All is quiet on the STRONG Kids Act front with the midterms fast approaching. But a private organization has demonstrated the bill’s impacts if passed.
Susan Crown Exchange — the grantmaker behind the Million Coaches Challenge — recently launched its new Empower Every Coach initiative to “dismantle systemic barriers to quality coaching across the United States.”
Chicago-based SCE operates similar to the system STRONG Kids would implement, primarily making grants to national- and state-level organizations that have the scale and strategy to assist its bottom-up approach and create impact at local levels — the same proposed strategy as the SKA leveraging about $200M in annual federal sports betting excise tax revenues.
“There are lots of opportunities and a need to create a more consistently quality experience for parents and kids. We drew a pretty sharp line around coaches,” SCE managing director Kevin Connors told Buying Sandlot. “There was this enormous opportunity around coaches, supporting them and meeting the needs they were expressing with that tangible goal of a million.
“We very intentionally selected a group of organizations who were representing kind of each corner of the youth sports experience. The recreational, the school, the elite and travel, the Olympic movement. Partly because kids show up in each of those, partly because coaches sometimes show up in each of those. And also, as our cohort taught us by the end — no matter what age or what environment, the fundamentals of coaching and the fundamentals of a quality experience are pretty common.”
SCE places heavy emphasis on athlete- and youth-centered approaches and development. But its grants can also support Xs and Os training for coaches and safety issues. SCE has announced 10 partnerships and partnerships so far through Empower Every Coach, including Positive Coaching Alliance, the U.S. Soccer Federation and FundPlay Foundation.
FundPlay was integral in the introduction of the STRONG Kids Act — which, like SCE, seeks to step into the vacuum left by the lack of national oversight in the industry.
“It makes scale and sustainability harder,” said Connors of the fact there is no central body for sports like in other countries.
“It makes the floor harder in so many ways. And at the same time, it's created is this environment where you have so many trailblazing leaders who said, ‘We can still think big and boldly.’ We’re just trying to find those organizations.”
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