context of a state school environment where specialist PE teachers rarely exist for an age group critical to building decent athletic skills in their formative years, the programme finished by quoting a statistic that under 50% of primary school teachers feel confident of delivering PE to their kids.

Where are the specialist PE teachers for our primary schools?

Where are the teacher training programmes for non specialist teachers to enable them to deliver PE with a confidence level significantly higher than just under 50%

In conclusion, it was a fantastic summer of sport but already for many it will be a winter of discontent as far as any real chance of having a decent opportunity to start or play any sport and mainly for those in the state school sector.

London 2012 was sold from the beginning on the benefits of legacy. Legacy is not just about leaving a few excellent major facilities in the community after the games (well, the ones which haven't been taken down, that is). It is about this. But fundamentally, legacy is about getting more people to play more sport and this is a social, economic and political goal as a healthier nation will be a better nation.

If nothing happens post London 2012, what was it really all about? What was the point of it all? Just to make us feel better for a few weeks?

We may have loved the opening ceremony. But as things sit today, I'd rather have that £27m which that ceremony cost invested in a few schools like the one which has just got rid of all its specialist sports coaches. The more I think about it, the more mad it seems.

Here are some questions.

Are you involved in a sport?

Is your kid involved in a sport?

If yes to either question, then contact the Press Office of the national body of that sport and ask them one question, 'In the aftermath of such a fantastic Olympics this summer, what is the Sport doing about boosting participation numbers amongst children between the ages of 5 and 12?'

State schools rock by Phil Stevens

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Introduction

My old Liverpool University football colleague, Dr Phil Stevens has had a lifetime playing and coaching sport and has been involved in teaching in various capacities and in various sectors of the education system.

Originally from East London, the Olympics at London 2012 has had particular significance for someone who loves East London and Metropolitan Essex. 

Now retired, Phil has tuned his skills to writing and is now about to complete his 4th book.

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State schools rock by Phil Stevens

The Government and their friends in the media are carrying out a vicious campaign to discredit school sport. It’s been drummed into us – lack of competition, all must have prizes, and lazy, indolent teachers.

Well – did Jess Ennis, Nicola Adams, Mo Farah, Bradley Wiggins and many others of our Olympic medallists attend fee-paying schools? I don’t think so – not even a decrepit old minor public school – of which there are many.

Let me tell you a story featuring my basketball team from a bog standard comprehensive school in Plymouth. I’d taken on this disparate, but talented bunch of boys in Year 8. My first impression was – keen, very keen, raw talent and plenty of street wise savvy around the court. Within two years these kids were so nearly English Schools champions.

Mainly as a result of their basketball, all the team members stayed on for the 6^th Form. In Year 12 we were drawn away to the elite private sports college, Millfield in the regional final. By this stage the team were unbeatable in the south west and this was a chance to test themselves against the best.

On the journey up to Somerset you could have heard a pin drop in the back of our ancient, but roadworthy, minibus. The players were calmly focussed on the game ahead – quietly listening to their music. My colleague Sarah, a superb PE teacher and gifted coach, who the boys adored, looked at me across the front seat and smiled – everything was just right.

As we warmed up before the match our players were met with real hostility from hundreds of Millfield kids, who had clearly been given time out to cheer on their team. Back to the dressing room for last minute technical instructions and some old style motivational tub-thumping and we were ready. In the minutes before tip-off we could see the boys were pumped up, bursting with pride for their school, especially when the Principle and the Head of 6^th Form suddenly appeared to support their team – all the way from Plymouth.

Two minutes into the 1^st quarter, we were 6-0 up, and from the start of the 2^nd quarter were never less than 20 points ahead in the whole match. The excited and noisy Millfield crowd was reduced to silence as they drifted away in embarrassment. We absolutely hammered this specialist private sports school on their own, much prized court.

We didn’t even win the competition that year, but narrowly lost in the semi-final to – guess who? A state comprehensive from Forest Gate in East London. But that was OK – our best player gained a scholarship in top US basketball college and is now an established professional in the BBA.

This story is repeated all over state schools in the UK, year in year out. Not competitive – bullshit. Inclusive – absolutely. 

Stop the lies and get into schools and see the truth for yourself.

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In this review of Phil's first book from my other blog, GoalsandWickets, on a book about sport in Essex and East London between 1960 and 2000, you can find out all about Phil, his wonderful sporting life and his many achievements in the field of education;

http://goalsandwickets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/perfect-goalsandwickets-book-sporting.html

'Competitive sports for ALL primary school children?' - Not sure about that one!

I heard on the radio the other day reports of David Cameron boldy announcing that there would be mandatory competitive sport in primary schools for all children.

My stomach immediately tightened up at this statement. In fact, it filled me with a sense of dread.

Should sport be for all? Mandated for all? Or for those who like it?

And COMPETITIVE sport? What did Cameron mean by this?

While discussing sport with my good friend and writer Joel Drucker, the question of competitive sport came up. In his usual incisive and insightful way, Joel asked, 'Is there any other kind?'

And on the one hand, Joel is right. If you take the competition out of sport, whatever it is you are doing stops being sport. Competition is integral to sport.

