Ep. 70: The Lost Art of Play with Dr. Matt Bowers

Rediscover the transformative power of play as we sit down with Dr. Matt Bowers, faculty member in the Sport Management program at the University of Texas at Austin and key contributor to the Aspen Institute's Project Play. His fascinating research is challenging the current understanding of athlete development in youth sport, and he helps us explore the often overlooked value of play in fostering creativity, passion, and mindfulness in young athletes.
 
Social Media Mentioned:

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YouTube: Mindful Sport Performance Podcast

Websites Mentioned:

mindfulsportperformance.org

enduromind.com

projectplay.org

Books Mentioned

Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement

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Very much appreciated, 

Keith, Tim, and Taylor 

Chapters

• 0:12 Exploring Youth Sport
• 18:23 Sports and Human Development
• 23:11 Youth Sports and Specialization Impact
• 32:31 The Challenges of Youth Sports Specialization
• 42:54 Norway's Model of Children's Sports

Transcript

Keith Kaufman: 0:12

Hi and welcome back to the Mindful Support Performance podcast. I'm Dr Keith Kaufman, I'm Dr Tim Pinnell and we are thrilled to be joined today by Dr Matt Bowers. Matt, thank you so much for making the time for us today. We appreciate it. Oh yeah, my pleasure. Just a little introduction to Matt.

Keith Kaufman: 0:30

Dr Matt Bowers is a faculty member in the sport management program within the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his doctoral degree in sport management from UT Austin in 2011. Prior to coming to UT Austin, he graduated with a BS and MS in sport management from the University of Florida, where he also worked with the Gators football and women's basketball programs. Before going a coaching career in college basketball, he instead pursued studying the systems we use to develop athletes, with an emphasis on understanding how to reimagine the youth sport experience.

Keith Kaufman: 1:07

Dr Bowers works extensively in the field with a range of sport organizations, in both research and consulting capacities. He has been intricately involved with the Aspen Institute's Project Play and has served on the science board for the President's Council on Sports, fitness and Nutrition. He has published research studies related to the impact of sport participation on creativity and the value of sandlot slash unstructured sports for children. His work has been featured in Sports Illustrated, sxsw Wired, the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal. So probably anyone who's listened to our podcast before can see why we'd want to talk to Matt, because his work sounds incredible and fascinating and incredibly relevant and important to what we do. So, again, we're just thrilled to have you, matt. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Matt Bowers: 1:57

Thank, you for the long introduction that kept going. I appreciate it. Well, I actually needed the heat so much today. There's a lot of stuff.

Keith Kaufman: 2:06

I do try to condense these. We do these bios quite regularly, but for you it's like everything there is important. I feel like everyone kind of needs to know that you are legit, that you have this background. You're in academics, but you also have coaching background and now you are involved in this playwork that we're going to talk about. It's really fascinating stuff, so I didn't want to skip anything. It seemed important. Oh, thank you. So before we dive into our conversation with Matt Tim, you were kind enough to want to begin our episode with a little exercise.

Tim Pineau: 2:38

Yes.

Keith Kaufman: 2:39

Yeah.

Tim Pineau: 2:40

Let's get centered. And so, if it is available to you, if you could just find some stillness, just take a moment, bending or sitting If you'd like to close your eyes let your spine get straight in whatever position you might be in, whatever that might feel like, so your chest can be nice and open to really just let your body breathe in a way that feels comfortable, natural, not trying to breathe in any particular way, just noticing what it feels like to take a full breath and then let it go.

Tim Pineau: 3:43

As you bring your attention in, I want to invite you to reflect on a memory or some awareness of someone in your life who has been or is struggling maybe a physical injury or a medical diagnosis, maybe emotional turmoil, someone you know and care about, who's experienced hardship and observe any feelings of compassion that arise whatever that may feel like the image of giving this person a hug, sense of warmth in your chest.

Tim Pineau: 4:50

it's no right way. Notice your reaction to their suffering On your next exhale. You can let that go Now bring to mind a person you know who is wanting. This might not be a person you know personally. Maybe you bring to mind a refugee, an unhoused person, someone who can't afford the medicine they need someone who doesn't know where their next meal is coming from.

Tim Pineau: 5:57

And again, just observe what arises, perhaps the seed of generosity and impulse to want to give, to share some of what you might have with this person who doesn't have, and your next exhale, you can let that go. Now simply take a moment to reflect on what came up, the feelings of compassion, of generosity that may have been there. Notice if those feelings felt good. Now notice the way that those feelings came from suffering. Notice the interconnectedness between what we often aspire to be compassionate and generous people and the necessity of suffering to generate those feelings.

