Announcing the First Statewide Training Network
for non-School Youth Coaches & Parents

The story of youth sports in America has entered a new chapter. For most youngsters, it’s no longer home to neighborhood games that teach life lessons through active, energetic self-governed play. With family management, safety, and skill development as its driving force, youth sport is too frequently a controlled form of adult-driven organized play. It speaks of player development, training, achievement, winnowing out the weak and specialization- words that sound like work, not play.

Yet the games children play and their physical engagement in those games, are important components of a healthy life. Magnified by a global ‘sportsmanship’ crisis and the health-challenges of childhood obesity and diabetes closer to home, the youth sports model that replaced player-organized games is under increasing scrutiny.

Coach as Memory Keeper

There is only one thing we know for certain that every child will receive from their time in youth sports; the memory of that experience.  The head coach can have a tremendous impact on whether or not a child's memory of their formative years in youth sports was positive or negative.  The SUNY Youth Sports Institute's training program, Youth Sports New York, is singularly focused on helping all coaches create great memories for the youngsters they  coach. We do this through our curriculum, our on-site trainers, a dynamic web environment and by providing exceptional teaching tools.

Rationale

Organized youth sports are an important part of the fabric of family life for millions of New Yorkers. More than ever, organized sports are the sole source of a child's physical activity and central to their social development. Yet sport leaders need to ask if this new 'professionalized' model may impact important developmental, wellness, socialization, and decision-making skills once acquired by children through active, unsupervised games. Leaders must ask how youth sports can be kept in context relative to other beneficial aspects of childhood.

The SUNY Youth Sports Institute is asking if the all-or-nothing approach of organized sports vs. self-governed play provides enough balance, or is there a way to infuse one with attributes of the other? 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 non-school, organized youth sports in New York State.

Parents are on new ground and in need of new perspectives on the importance of the games their children play. As their youngster's now dominant form of "play", adults need to know the great benefits and honest limitations of organized sports in their community. What happens if a youngster quits playing organized sports. If this occurs, where can they remain physically active with their friends? Other limitations associated with the organized model can be illustrated in at least five areas; child wellness, family costs, suffocating pressure to win, burnout rates and increasingly serious injuries to ever younger children.

For volunteer youth coaches who manage other people's children, often from challenging family situations, these coaches need and deserve assistance from trained professionals. They need instruction and minimum standards along with tools to temper the unrealistic expectations of parents and players. With knowledge from a coaching education program centered on the youngest members of their community, these tools teach volunteer coaches how to infuse organized sports with the fun, activity and relationship-building benefits that children had previously received from unsupervised games.

For the vast majority of youngsters who do not move on to interscholastic or intercollegiate sports, organized youth sports are their singular athletic experience. At their best, community-based, organized athletic programs create a child-centered sense of belonging, rich in relationships, life-long lessons, physical health, and fun. So here's to the best your community youth sports program can be.

It's Time for Minimum Standards

While youth sports beg for trained coaches, training is rarely required by the youth programs, recreation departments, or municipalities who sponsor youth sports. Minimum standards not only improve conduct, knowledge, and safety, but would clarify the role of everyone involved; the administrators, coaches, and parents.

Youth Sports NY™ - Training & Certification for Coaches

In no other pastime, academic or social structure, do children spend so much time with unrelated adults who have no minimum standards of knowledge, conduct, safety, or practice as they do with their coaches in non-school youth sports.

In New York State, these programs rely almost exclusively on the instincts and best intentions of an estimated hundred+ thousand volunteer coaches; with relative few receiving qualified instruction. Volunteer coaches are responsible for a child's formative experience in sportsmanship, physical education, and relationship building through sport. Even for paid professionals it is a difficult task that has a permanent impact on children.

We began low-intensity training of coaches in March 2008. In our first two years we have trained nearly 4,000 New York youth coaches in face-to-face lectures with the large majority completing a SUNY Youth Coaching Certification. Our evidence-based curriculum was developed by our Academic Advisory Board at SUNY Cortland.

As we help youth coaches foster the healthy lives, positive memories and lasting relationships that children should expect from their experiences in youth athletics, we strive to help young people stay connected to community-based physical activities for the rest of their lives.

Through our training network's 40+ college coaches, faculty, and instructors at twenty-nine SUNY community colleges and two technology colleges, we are bringing SUNY's system of public higher education into close contact with their local communities. SUNY leadership in academics, athletics, community health, and outreach is making a direct impact on the lives of the children, families and communities in New York State - while also promoting a positive culture of activity for all.

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 general coaching standards established by the New York State Education Department and New York State Public High School Athletic Association. These standards  are recognized as among the highest in the nation for school sponsored sports. However for the vastly larger pool of non-school coaches and administrators there are no similar standards.  As a result, youth sports in New York and nationwide are a polyglot of travel teams, community teams, elite programs, camps, recreation teams. teams, summer teams and town teams without any consistent set minimum coaching standards.

SUNY's coaching education program is not a sport specific coaching development program. While some sports encourage this and require participation, the institute believes a general coaching curriculum provides a balanced approach to youth coaching. To that end, the SUNY Youth Sports Institute promotes minimum standards across all sports. These standards include health and safety, character development, communication skills, training techniques, teaching tools, risk management, coaching to the middle, and game and practice coaching.

Sports Leadership Training Network

The State University of New York (SUNY) 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. In the spring of 2008, the Institute launched the Youth Sports Leadership Network with technology, curriculum, and resources to work with trained faculty or athletic professionals instructing our non-credit coursework.          (Link to Map)

Operationally centered at the State University of New York College at Cortland, the SUNY Youth Sports Institute is committed to 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.

SUNY's academic and community leadership will contribute to the important discussions taking place in boardrooms, at schools, on playgrounds and in homes about the changing culture of youth sports. 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.

Timothy J. Donovan
Director, SUNY Youth Sports Institute

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.

To provide parents, coaches and youth sports administrators insight into the benefits of unsupervised play and to provide adaptations and derivative games that can be included into organized youth sports.

To enhance the health, wellness and positive relationship young people have with energetic, active leisure activities (Creating a Culture of Activity).

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 coaches and parents discussion network for topics as diverse as new drills and current thinking on over-training.

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 training youth coaches for the nation.