But that competitve aspect of sport can be coached in numerous different ways, especially to impressionable young children who live at the edge of their emotions with few barriers yet developed to protect how they react to things or demonstrate what they are feeling.

The issue, therefore, then becomes one of how the competitive side of any sport is coached with the goal being to leave the juniors at the end of the activity with as much positive feeling about the experiences they have just been through.

The examples of where this has not been done well are too many to ignore.

The night before, I had been on an internet forum where in equal number, people had been extolling the virtues of sport and also their terrible tales of woe about the type of PE experience that had filled them with terror even as far ahead as the night before the day at school when the PE Lesson would take place.

These negative comments and experiences highlighted the problems if primary school sport is ratchetted up;  although in principle, sports can be for everyone, ultimately, the reality is that sport isn't for everyone in that some kids may just not like it, regardless of whether they are any good at it.

I would also add that unless the competitive component of any PE is not handled properly, the risks of re-creating all of the PE horror stories is just re-opened again.

I remember the parent who was always very concerned that her young son wasn't enjoying his tennis lessons enough; certainly not as much, it seemed as the other kids.

When I got chatting to her, she started telling me about him. 'I just want him to be able to enjoy it but he doesn't seem able', she told me. When I asked her what he did like, she exploded with enthusiasm saying, 'He LOVES to read. Nothing he likes better than sitting down and reading'. While I never turned anyone away who wanted to enrol, I suggested that if the like / dislike default position was so strong, why not let he son concentrate on an obvious strength he possessed and one he clearly enjoyed?

It's a difficult one for parents. How do you know what your child likes unless you get them to try it out? Some kids need leading to the well. It's more straight forward when a kid stands watching some sporting activity and the parent can see how interested the child is. Asking the question, 'Would you like to try this', is a natural and obvious one to ask.

All the research and thinking behind the 10,000 hours model (more of this in another post to follow) says that in the early stages of child sport development, the 5 to 11 years, (and there are even different groups within this range, it's not one clump of kids to be treated all the same) it's all about basic athletic skill development and within each sport, the basics of skill development for that sport.

In all ball sports, for example, it's sending and receiving skills that ultimately need to be hard wired, so anything where kids can get a ball going backwards and forwards is hugely valuable. When one dad told me that he was making sure his football mad son did 500 keepie-uppies every night, I suggested to him that he add the simple exercise of hitting the football against a wall for as well - send it, receive it (and also control it).

In these early years where the emphasis is on FUN, FUN, FUN, it's about building the ABC's (agility, balance and co-ordination) where the aim is learning while having fun. If the kids can have so much fun, they don't even realise that they are learning, then this is perfection.

The use of creative games is critical in this process (again, more about this to follow).

But all of this does not mean that competition is absent. Competition can be part of this and should be part of this. It's all a question of how.

I remember an excellent article in the newsletter of the PTR many years ago where it talked about the gradual introduction of competition to the activity where as the kids got gradually older, competition would be gradually increased.

Initially, with the very young ones, competition would be in the form of self focused tasks, where kids are trying to do something and maybe to beat their own score at that task. Certainly 5 and 6 year olds are innately self centred at that age and are not great at tasks in pairs for example (this ability develops a bit later)

Even from an early stage, depending on the activity or mini game being played, teams can be used within the activity. We used team formats in our 10 main tennis drill games which were used to build stroke skills. Placing kids in teams, even in individual sports like tennis, when they are very young, adds a layer of protection to the kids against the potentially ruthless impact of competition.

Any relay races either with or without equipment (balls, bats, racquets etc) are fantastic.

You can still have winners and losers but both need to be dealt with in an appropriate way. There is no going over the top at winning, nor any sarcastic castegation of losers. Well done and hard luck will suffice. Be Kiplingesque; life goes on whether you win or lose. Be excited to win and a bit disappointed to lose. It's almost natural. But react in proportion.

As for how teams are picked, this cannot be left to the old style playground method of the coach selecting 2 captains who then go through the excrutiating process of picking the teams by selecting the kids on the basis of perceived ability where those regarded as no good get left to the end. The coach must organise the teams and ensure that they are as fair as possible.

As the kids move up from 11 into the pre-teen and early teenage years, you up the anti as far as structured and organised competition but as you coach, you STILL focus on task mastery. In success and in defeat, you look at the lessons to be learned from the performance (think how top athletes and sports people usually talk about defeat). There is no over self deprecating apology or criticism of performance (like the lovely lad who lost and burst into tears shaking his head informing everyone, 'I blew it!' He hadn't.).

By the time the kids reach 15/16 you want them to have reached a point where they have been through a managed process of experience as far as competition and how to handle it where they have as good a skill level in their sport as possible, they understand the game and can handle winning and losing.

Through this whole process, it's about focusing on both the result (the winning and losing) and the performance (how the result was achieved). At the youngest and younger ages, the performance IS the result; the learning, discovery and skill development are one and the same. By the time the players are 16, you definately focus more on the goal of the upcoming activity; to win. But you still spend a significant amount of time on the process, the how you are going to go about it.

This model works. I recommend it.