Tim Pineau: 8:00

Just allowing this to let you relate to your own suffering just a little bit differently, not to always try to make it go away, but to recognize the ways it can contribute to these other things we tend to want to invite in. You can see the fullness of our experience Need more breaths in this reflection, perhaps wiggling fingers and toes, reconnecting with the points of contact between your body and the ground beneath you. Whatever you may be sitting in, the noises around you, you know. When you feel ready, open your eyes and come back to the space you're in.

Keith Kaufman: 9:28

Thanks Tim. Yeah, I mean I love doing these with you because I feel like I learned so much and we've worked together for a long time now, but I don't think I've ever done a practice quite like that with you before, so that was really interesting. That was very cool.

Tim Pineau: 9:44

Yeah, I was aware it was like going to be a little different, but it was really what was on my mind, it was what was coming up for me, so I was like all right, let's go with it.

Keith Kaufman: 9:57

Interesting. All right, yeah, very cool. Well, I know you're coming off of a conversation that you were having with a team that you're working with, so I know. Well, I've got a zillion questions for Matt, so I want to move on from this in a second. But I just want to ask was there something on your mind in particular that prompted the sort of other suffering, empathy and compassion?

Tim Pineau: 10:19

Yeah, so in part, yes. One of the things I was talking with the team about was kind of not into any or didactic of a way, but self-determination theory and relatedness. And I was asking some of the athletes I've been working with this team for seven or eight years that's a college team so there's lots of turnover but some of these athletes I've been working with now for a few years and I was asking them how is this work that we've been doing impacted your relationships on the team?

Tim Pineau: 10:57

And this one athlete was talking about how they're like yeah, now when they make a mistake or she makes a mistake, the response is so automatic of like, hey, come on, let it go, it's cool, come back, we need you, we need to be together. And the importance of not trying to push away the mistake, the suffering, but to be like, oh, actually that suffering, that mistake, was now the root of this renewed connection, this sense of acceptance and this creation of safety, like, oh, I can't make a mistake and that's okay and it's all of a piece and we actually need the suffering. And that's actually been very present of my mind, because I actually was at this meditation retreat, like this past weekend and that was like a big part, I think, of what I was reflecting on. So it really has been heavily on my mind this week.

Keith Kaufman: 11:54

Interesting. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing that Well, matt. I know it's a shame Taylor can't be here today, because I know you've known our producer, taylor Brown, for quite some time and you've been our producer.

Matt Bowers: 12:10

I think we both had hair when we first knew each other. Me too.

Keith Kaufman: 12:14

probably We've been down here 11 since, yes, yes, we all share, except for Tim who just keeps growing his hair longer just to rub it in our face.

Matt Bowers: 12:20

That was something.

Keith Kaufman: 12:22

I just hate that guy.

Keith Kaufman: 12:26

But we've tried to do something a little bit different this season on our podcast, where in the past we always kind of spotlighted on guests and there were specific people we wanted to talk to.

Keith Kaufman: 12:39

And this year we decided to be a little more question-driven, like what are the issues, what are the questions that drive us that we're really curious about and want to explore? And as we were sitting down to make a list of our questions, one of the ones that came up is around youth sport, specifically like this contrast between competition and play and what are the implications and what do we do into our kids, essentially in the world of youth sport. And as this question came up immediately, taylor said oh, I know the perfect guy we need to have on the podcast and he told us about you and Tim and I got super fired up about what you're doing and about the work that you're involved in, and so just tell us a little bit about you, about your space I know I read your bio but just how you kind of got into this world of play and achievement.

Matt Bowers: 13:30

Yeah, yeah, and thank you for having me. It is a bummer that Taylor can't be here. I want to give him a shout out real quick, because he did his master's thesis under me and it was so good and I was desperately begging him to stay on and do a PhD and he had other aspirations at the time, which I supported, of course. But yeah, he was like one of the ones that got away because I think he has a scholarly brain in the way that he thinks about things. So, yeah, he's been a good pal for a number of years now.

Matt Bowers: 14:10

And I'm grateful to him for connecting all of us together here today. So yeah, I mean, I think in terms of people who spend a lot of time thinking about free play within this context of sports and youth development and athletes, there aren't that many of us who are kind of in that particular lane. I think a lot of us think about these things and kind of come and go from them. But this is something that has fascinated me for years, going back to when I was on a sort of coaching trajectory. I was a graduate assistant with the Women's Basketball Program at the University of Florida. I helped co-found an AAU program and coach the highest level team as well.

