Youth Sport Reform Is Shifting From Programs to Children’s Rights Standards

? tom-farrey used Norway as the clearest example of a sport system built from the base up. Since covering the 2018 Winter Olympics for NBC Sports, he said, he has been focused on how Norway won 39 medals while the United States won 28. When he spoke with architects of the Norwegian system, their explanation began with children: 93% of kids in the country were playing in sport clubs.

The Norwegian foundation, as Farrey described it, was not early elite sorting. It was love of game, physical literacy, local play, low cost, and consensus among the Olympic Committee, national governing bodies, local representatives, and clubs about what should happen for children 13 and under. That base, he argued, helped Norway produce, on a per-capita basis, some of the best athletes in the world, in winter sports and in summer sports.

Farrey acknowledged the obvious objection: Norway is much smaller than the United States. But he rejected the idea that this makes the model irrelevant. Norway is also comparable in size to many U.S. states, he said, and many of its principles are transferable.

The American problem, ? cassidy-lichtman said, is that “the adults have kind of lost the plot on what matters.” Coaches, parents, club leaders, governing bodies, and system designers often emphasize and incentivize things that are not aligned with a child-centered foundation.

Her example came from elite volleyball. Lichtman said she had recently spoken with Jordan Thompson, whom she described as probably the best volleyball player in the country. Thompson, a multiple-time Olympian who has played for decades, told her she still loves playing volleyball. Lichtman’s point was that Thompson’s excellence cannot be separated from that love. Height helps, she said — Thompson is 6-foot-5 — but without love for the sport, “she never gets to that level.”

That principle, in Lichtman’s view, applies whether a child plays through middle school, high school, or the Olympics. The journey has to begin with the child’s relationship to the game. The current U.S. sport system, she said, does not reliably emphasize or reward that starting point.

? mariam-mansury located the pressure on children and families in national trends that become local barriers. She named three: cost and time, coaching, and early specialization.

Cost and time are especially punishing for lower-income families, who may lack both the financial resources and the schedule flexibility to keep children in sport. Coaching quality is another constraint: coaches are receiving less training in areas Mansury described as important to children’s experience and safety, including child safety, CPR, youth development, and mental health. The third pressure is sport specialization at younger ages, which she said is increasing pressure, increasing injuries, and contributing to children quitting sports altogether.

The problem is not only that isolated programs are failing. Adult incentives, access barriers, and uneven coaching conditions are combining locally in ways that make sport harder to enter and easier to leave.

Systems change, in the working definition ? tom-farrey offered, targets “the rules and not just the results” — the policies, power structures, and norms that make certain outcomes inevitable. The work is not to help people navigate a broken system, but to change the system itself.

That kind of change also has to be durable. When underlying structures shift, the desired behavior becomes the default and can persist beyond a single program, leader, or funding cycle. It also requires a different definition of success: systems change is slow, hard to attribute, and depends on funders and field actors tolerating longer timelines, emergent indicators, and shared credit.

For ? mariam-mansury, this is why ecosystems matter locally. People do not live in silos. Children’s and families’ experiences are not defined by one interaction with one organization or one policy, but by the combined effect of many interactions across a fluid local system.

Her key claim was that experience often leads behavior. A local ecosystem that encourages cooperation and trust is more likely to draw people in. One that encourages antagonism, mistrust, or conflict is more likely to push people — including children — out. Designing for systems change therefore means designing not for a single touchpoint, but for the full environment in which the child and family operate.

? cassidy-lichtman translated that systems idea into volleyball. A sport’s ecosystem sets standards and norms for the child’s journey: how parents interpret progress, how clubs behave, what coaches prioritize, how governing bodies structure events, and what kinds of education are offered.

A parent may say a club is good because the child plays in tournaments every weekend. Lichtman’s response was that this is not necessarily good at all: “Your kid shouldn’t be playing every weekend.” The parent’s behavior is not just a private choice; it reflects what the sport environment has taught them to value.

USA Volleyball, as the umbrella organization in that ecosystem, has influence over those norms through the events it runs, the coaching education it provides, and the standards it communicates. Lichtman accepted that the governing body is one of the actors “setting the rules.”

The Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports was discussed as a “building code” for youth sport: a minimum set of conditions that providers should honor when serving children. ? mariam-mansury said that kind of shared foundation can have significant impact because local ecosystems need shared language, shared principles, and shared priorities.

In her account, the Bill of Rights gives local actors a framework for policy design and implementation, for collaboration across organizations, and for investment decisions. Those functions matter because systems change depends not only on endorsing values, but on using them to shape decisions.

Mansury described the Bill of Rights as a simple, unifying framework for a horizontal, city-by-city strategy. She said it contains eight minimum standards for children around positive development, play, safety, and joy. The source did not enumerate the eight standards, which is why the framework is discussed here through the uses and examples the speakers described rather than as a full list of rights.

The work Mansury and the Monitor Institute by Deloitte have been doing with Farrey’s team has had two parts: assessing the impact in cities that have adopted the bill, and developing a tactical plan to encourage more adoption in the two years leading to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

About 20 cities, of different sizes, demographics, and regions, have adopted it, Mansury said. The opportunity she described is tied to the coming international attention on the United States, sports, and play during the next Olympics.