So I'd say to Cameron, be careful about how you use the word competition. I'm in favour of it but as long as those coaching it understand how to do it.

Mandatory competitive sport for primary schools? I'm not so sure. Competitive sport in all secondary school? Better but again, as long as it's coached well. For the youngsters starting off, give them as wide a range of experiences as possible and build their ABC's. Whatever you do, make it FUN, constantly praise people, show those who can't do it how to do it and extract every once of patience you possess for every kid.

Maximum joy and minimum dread; those are the goals of primary school age sport.

Why this blog?

It was sitting there looking at me every day.

A spare hard drive at the back of my desk.

On it was a book: 80,000 words in 17 chapters.

It took 7 years to write, every evening after the coaching.

336 tips from 14 years running a junior tennis programme coaching at times, upward of 700 kids a week of all ages and stages from 4 year-old beginners to 16 year old tournament players.

A former corporate marketing executive who had spent 12 years in a multi-national company, I had packed it in to do something else. I had then travelled around the world and done many things, including following the Grand Slam tennis tournaments as they took place through 1992 and early 1993 in Paris, Wimbledon, New York and Melbourne.

While watching all that tennis, it came to me one day, sitting in the stands at Didsbury in Manchester that I had to get involved in the thing I love, sport and specifically tennis.

I became a tennis coach with the help of Steve Matthews who offered me the job of running the junior tennis programme at the David Lloyd Club in Raynes Park, S.W. London very close to Wimbledon itself.

As a qualified and then licenced tennis coach, I had run my programme for 5 years and the numbers had risen significantly from 140 kids a week to over 700 a week. During that time, I had also researched every bit of youth sports information I could lay my hands on. I wanted to run great coaching but I wanted to know why some things worked and why other stuff didn't.

Then Cliff Drysdale, the former tennis star, a man then and now involved in junior coaching in the United States, walked past the tennis courts full of kids having fun while he was at Wimbledon. He looked across the courts and said, 'Crippsey, you've got to write this stuff down.'

So one day I started and with the fantastic help of my friend Bob Mitchell, a self avowed sports nut and published writer, who crafted together my initial notes and helped me to write a book proposal on the project with view to getting it published, I started writing.

While making efforts to get a traditional book deal, I kept the writing going, every evening, using the fresh experiences of the coaching day after day.

In 2000, the U.K. arm of the Professional Tennis Registry, the independent worldwide tennis coaching organisation presented me with their Golden Eagle award for outstanding contribution to junior tennis.

The momentum was building.

Eventually, after many hours, many re-writes and a massive amount of editing, it was done.

The material forms a pretty comprehensive model for running a junior tennis programme, although the vast majority of the content could be applied to any sport. In fact, everything any adult involved in a youth sports programme might need to consider in order to maximise the performance of their club, activity or programme is included. From all the planning considerations through the coaching and the regulations, it's the principles and the practices broken down into bite size chapters, then sections and then individual tips.

The book includes much on the philosophy of what makes great youth sports experiences for kids but is about practical things that the adults involved can actually do. So it's as much oriented towards the actions as the words.

In 2007, I had been forced to give up the best job in the world, due to chronic knee problems and begun a new chapter in my life where I've now got involved with sports memorabilia in my 2 original sports of football and cricket (see my blog, GoalsandWickets).

Meanwhile, the book with all those practical tips settled down to a life in permanent semi-retirement on my spare hard drive.

But then came London 2012 and as everyone began to start talking about the legacy of the games, I found myself writing frequent and long posts on internet forums to which many would respond.

I kept looking at the hard drive and came to a decision. I needed to get the material out there.

While still a coach, I had made efforts to get the book published but despite the frequent calls for increased participation in youth and school sports from just about everywhere you looked, from a commercial perspective, the type of material I had to offer was just a bit too niche for the large publishers and those who were specialists in the area, like Human Kinetics, already had similar offerings.

However, having spent 2 years writing my GoalsandWickets blog, I already had some experience in how this all works, so I decided to set up another blog, this blog, to get the process started.

Through the prism of events in the sports world, I will write about youth sports issues and any of the tips in my book which are relevant.

I will also write about the book itself both from the perspective of the big picture which provides a structure for youth sports people and from the perspective of the original tips which have been written for people to take or leave, to dip in and dip out, to try and see how they work for them, even to enhance and improve them for the benefit of the kids.

Hopefully, in as many cases as possible, any tips I give can be the start of other's experience and not the final word.

I won't tell people what to do but I do have a whole lot of experience from those 14 years which may just help a few people. It was a marriage of organisation and love for sport and getting kids playing, all kids.

So if you are an adult involved in youth sport, whether a policy maker, an administrator, a manager, a coach, an assistant coach, an official, a journalist, a volunteer helper or a parent with a kid involved in a sport or one who you want to get involved, this blog and the tips from my book as I write about them will hopefully provide something for you to use.

The blog will take time to build and hopefully, readers remarks, comments and experiences about what they went through as a kid in sports and what they are experiencing now in any one of the roles I've just listed above can add to the blog.

Maybe in this way, the blog can become a resource of shared experiences built on the foundation of my original material?

I hope so.

Let's see how it goes.