Matt Bowers: 15:04

And one of the things that I was really fascinated by was how little fun it was.

Matt Bowers: 15:10

Everyone was having it's tragic comic, but I kind of kept coming back to this like we get to do this. This is amazing. I know the stakes can be high, I don't make light of that, but I was just shocked at how little fun it was. No-transcript, that kind of got me thinking, you know, as I started maybe evolving away from coaching, which at the time was a much less intellectual space as well, I think it's evolved in some positive ways over the intervening years but yeah, I didn't feel like I would necessarily be able to be fulfilled and be able to pursue questions that were fascinating to me. You know there's still stuff I miss about not coaching. You know we're getting into the fall and October in particular really hits me with basketball season starting back up. I guess I'm fortunate that you know a lot of the things I loved about coaching I get to do now in. You know, working with students right like helping individuals and groups try to reach their potential and understand what that potential might be.

Matt Bowers: 16:30

So I still get, I scratch that itch a bit. I became fascinated with like, okay, well, when let's think about my own journey, like, when was I having the most fun? Like starting to kind of like deconstruct this a little bit, and I kept going back to this particular location with my friends in middle school and into high school and we all played on the you know the basketball team, you know the formal basketball team, but we spent so much time in the backyard of one of my friends' houses and when I think about my favorite sports moments it's playing on that hoop. Yeah, and why, you know why is that and what? Why am I connecting with that?

Matt Bowers: 17:14

Interestingly, that that person is Dr John Avery, who is one of the leading like addiction psychiatry researchers at Cornell Medical School now, so one of my longtime best pals. But, yeah, why was that? Why was that my favorite memory, you know? And so then, starting to understand what is it about how we develop athletes, how we coach them, how we onboard them and progress them through their sporting experiences, where, you know, I became kind of fascinated with like I'm involved in this system, you know, like I'm, if anything I'm, I'm operating at a, at a place within this kind of the systems we we use to develop athletes were like I'm getting to work with the winners right, like the ones who are, who are excelling in this context and it's still not fun, you know, like, and we're still not enjoying ourselves.

Matt Bowers: 18:10

So it's, it became this fascination, right, like. So why is that? And that kind of led me back to the origins of like. Why do we even play sports to begin with? What's the function of sports been in society and human development and and all of these other factors that that really drove me down to a very evolutionary level of like, human play. How is that played a role? How have we evolved around that, both as a species, but also as a as a culture as well? And so, yeah, that that's my fascination is are there, are there things that are elemental to this experience that you know in the work that I do these days that we are depriving more and more kids of, then then we have, at any point, at least here in the U S, at any point in our kind of modern history, we think about kids and sports and play and all that stuff.

Matt Bowers: 19:14

So, yeah, it's a. It's a very pernicious and difficult thing to sort of disentangle, you know, because of the way that that things operate, but figuring out how we make sports more playful, you know, and the role that that can play, and not just creating better sports experiences, but in creating better athletes like those don't, those aren't mutually exclusive, and so, as we think about how we design experiences to get the most out of people, we've been doing it wrong in many ways and I I try to be very dispassionate and academic, right, I try not to evangelize about the way things should be or this or that, but it's hard not to. You know, when you're in this space and you and you, you're, you know you're on the sidelines, you're in the, you know you're in with parents and coaches and you're seeing what you see and you know you, we've all experienced this to a certain extent. So, yeah, so thinking about how we re-infuse the, the sport experience for kids, with things that are going to help them have a better overall developmental trajectory.

Tim Pineau: 20:36

And so I mean, I I know our conversation, or I I very much hope our conversation goes to like, and what does that look like? You know, but I guess I find myself fascinated. First, and at the risk of asking you to put on like the Professor Bowers hat, like can you, can you speak to, like this evolutionary piece? Like, what is it about our nature as human beings and why we are drawn to play in the importance of it? I'm just like I'm so curious to hear more about that.

Matt Bowers: 21:08

Yeah. So I mean, I think it's easy to forget that play is how we learn, you know, and how we've evolved to learn, and so you know. Sometimes people will come up to me and they'll say well, you know well what's the benefit of? Free play. It's like I'm human existence right.

Matt Bowers: 21:27

You know like not, I'm not actually usually that that snarky, but like you, you it's everything it's cognitive, it's physical, it's social, it's emotional, like it's it's foundational for all of these pieces. So it's so easy to kind of like lose sight of that when we, when we go into this achievement oriented context that has been designed and delivered kind of by and for adults yeah, and so it's.

