The SUNY Youth Sports Institute

Rationale

The new legacy of youth sport is no longer home to neighborhood games, enforced by self-styled rules, without coaches or adults. For most American youngsters those days are well in the past, if they ever were. Today youth sports are adult-driven organized play that speaks of player development, training, achievement, winnowing out the weak and specialization.  

Magnified by the global ‘sportsmanship’ crisis, the United States youth sports model that replaced player-driven games with pay-to-play programs, travel teams and national organizations is being closely watched. Though it has provided some children with exceptional benefits, many experts are concerned this new ‘professionalized’ model may limit important developmental, socialization and decision-making skills acquired by children through playful, unsupervised games.

There is a place for the days of sandlot games, but since organized sport is the model we’ve accepted, we need to know its opportunities and limitations. In particular the “lessons-not-learned” from youthful games, along with professional stress levels on young bodies may be impacting the long-term health of young people. The opportunities from youth sports, e.g. fun, exercise, community and healthy competition, are often at odds with the challenges created by this environment. In three areas; family costs in time and money, suffocating pressure to win and increasingly serious injuries to ever younger players we’re on new ground in need of new research.

Since adult involvement has created this environment, adults play the largest role in its assessment. The head coach is the one adult with the greatest potential impact on whether or not a child’s formative experience in youth sports will be positive or negative. When trained, the head coach will be able to communicate effectively with parents, players and community. The coach enforces (even sets)  the standards and expectations that everyone will operate under. The head coach is central to all possibilities of every one involved.  It should also be noted that youth sports programs can be started by virtually any adult with access to a playing field, a clipboard, to children and a whistle. It is an area that begs for training yet training at the youth level is rarely required of the coach.  

In recognition of the central role of youth coaches, and in recognition of the influence organized sports have on the formative years of millions of New York’s children and their families, the State University of New York has chartered the SUNY Youth Sports Institute to be a catalyst for positive change in youth sports in New York.

School Sponsored Sports  vs. Non-School Sponsored Youth Sports

In New York State’s middle and secondary schools, all athletic coaches are required to be certified and to adhere to standards of knowledge and behavior. These coaching standards, established by the New York State Education Department and New York State Public High School Athletic Association, are recognized as among the highest in the nation for school sponsored sports. Yet there are no such requirements for the vastly larger pool of non-school volunteer and travel team coaches and administrators.  As a result, youth sports in New York are a polyglot of travel teams, elite programs, camps, rec. teams, summer teams and town teams- without any oversight or minimum standards.

Some youth leagues, towns and national sport federations have their own loosely enforced unique standards, yet unlike the school environment there are no minimum standards for coaching across all youth sports.  Without common minimum standards of operation, training, behavior, risk management, health and safety, or game and practice coaching, sports programs and coaches may unduly influence young children during their most formative years.

One central goal of the SUNY Youth Sports Institute is to establish a common language of minimum standards applied across all non-school sports in New York State. Accompanying these minimum standards will be a broad but low-intensity curriculum, a face-to-face classroom session along with an online test. Once registered as having passed the exam, youth sports administrators, coaches, parents and officials will have access to outstanding sport-specific material and online support for their specific sports needs as well as general interest youth sports research and news. This will provide valuable, ongoing communication with coaches in their same sport across the New York State.

Sports Leadership Training Network

The State University of New York consists of 64 geographically dispersed campuses which lay within commuting distance of virtually every New Yorker.  The SUNY system is a natural network for the training and communication work of the Youth Sports Institute. The Institute’s launch in the fall of 2007 of the Sports Leadership Training Network located centers at 27 of the 30 SUNY Community Colleges. The Institute is providing the Sports leadership Training Network with technology, curriculum, and resources to work with trained faculty or athletic professionals instructing our non-credit coursework at most SUNY Community Colleges.          (Link to Map)

SUNY’s academic and community leadership position will contribute to the important discussions about the changing culture of youth sports taking place in homes, at schools, on playgrounds and in boardrooms across the state. In so many ways this discussion is not about youth sports at all, but about the health and future of New York’s children, their families and our communities.

Headquartered at the State University of New York College at Cortland, the Youth Sports Institute and the Sports Leadership Training Network are committed to creating and instructing a common language of minimum unified standards across all youth sports. This common language will renew the legacy of youth sports in New York State.
 

Mission

The SUNY Youth Sports Institute has been chartered by The State University of New York to identify the challenges of youth sports, refine its opportunities, to correct its inadequacies, to encourage the positive attributes of current sport programs, and to assist local communities create sustainable positive sport environments. The SUNY Youth Sports Institute has been authorized to develop research, produce evidence-based curriculum, provide best practices, use instructional technology and create a state-wide network of training centers through which coaches and other non-school youth sports officials will become certified to a common standard of coaching across all youth sports. All of our efforts are focused on fostering the health and well being of the children and the families in the youth sport communities in New York State.

Objectives:

Improve the ability of all youth sport practitioners to embody a "child centered" youth sports environment.

Test the claims and common knowledge surrounding a variety of issues in youth sports: sport specialization at younger ages, overuse injuries, activity-passivity in youth games, nutrition, the pay-to-play cultural paradigm, value of supervised vs. unsupervised play; healthy vs. unhealthy competition; youth sport burn-out, etc.

Provide evidence on how a common language of minimum unified standards is optimal to enhancing the health of sports-minded children and families.

Through curriculum, training, research and certification the SUNY Youth Sports Institute will de-construct and then re-build the current youth sports culture in New York State by providing youth sport leaders a common language of minimum unified standards across all youth sports.

Establish a statewide coaching and parents discussion network for topics as diverse as new drills and current thinking on overtraining.

Encourage local sports constructs to understand and establish models of competition.

Facilitate an ongoing and dynamic statewide training network that encourages local input into youth sports standards based upon the needs of local communities.

Provide a model for youth sports training for the nation.