General / Générale

The structure of sport and physical activity in Canada creates an “us versus them” mentality. Organization versus organization; sport versus recreation; soccer versus hockey. The structure cause organization to all be competing for a piece of the pie – whether that pie be funding, quality coaches, administrators or support staff, or even athletes!

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.

Happy New Year to you all! I hope you had a safe and happy holiday season. With the New Year rolling in we are less than a month away from the 2012 CS4L National Summit and the first ever World LTAD Symposium!

Remember, today is the last day to register and get the regular rate; don’t miss this opportunity! Today is also the last day to book your accommodation at the Hilton Lac-Leamy under the special Summit rates.

If you have already registered, don’t forget to log in to your registration account and choose your sessions to ensure availability.

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.

We are pleased to announce the program for the 2012 Canadian Sport for Life Summit, February 1 – 2, 2012 at the Hilton Lac-Leamy in Gatineau-Ottawa.

This year we have made a few tweaks to the Summit format. These changes will provide you with even more opportunities to learn about CS4L and share your thoughts, experiences, and best practices.

Recently I’ve been working with a Provincial Sport Organization, and shortly I will begin working with a National Sport Organization, on LTAD-based strategic planning. I’m sure you know all about strategic planning: a strategic plan usually has a 3 to 5 year horizon; it usually takes about a third of that time to pull one together; and it usually takes the first 3 months for the consultant you hired to learn enough about your business to do anything. The only thing worse is doing it in-house because, to paraphrase the old saw, a Board that hires itself as a planner has a fool for a client.

Enough cynicism. There is a better way.

I was recently invited to provide comments on a discussion paper with proposals for a new Canadian Sport Policy (CSP). As someone immersed in the values and vision of CS4L, I am very concerned about what I have read.

With confusing and often vague language, the discussion paper fails, in my view, to clearly articulate a unifying, encompassing vision for quality sport in Canada.  It also fails to leverage key initiatives occurring presently in Canadian sport, including but not exclusive to CS4L. 

The implementation of CS4L and LTAD is not without its naysayers. The question is whether or not the naysayers are actually getting their facts straight.

Brian Lilley, columnist and blogger for the Sun newspaper chain, has written a blog post that attacks LTAD and CS4L concepts around competition in the ranks of children’s sport. Mr. Lilley makes a number of inaccurate statements that have stirred readers, most notably that LTAD “attempts to make sure there is next to no competition for children under 12”.  

He could not be further from the truth.