Matt Bowers: 22:03

It's like it's like we're speaking a different language really and we're not there's a, there's a common aspect to this that needs to be, needs to be recognized, because we can't we can't bring it back in without understanding that it's was always there.

Keith Kaufman: 22:22

Yeah, I wanted to ask you and you're like the perfect person to ask this question. So I mean I pride myself on being a scientist practitioner. You know I try to. Obviously I have a practice. I consult, I work with athletes, with others, and so I have my kind of observations of what I've seen over the course of that part of my career and kind of married that to to the science and I've kind of developed this pet theory in in my applied world that I want to see like if, if what I've experienced kind of jives with what you've studied and and kind of what, what the broader trends are, cause I've referenced this on other episodes that we've done and and something that's been.

Keith Kaufman: 23:11

So I taught sports psychology for over a decade and one of my favorite studies to mention was this study made you probably are familiar, I imagined, with it. It was a study that was done in the mid 90s by Ewing and Seafelt, this massive survey on why do kids in the U S play sports organized and more recreational sort of like, in school or out of school sports, and so they did this massive survey and and the top reasons that kids gave for playing sports. You know this sort of younger school, a elementary school age. Number one was fun, for both boys and for girls. Other things were like learning something new you mentioned learning a moment ago getting better at something, getting exercise, having having an experience with their friends, and also the the challenge of competition, right, sort of pushing themselves to higher and higher levels. And so what has always struck me about that list when you talk to young kids and this has been my experience, I don't work a lot with very young kids, but it seems like a lot of them tend to be intrinsically motivated and and have a system in place that facilitates learning, that facilitates skill development.

Keith Kaufman: 24:24

And then here's where my pet theory part comes in. It seems like around the age of 12, this is kind of the age that I've identified and I'm curious to hear what you think there's this pivot point where things get quote unquote serious and instead of it being about play or about learning or about skill development, it becomes more about winning, it makes, becomes more about making the team, and I think what, what folks like Tim and I see is that's what opens the door to things like anxiety, relationship issues, some of the stuff that ends up culminating in a knock being very fun, right, and what they lose sight of are more of those intrinsic motives that got them into sport to begin with, or at least got them hooked on sport to begin with. And we kind of know that extrinsic motivation eats intrinsic motivation, that that's a thing. And so I have found that with like later adolescents that I've worked with I'd say athletes between the ages of like 14 and 18 or 14 and 20, a lot of the work is on helping them rediscover what they knew when they were eight. So all of that to say, I'm just kind of curious what you think about my pet theory about this sort of developmental model.

Keith Kaufman: 25:34

I guess you can call like what, what is, what is your work? Tell us about what, what I'm saying?

Matt Bowers: 25:39

Yeah, so you've touched on a number of things. You know the, the idea of trying to under understand what are the elements that kids find to be motivating. You know about participating in sports, so this I can. Her colleagues at George Washington have done some studies called the fun map studies around sports and physical activity and found, more recently, found very similar things to what what you cited you know. So the stuff that we tend to emphasize winning, you know, playing in tournaments, trophies, these sort of external types of things are rated.

Matt Bowers: 26:23

The things that we prioritize and how we, how we develop and, you know, deliver sports experiences are rated much lower than you might expect for kids in the, in the grand scheme of what's driving them to want to do this stuff. It's very much the things that you noted, you know having fun overcoming a challenge, being in a team setting. You know, having a coach that treats you well and, and you know, kind of believes in you, all that kind of stuff. So check, yes, right, like then, we're still the data still suggesting that that's, that's the reality.

Matt Bowers: 26:59

You mentioned 12 being this pivot point. I would, I would reef, I would. 12 is very important. I would actually recategorize that from a pivot point to a cliff.

Matt Bowers: 27:14

12 is when we see participation plummet in in organized sports. Um, part of those reasons are psycholot psychosocial, it becomes less fun. Right, it becomes more work. Part of those reasons are structural. We, if you're not that great at sports as you hit 12, and I'm not just talking about your terrible sports, I'm talking about your average at sports Structurally speaking, you don't have that many options for kids. Yeah, they can maybe keep playing a little bit at the Y or whatever it may be in a recreational setting, but those recreational settings are being increasingly cannibalized by the emergence of the privatized youth sport model that is eating up the local traditional recreational sports options. That cliff, the pivot point. Actually, in the work that I've been involved in, the pivot point comes much earlier actually, I think that's increasingly one of our challenges. The pivot point's coming at seven or eight now Instead of 12,. There was a time when 12 was right, and I don't mean that in the wrong sense.

