Blog

Wow! What a week! The 2012 Canadian Sport for Life Summit was held last week in Gatineau-Ottawa and it was a huge success!

First off thank you to all of our delegates, presenters, panelists, poster presenters and exhibitors for making this year’s Summit our best yet. With over 550 delegates attending over 40 different sessions and 4 Pre-Summit Workshops. I’d also like to thank Minister of State for Sport The Honourable Bal Gosal for attending and giving a plenary address.

We kicked the Summit off with our Big Ideas, seven presenters giving 4 minute TED.com style talks which were innovative and pushed the boundaries of our thinking, from announcing the new Actively Engaging Women and Girls in Sport document to discussing the business of sport the Big Ideas were a huge hit. We’ll be posting the PowerPoint slides and the videos of all the Big Ideas on the website in the next little while, and we will also have some blog posts from the Big Idea presenters going into more detail about their topic.

As the 100,000 Canadian Sport for Life Champions campaign continues we are looking at new ways to inspire individuals to take action in their community. At this year's CS4L National Summit we will be launching the CS4L Messenger Program. The Messenger Program involves Champions, such as yourself, presenting to individuals, organizations or groups in your community about Canadian Sport for Life.

At the Summit we will be hosting Messenger Training sessions, which will provide you with all the tools, tips and tricks on how to deliver effective presentations on CS4L and physical literacy.

In my last post I briefly described how an organization’s LTAD plan is, in fact, the foundation of their broader strategic plan. Integrating CS4L-LTAD into strategic and operational planning is indeed a way to introduce and integrate LTAD into the life of the organization, but it is not the first step. And there must be a first step!

As I work with sport organizations at all levels- National Sport Organizations (NSOs), Provincial/Territorial Sport Organizations (P/TSOs) and Community Sport Organizations (CSOs, or Clubs) the challenge of how to get going inevitably arises. I’ve developed some simple strategies for getting going, and I invite my colleagues who do organizational development work to chime in as well.

What could be worse than being an overweight or obese child? Or a child that doesn’t know how to fail? Or how to stick with a difficult task?  Or a child who grows up in a fishbowl, cushioned in bubble-wrap and terrified of failure while expecting everything to be delivered on a silver platter? 

This is the modern day child.  We have successfully engineered a child that is unable to take risks, lacks imagination, lacks resilience and has an artificially inflated sense of self worth (Dweck C, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House, 2006). This does not bode well for the future health of Canadians or for its athletes aiming to compete abroad.