Farrey said the Bill of Rights has been endorsed by more than 500 — “maybe 600” — athletes, entities, and individuals, including many national governing bodies and the U.S. Olympic Committee or otherwise. Endorsement matters, in his view, because it builds common language across a fragmented American sport system. The harder test is whether organizations activate against it.

One of USA Volleyball’s system-building efforts is an athlete development model that begins at the earliest encounter with the sport and extends to the Olympic team. ? cassidy-lichtman said she likes to think of the first stage of volleyball as “keep the balloon off the floor.”

USA Volleyball has recently improved its high-performance and national-team development pipeline, according to Lichtman, especially for top-level youth players who are brought into the gym under stronger structures and coaching. But the area now under scrutiny is the youngest ages.

Volleyball is difficult for children under 10. The task is to keep a ball in the air. In soccer, Lichtman noted, if a child misses the ball, the ball remains on the ground and the play can continue. In volleyball, the basic physical demand is harder, especially for children who are “three feet tall.”

The sport has not done a good enough job adapting itself to young children, Lichtman said. That means lowering the net, shrinking the court, using a lighter ball that is only a step beyond balloon weight, and creating a version of the game that lets children participate successfully. USA Volleyball is now working on an athlete development model for that under-10 level and deploying it through pilot systems.

? tom-farrey characterized this as the vertical version of systems change: one sport defining what should be expected from ages zero to six, six to nine, nine to 12, and beyond, then communicating those expectations to parents, coaches, and operators.

Lichtman said the current state is too much of “a free-for-all” — in effect, adults saying, “Here’s some children, please help them keep a ball in the air.” That, she argued, is not the best approach when the sport knows something about how children develop from under 10 to 14 and then through 18.

? hugh-mccutcheon, Secretary General of the International Volleyball Federation, or FIVB, and a former Olympic volleyball coach for the USA men and USA women, appeared in a recorded message.

McCutcheon said FIVB had been aware of Project Play and the Children’s Bill of Rights for some time. He described the bill as “a powerful opportunity to create more impactful, safe and inclusive spaces in youth sport.” Its normative rights, he said, resonated with FIVB and aligned with its mission to grow volleyball in a healthy way that gives children access to the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of sport.

McCutcheon’s message emphasized implementation, not only endorsement. He said FIVB plans to work with USA Volleyball to outline how an international federation and a national governing body can align in support of implementing those rights in one country. The hope, he said, is that lessons from the United States can help create similar initiatives elsewhere.

? tom-farrey underscored the significance as he saw it: FIVB was the first international federation to endorse the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports. Because an international federation is an ecosystem actor, he said, that matters. But he also said McCutcheon did not want a symbolic endorsement alone. According to Farrey, McCutcheon wanted to start in one country — the United States — and bring key actors in that ecosystem together to examine how well they honor the Bill of Rights and to develop actions against it.

? cassidy-lichtman described the path forward as convening the actors in youth volleyball, whether they are collaborators, competitors, or otherwise involved in the space. She named the coaches association, USA Volleyball’s 40 regions, the athletes themselves, and other organizations touching youth volleyball. The goal is to look at the Bill of Rights and identify concrete commitments each organization can make.

Her premise was that youth sport is highly fragmented, but children’s rights should be one area around which the field can align.

The clearest examples of activation came from ? mariam-mansury’s research into cities and towns that have adopted the Children’s Bill of Rights. Boston, she said, is an endorser and has done interesting work around its youth sport ecosystem, though she deferred details because the mayor was scheduled to speak later.

She then gave three examples: Akron, Chapel Hill, and Tacoma. They mattered because each showed a different implementation mechanism: tying the bill to funding, embedding it in operating guidance and public education, and using it as a planning framework.

In Akron, Ohio, the mayor publicly endorsed the bill, but the city went further. Mansury said every nonprofit seeking funding from the city’s sport and wellness fund has to endorse the bill and demonstrate how the bill is incorporated into the organization’s strategy and operations. In that example, the bill is tied to funding applications and organizational expectations, not only to a public value statement.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, followed a different path. Mansury said the bill was not brought forward by a local official, but by a mother whose child had a terrible experience in the city’s youth sport ecosystem. The parent heard about the bill, brought it to local officials, and helped generate community support. The bill is now included in every coach handbook at the start of each recreational league year. It is also visible in 13 public spaces, both indoor and outdoor, across the city. Mansury described a parent-led and community-led education campaign that includes local media spotlights, interviews, and newspaper coverage.

Tacoma, Washington, offered another model. Mansury said the park district — which she believed was the first on the West Coast and the third in the country to endorse the bill — has used it as a foundational planning guide for youth policies. Those policies include safety, sport access, and coaching. In Tacoma, as Mansury described it, the bill functions as a planning tool for how the park district integrates a focus on children into its work.

These cases supported Farrey’s broader point: endorsement can create the shared language, but activation is where the framework begins to shape behavior.

? tom-farrey described American youth sport as “very disjointed” and “very entrepreneurial,” the latter meant positively. In that kind of environment, he argued, the Children’s Bill of Rights can serve as a common foundation beneath many different models: an elite academy, a school program, a camp, or other sport offerings.

His request was not that every provider become the same kind of organization. It was that whatever they build, they check the eight boxes in the Children’s Bill of Rights in Sports.

That was also his invitation to organizations and cities that have not endorsed the bill. Organizations, he said, should endorse it and use it to build common language. People in cities should bring it to mayors and ask them to think about how to activate against it.