Keith Kaufman: 28:35

No, this is great. Thank you, this is exactly what I hoped you would speak to.

Matt Bowers: 28:39

Yeah. So now what we're doing is we're pivoting toward this kind of work-focused model so early in athletes' journeys that creates this whole slew of externalities and flow-on effects and things that are largely not good. That's really a huge challenge and one that is, I would say, somewhat unique to our moment, or the last two to three decades or so We've been on a steady march towards professionalizing the youth sport experience.

Keith Kaufman: 29:22

Definitely specializing. Right, that's the word.

Matt Bowers: 29:25

Yeah, and I'm not somebody who's my default setting is not anti-specialization. I think a lot of times that can be what portrayed in stories and in articles and stuff or the media. My default setting is proceed with caution around specialization. There are some things that, structurally, if your son or daughter is going to be a gymnast, you have no choice. That doesn't make it right. Right, but you've got to specialize at age four, five, six. Also, sometimes you're with a kid who gets such enjoyment out of it in a way that's healthy from an identity standpoint that it's okay to dabble in some specialization.

Matt Bowers: 30:21

What I generally say is that if you're going to play some team ball sports, don't specialize, because all the experiences that you have complement each other in terms of your athlete development. It's not that you're detracting from your child's ability to play basketball by having them play soccer. Kobe Bryant will tell you that because he played soccer he became good at basketball. But those things were sort of symbiotic. When we think about specialization, I think one of the real worries right now is from a physiological standpoint and a psychological standpoint we have. Specialization connects with psychological burnout and it connects with overuse injuries. You look at Little League and the amount of UCL injuries we're seeing in pictures in Little League due to hyper-specialization, playing year round, overworking their arm and it giving out.

Matt Bowers: 31:34

While there's some room for nuance on this and I always try to bring a perspective of not every situation can be uniformly prescribed there are contexts where specialization is something you don't have a choice about or something that can be healthy for a stretch. It's just a matter of these. Those are case by case, whereas as an academic, as research or a scientist, we're zoomed out. We're looking at this and a student or an athlete or a parent may say, but yeah, but my kid loves it. They might and that might be okay, but we're talking at the system level. How do we do this in a way that sets up our broader structures to be able to move toward better outcomes?

Tim Pineau: 32:31

I was reading up on this a little bit in preparation for our conversation today. I thought this specialization topic or debate felt so relevant to play versus making it so how important it is. One of the other lines of evidence was that, again, like you're saying, on average the kids who specialize later on in their later sport career, not only do they have less injuries and less burnout, but they got along with their teammates better. They were more emotionally healthy, healthy air quotes, so to speak. They're just getting, related to that, happier. They were happier doing what they were doing.

Tim Pineau: 33:24

I think from our mindless-based perspective. That speaks to me about how important the holistic view is and how resistant, in a way, the current culture in sport is to that holistic view, because there's this laser focus on well, if you specialize earlier, you get literally more hours doing the thing. More hours, of course, is going to be better, yet there's all this data that suggests that. But actually, on the whole, if those more hours create more injuries or if those more hours actually create less psychological flexibility, if those more hours are going to mean your career is going to be shorter, we're not seeing the big picture. And yet, just like you're saying, there's this incredible pressure, this seeming societal movement for earlier and earlier specialization, like start the elite soccer academy at seven years old because that's going to be your route when the evidence actually says the opposite. But then we're just ignoring the evidence Again. From my perspective it's like why is it so hard to embrace this more holistic mindset?

Matt Bowers: 34:41

Yeah, and you brought up a lot of interesting, important points that are really at the foundation of what we're trying to understand. So here's what's interesting. I'm trying to not go too down the wormhole rabbit hole, whatever you want to call it, and get real academic-y, but there's some things that we have to understand and things that I had to understand earlier in my career. So I come at this from a standpoint of y'all. Come on, sorry, I've been in Texas a while, but what are we doing? The evidence is here, what we're doing is here. This seems pretty simple, and so I think what I had to come to realize was to really dive into understanding the geopolitical and cultural environments within which our sports system developed and is embedded. And so, if you'll indulge me, just like these things help explain it a little bit better.

Matt Bowers: 35:50

So in the US, we have tended throughout our history to adopt an approach that resists intervention, particularly at the federal level. So maybe states can set things how they want or whatever, but wherever possible, we're trying not to intervene at the federal level, and this has really flowed into the policymaking around sports. So we have next to no and I won't go into the whole history of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978 and how that just was like this casting of the die for an un-system, like a lack of sort of federal approach to sports. But that's essentially what it was. It was an opportunity, a focusing event coming out of a subpar performance in the 1972 Munich Games, and we had an opportunity to decide as a society, like do we want to do that? Do we want to set some guardrails around sports and how they operate? And we essentially chose no.

