Engaging Schools in Sport: Neither Witchcraft Nor Wizardry

19 Jun

If you’ve tried to use schools as a platform to grow sport participation, you know it’s not a case of simply waving a wand and watching magic happen.

Schools are widely recognised as a captive audience and potential recruitment ground for sporting clubs. In one national participation program I managed, 35% of our new participants discovered the program through their school. Yet the golden question seems to continually pop up across the sector: “how do we transition more kids from our school programs into mainstream club sport?”

It’s one of the most common puzzles that sport organisations are seeking to solve. And whilst we won’t preach to have the secret potion, in this blog we’ll share the key principles shaping any program or strategy that we develop for sporting organisations from community clubs to peak bodies.

We firstly believe that if school engagement is viewed as a series of discrete events (i.e. one-off clinics), you will only ever get a series of discrete results. Instead, school engagement for sporting organisations needs to be viewed as a system of linked activities across three relationship pillars:

The student,
The teacher, and
The school.

The scale of your school strategy may differ according to your organisation’s size, but it must integrate each of the three pillars in some way. Let’s dive into what each pillar looks like.

Pillar #1: The Student

We will start with the student because it is the relationship that many sport organisations currently focus their efforts on, most commonly through the school clinic. There are three C’s that organisations typically think about when planning promotional activities in schools: the coach, the curriculum, and the collateral (flyers, certificates etc.).

Peak bodies often sharpen their focus on the last two - curriculum and collateral - because these are the two that are most easily controlled from afar. But make no mistake, the coach/deliverer is the most important element towards building the relationship between student and club. There are three fundamental events involved when transitioning students from ‘clinic to club’:

Providing a remarkable experience
It’s not enough to simply deliver ‘skills and drills’, coaches need to deliver an experience that gives students a story they want to tell friends and family. It varies for each student: they achieved a personal best, they learned a new skill, the coach praised them for effort, or a semi-professional player showed them some cool tricks to perform with the ball. It is not the coach that defines a remarkable experience - the student does.
HINT: If a student isn’t mentioning the school clinic when answering their parent’s daily ‘how was your day!’ question, it probably wasn’t remarkable.
Developing a sense of belonging/affiliation to the club
Does the student now feel like they are “a Lion”, “a Cougar”, or whatever the local team’s mascot is? Did the coach nurture this feeling by using students’ names, making them feel safe, and part of the club?
Giving a call-to-action
If the coach has delivered on the two elements above, they are well placed to invite students to attend a Come and Try day or enrol in their schools’ team.

Let’s be honest, there are far cheaper ways to reach parents and children about sport on a cost-per-student basis. So in-school clinics are therefore more about quality of reach, and embedding your sport as part of the school’s culture (more on this later). To justify the cost, each session needs to be targeted and meaningful, so some important questions to ask when delivering in-school clinics are:

Which program do I want to have these participants transition into?
How is this experience being communicated to parents?
How am I building the school’s capacity to continue delivering the sport after I leave?

Pillar #2: The Teacher

Developing strong teacher relationships gives you additional promoters of your sport program from a highly credible source. Essentially, they become a voluntary development officer. The best example I saw of this was a teacher who recommended students participate in specific local sports programs as part of parent-teacher interviews. Empowering teachers as advocates can be achieved through a mix of professional development, class resources, and ambassador programs.

Most general primary teachers receive around 10 hours of formal physical education (PE) training during their education, and may have little knowledge of your sport to draw upon when planning their curriculum. Gifting teachers with curriculum materials and in-school delivery empowers them and improves the likelihood that they will continue teaching your sport the right way long after you have left the school grounds.

Teachers may also be interested in attending local community coaching seminars, as it can contribute to their yearly personal development requirements. These courses/seminars should be accessible in timing and cost, and be tailored to their requirements - teachers are unlikely to require modules on behaviour management or child-safe environments.

Give schools a sporting experience, and your sport benefits for a day. Empower schools to deliver your sport, and your sport can benefit for a generation.

Some sports create formal “ambassador programs” where teachers are provided with merchandise, equipment and event tickets as sweeteners to stay connected peak bodies and deliver. But more informally, a local football club could offer a “Teachers Day” where teachers from the community are given a game-day VIP experience with basic catering, and given a short presentation by a coach within the club. The added benefit here is that the sport is facilitating a networking opportunity for teachers across the region.

Need help with your schools program or strategy?

Pillar #3: The School

The school pillar is all about creating a school-club partnership that endures any changeover in staff. The ultimate aim is to embed your sport within the culture of the school, through regular and mutual exchanges of value. The examples we discuss here are equipment, shared spaces, inter-school competition, and a beyond-sport approach.

Equipment

It goes without saying that schools can only deliver your sport as part of their PE curriculum if they have the equipment to do so. If you are not in a position to donate old equipment, Australian sporting organisations can raise funds through initiatives like the Australian Sport Foundation or Sporting Schools grants.

Shared Spaces

Many sporting organisations deliver participation programs in school facilities after school hours, with the following benefits:

1) Increasing their catchment area, compared with running out of a single centralised facility,

2) Lower hire costs than many privately-owned venues (typically); and

3) Convenient timing and location for parents.

Inter-school competitions

Inter-school competitions serve to embed your sport into a school’s psyche by leveraging feelings of school pride and tradition. Carefully managed over time, the goal is that schools view their performance in your inter-school competition as part of their brand and identity, which encourages them to invest in equipment, training and resources.

Beyond sport approach

The best school-club partnerships find ways to deliver value to each other beyond the exchange of sporting experiences. Does the school have a thriving music program? If so, you might extend the opportunity for students to perform the national anthem at your local semi-professional league. Or perhaps the Visual Arts program can be engaged to design the club’s uniforms.

Where school engagement strategies fail

OK, so we’ve talked about what works - but here are three reasons sport organisations don’t achieve enduring success in schools:

1) A narrow focus on one of the three pillars (typically the student level).

A challenge for many organisations is relying too heavily on engaging students, and giving insufficient attention to the teacher and school relationships. It’s a short-lived ‘sugar hit’ in many cases that lacks the sustainability of a whole-school approach.

2) Not balancing quantity with quality

The annual reports and staff KPIs of many sport organisations are based around the number of schools and/or students reached with experiences. This leads to casting the net wide, and this can no doubt help to create footprints in new communities. But just as the corporate marketing world has recognised the need to shift from brute force figures (think social media impressions, reach) to quality-based assessments (engagement), a similar balancing act is needed in the sport development space.

3) The local sport participation structures are insufficient to deliver a quality experience.

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” If you have delivered all of the above but community participation is not increasing year-on-year, it’s likely there is an underpinning issue with the experiences being offered in that club/league. It could be a variety of factors - cost, scheduling, culture, format - but ultimately the programs are not aligned with what students enjoyed during the school-based experience.

Getting Started: A Schools Strategy Planning Tool

Regardless of the level your organisation operates at, you can use our 3x3 matrix provided below to examine the way your sport engages schools, the roles played at each level of governance, and identify opportunities for growth.