Matt Bowers: 37:09

And so one of the things that makes our particular context different than, say, some of our kind of peers around the world is the fact that we are existing and operating within a largely ungoverned, market-driven system of youth and athlete development. So if the market is what? If consumer demand is ultimately what's shaping, what options are out there for people to participate? It naturally is going to be responsive to what you brought up, tim, with the idea of like, well, if I get my kid in at four versus six, I've got two years of advantage on everybody else. And I don't say that in a sort of snarky like, can you believe parents way? Like, yeah, I can, I am one, I feel it, I get it If I see the kid down the street like starting to play, like travel ball it's, I mean, and I know as well as anybody the potential negative consequences of that, and yet I'm still sort of like, should we? I don't know.

Keith Kaufman: 38:29

You know, like I was just thinking it's so validating to hear you say that, matt, because I was just thinking the same thing with my kid.

Matt Bowers: 38:35

We all are, and that's the thing like. That's. The thing I had to come to a realization about is that these aren't bad actors, right?

Matt Bowers: 38:42

These are people making individual choices that they believe will put their child in the best possible situation to succeed, and that's not wrong, fundamentally right.

Matt Bowers: 38:55

Like it may be manifesting itself in a way that is producing negative outcomes at the individual and system levels, but it's not wrong for a parent to want something good for their kid.

Matt Bowers: 39:09

And so if we're gonna solve these issues, we have to recognize there's some basic logic there of like a parent saying, well, geez, I wanna give my kid a chance to play in the NBA or the WNBA or whatever, like, yeah, let's start them early and let's get extra coaching for them, and like that can be a bad thing, but it's not coming from a bad place the vast majority of the time, the vast majority.

Matt Bowers: 39:38

And so if we're gonna work within the system, we almost we have to like acknowledge that, because a lot of the people who are working on reforming the system, a lot of researchers they sort of refuse to meet people where they are, and I'm not casting stones at anyone in particular, whatever, but there's a natural tendency to wanna be like yo, this is so clear what we should be doing and it's just at the individual level, working within a market-based system, we're not going to be able to just flip a switch and everything is fixed right, because we have no policy mechanisms for that.

Matt Bowers: 40:23

We literally can't do it. So what we have to do is try to figure out how we shift demands toward healthier, more beneficial types of sport experiences, how we help parents understand that doing what the science suggests and pursuing what they want for their kid are not things that are incompatible with one another, but that it's really hard. As one of my mentors, lawrence Chalep, who's one of the great thinkers in sport management history, calls that the sort of prisoner's dilemma of youth sports. Right, if you've studied the economics the sort of prisoner's dilemma logic it's the same kind of thing that's operating.

Keith Kaufman: 41:08

Anyone you've seen the dark night the last 15?

Matt Bowers: 41:10

minutes of the dark night is the prisoner's dilemma.

Keith Kaufman: 41:13

There you go, exactly.

Matt Bowers: 41:15

So I'm sorry to go in, like I feel like that was a lot to take in Like. So when I teach my students that like and it goes on for even longer I'm like you gotta just buckle in, I promise. But most of them, even studying sport and other programs around the country, won't even be exposed to this explanation or understanding around it. So you know, a lot of times you put it in- such important context.

Keith Kaufman: 41:41

I don't know that too many people have that full picture. I mean, I've studied this stuff, I've taught this stuff and but the way to hear, the way you explain it, the way you frame it, it is, I think, really important.

Matt Bowers: 41:56

And I do too, thank you, of course, but, like I think you can feel that come through, the more I study this, the more I'm like you know, and we're in so many ways we are failing kids, our kids right and in terms of what we're allowing their life to be and what we're allowing their experience with sports to be. And again, I don't mean that in really maybe as dramatic a way as it sounds, but it's scary and frustrating and interesting and challenging and all these things. And you know, we can look at other models around the globe and there's some really cool, interesting models. You know, you'll hear Norway talked about a lot as a and they're Norway kicks ass Like.

Keith Kaufman: 42:48

Norway is awesome, like the way they do stuff. Happiest country in the world right, that's pretty consistent. Yeah, and the way?

Matt Bowers: 42:53

they. There's sports systems. For any listeners who are not familiar with the way that Norway operates, they were the first country to have a children's bill of rights in sports and they are. So they so heavily protect the experience of their kids and when we can start keeping score and when we can specialize and in the US, we're never gonna allow that, like we're never gonna allow the level of government intervention and policy intervention that you might see in a country like Norway, and Norway is not even the most heavy-handed in terms of government intervention but it's, you know, they've been a really good model for showing like, wait, you can protect the experience of kids and excel.

Matt Bowers: 43:41

They always, you know, at the top of the medal table in the winter Olympics. They've got some of the most impactful, you know, like summer Olympic sport athletes Erling Holland, you know, the leading goal scorer and the premier, you know they. So their model is one that's every nation should look at, and whether they can fully implement it. The way that the Norwegians do is, you know, another conversation, but as something aspirational. It's pretty rad, you know. I mean it's pretty neat.

Keith Kaufman: 44:14

Let me ask you a totally unfair question. Sorry, tim I because I realize where we are in our time together and we only have a few minutes left and I wanna, I sort of wanna get your really quick take on this. So I don't know if this will tell you with what you were saying, tim, I apologize. I just I wanna make sure that that Mac gets to speak to. Okay. So, like, what do we do, right? Like, like you're saying, you know, a system like Norway probably wouldn't work in the US. What do you suggest in terms of moving this needle? Yeah, and that's the question right.

Matt Bowers: 44:52

It's like and it's easy for academics to be like these are all the things that are wrong, you know. And then people are like well, how do you fix it?

Matt Bowers: 44:59

And they're like well, I don't know, you know. I mean, like, how do we? It's not fixable, it's not, it's not transformable in its present state in a way that I think would be satisfying to you, satisfying to a lot of the people who see the kind of the gap between like what we do and what we really could do. Like we're good, we're amazing at sports, in spite of ourselves in the US.

Tim Pineau: 45:26

It's not because of how we do it.

Matt Bowers: 45:28

In many respects, it's in spite of how we do it. So government is never I keep saying never right. There's obviously a chance things shift in some way, but in general we are unlikely to be able to look toward government for these sort of national level shifts. We've seen sort of shifts in terms of national governing bodies adopting more holistic, better approaches, you know, in a piecemeal fashion, right. So like USA hockey adopting and developing the American development model, which has then been sort of cloned to other national governing bodies.

Matt Bowers: 46:11

So we're seeing some good work in these areas. To see real change, it is going to require, as I mentioned, a fundamental kind of shift in the demand for what we want out of sports.

Matt Bowers: 46:25

So as a parent individually, I've got to want better, right Than a lot of these abusive environments that we thrust our kids into. And where we can really achieve that, I would argue, is through like a more of a public-private partnership model, right? So driving a lot of this through from the top down but in our case, in the way we do things, the top down means major league baseball or the national hockey league or NWSL. Like driving better sports practices from our professional systems, because, not because it's the moral or ethical thing to do even though it is but because it's better for business and I know that sounds cynical. But like creating a system we have to understand the system we're in and respond to that right. So like figuring out how we better the system, and it's gonna require showing how the entities and people who benefit from the system could actually be better served, along with their participant base and kids, if we do it this way. So like an organization like the Project Play. If this is a topic that is, you're listening to this and this is a topic that's really interesting to you I don't think there's a more important organization in this space right now than the Aspen Institute's Project Play. Project Play run by a good friend, tom Ferry, who was at ESPN previously and kind of wrote a book about called Game On which I believe has a big anniversary coming up soon about like how crazy our systems are, and then sort of took that as the seed for starting this. You know the sports and society program at Aspen Institute which became Project you know, which has an offshoot called Project Play. They've brought everybody to the table. They've brought all the key players and entities to the table in a way that we've been unable to achieve. Project Play just celebrated its 10 year anniversary and the amount of good work and needle moving, you know because that's kind of how we have to think about this Like the amount of needle moving that has been precipitated directly through what has happened at Project Play, is something that the average person would never be able to fully understand or appreciate.

Matt Bowers: 49:04

And so if this is something that, as you're listening to this, you're like, yeah, I really want to think more about this stuff, this is cool, that's a great starting point. They have all these resources, all this research, you know, and so as we look toward the future and how we better things, it's gonna take creativity, you know, and that's hard because it requires a lot of entities who have entrenched financial interests in the way that the system currently is structured, to wanna do something different, and you can't really blame them for not on a certain level, right On an abstract level. I can blame them for, you know, not taking more ownership over, you know, the systems that they've helped create. But, yeah, it's a really difficult thing. That's gonna have to require, you know it's gonna require sort of top down, bottom up, side to side, like it's gonna require the incentive structures to be better understood and kind of shifted. And we didn't even get to talk about like play and competition and stuff as much as we could, you know.

Matt Bowers: 50:20

So I think there's so much fascinating stuff about I'm not anti-sports, right. Like I kind of have to remind people like I love sports, sports of my life, right. Like I often have to sort of remind people of that because I can come across as being sort of well, he likes free play, like unstructured sports, not organized sports. But I think one of the most important things I've learned in the years that I've been doing this is that type of like reductionist thinking of like it's either this or it's that Misunderstands the whole question, right.

Matt Bowers: 51:03

So it's not about abolishing organized sports. It's not about every kid just running and chasing butterflies. It's about how do we create experiences for kids where they are able to develop in and through these complimentary contexts in a manner that allows them to develop in. Some of the work that I've done and my colleagues has shown that just by creating opportunities for them to play in multiple settings, not just organized sports, opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for them developmentally and in terms of their kind of mental health. So, yeah, there's a ton of stuff to unpack with regard to that, so maybe we'll do another episode. Yeah, I feel like we need to. Yeah.

Keith Kaufman: 51:56

There's still more that I wanna bring up too. I know and, tim, I apologize, I know you didn't get a chance, but we do wanna respect your schedule, mats, and you mentioned project play. Just real quick, do you wanna give our listeners, if you have it, the URL, if people wanna look it up, or if there are ways that people can connect with you, learn more about your work? Obviously fascinating stuff. Where can you direct folks?

Matt Bowers: 52:21

Yeah, so thank you for that Google project play. I can't remember what the website is projectplayus, I'm not sure, something like that but Aspen project play it's one of those. In terms of connecting with me, linkedin is often a good spot. You're welcome to email me, mattbowers at austinutexasedu. I'm always happy to connect and talk more with folks about this type of stuff. Yeah, it's. As I think you can probably tell, it's like it's really fun to try to wrestle with this. You know it's frustrating, it's challenging, it's a lot of things, but it is one of those fascinating kind of almost uniquely American in some ways, like an under-emory in about how we do this stuff and how we create better experiences for kids what we're able to do with that.

Matt Bowers: 53:25

So, yeah, I love chatting about this stuff. I love the work that you all are doing on this podcast. I'm someone in the classes I teach in the work that I do. That is, you know, that really emphasizes mindfulness, you know, well-being, mental health, and I think there needs to be more. I think we were joking before we were recording or whatever that like. You're sort of a you know you're talking about kind of mindfulness and centering and thinking about how we navigate and being very reflective and sports can be such this kind of blunt force instrument, right when it seems almost incompatible with mindfulness.

Matt Bowers: 54:15

But anybody who is working in sports at the highest levels or working in sports in any capacity, recognizes the importance of kind of a mindful approach to how we train athletes, how we train coaches, how we develop teams and the best teams and coaches and athletes are doing this work. So yeah, so thank you guys for the stuff that you kind of put out into the world. That it's something that very much connects with my own general philosophy.

Keith Kaufman: 54:51

Yeah, oh, thank you. Yeah, I would love to continue this conversation at some point. I think there is a lot of common ground and just fascinating stuff, yeah, so thank you for the work that you do as well. I wanna take a moment, too and just invite folks who wanna connect with us with our Mindful Sport Performance podcast. We do have an Instagram at mindful underscore sport underscore podcast. We also have a YouTube channel where we post our exercises that we begin our guest episodes with. So the exercise that Tim led today will be up there, and if you're looking for a great free library of mindfulness based exercises, highly suggest you check that out our YouTube page. You can connect with our MSP Institute at wwwmindfulsportperformanceorg. We also have an Instagram page and a Facebook page where you can find information and me, dr Keith Kaufman. I am on Instagram at mindful sport doc, and that is also my handle for Twitter, slash X, so you're welcome to connect with me there.

Keith Kaufman: 55:53

Our book is still out there Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement Mental Training for Athletes and Coaches. So if you're interested in our mindfulness and sport work, definitely check that out, and we always welcome reviews ratings for our book as well as for our podcast. If you listen, please, please, rate and review us, and it helps. And there's other ways to support our podcast this year as well. If you go to our BuzzFrowd feed, which is the home base of our pod, there are ways to support us, to help us offset the operating costs of our podcast, and so we're very grateful for that as well. So thank you again to Matt for all of your time and all of this wonderful information today, and thank you to everyone who listened. We'll see you next time. チーム.