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“Do you know that you can fly?” – A powerful video from Nike and Girl Effect

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Raising 4 daughters is easily the most challenging, humbling, enlightening and fulfilling process that I engage in daily. Each day that I see my daughters interact with each other and their community I am taken aback but just how amazing and powerful they are. If anyone’s set to change the world for the better, it’s young girls.

But as a global society we’re often not helping to bring love and light to that potential.

Girl Effect is an organization backed by the Nike Foundation to help create meaningful impact in girls’ lives across the globe.

Their mission: “To change the world for girls, so that girls can change the world.”

Girl Effect recently released a video called Invisible Barriers that asks the question: “Do you know that you can fly?”

It’s a powerful 2 minutes of animated video that I encourage you to watch with your girls.

SI Play mobile app walkthrough video shows exciting youth sports features for parents

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Sports Illustrated and Time Inc are one the recent players to enter the youth sports market — helping leagues, coaches, parents and young players better manage their youth sports experience. The folks at SI Play recently dropped a walkthrough video of their new mobile app and there are some cool features for parents to check out. I am particularly excited about the Players Cards and Family Schedule features.

Throughout the season it’s still a pretty clunky activity to take pictures and videos of players and moments and share them with other parents. It will be cool to see these images all contained and contextual within the app and tagged by player.

Also, with multiple kids on multiple teams it will be helpful to see those schedules and games in context of each other to help parents manage drop-offs and pickups a little better.

Excited to see how these features adopted this fall when the seasons really kick off.

New Survey: Most Americans think kids shouldn’t play tackle football before 14 years old

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This summer, The UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion conducted a poll of 1000 Americans about their attitudes towards youth sports, concussions and CTE. If you’re a parent who has had these discussions with your kids and parents communities, the results of the survey may not surprise you.

The bottom line is that concussions and their impact on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE has reached a high level of public concern.

Parents are worried are about having their kids exposed to head trauma at such an early age. Key results are below:

Most people think tackle football doesn’t make sense for kids under 14

78% of those surveyed surveyed believe it’s inappropriate for kids to play tackle football before age 14
21% of those surveyed feel that it’s OK for kids under 14

Slight gender gap but still pretty consistent thinking

94% of women oppose tackle football before age 10
84% of women oppose it before age 14
72% of men oppose tackle football before age 14

Not just football

60% of respondents believe that it’s not safe for kids to “head” the ball in soccer before high school

From UMASS Lowell prof, Jeffrey Gerson who has studied sports concussions for over a decade:

“This poll confirms a growing public awareness that concussions can result in CTE, a degenerative brain disease, and that CTE is now viewed as a serious public health issue…The poll also confirms that the public believes that one of the greatest threats to athletes is at the youth level. The public’s negative view of tackle football for children under 14 and heading a soccer ball in youth soccer may lead to further changes in these sports that can have a ripple effect on sports for older children, especially at the high school level.”

If you want to dig into the data further, head over to the UMASS Lowell website.

 

SI Play app is live and it looks pretty cool

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Any parent with kids that participate in youth sports is fully aware of all the elements that go into a season and management of a youth sports team.

Whether you’re a coach or not, there’s a ton of stuff to manage: rosters, schedules, game attendance, practice locations, snack, rain outs, picture days, parent communication, trophies, etc., etc., the list goes on and on.

There have been a variety of companies to come on the scene to help leagues, coaches and parents manage this endless activity. Throughout my daughters’ sports careers TeamSnap has been the standard for managing all of the above. TeamSnap is a great app and certainly helps keep an open line of communication between parents and coaches.

As the world gets more social, schedules get busier these apps have had to evolve. I’m excited that Sports Illustrated has entered the space with a relatively new player in SI Play.

SI Play is looking to elevate the management of youth sports with enhanced features and better UI. It will also be fun to see how they leverage their content and access as Sports Illustrated and Time, Inc.

Fall sports are just around the corner (I’ve already shelled out a ton of money for registrations and uniforms) so it will be interesting see how many of the leagues start to adopt the SI Play technology and mobile app.

[SI Play]

Animation: How To Help Every Child Fulfill Their Potential

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One of the best books I read last year was Mindset By Carol Dweck. Okay, I listened to it on Audible, but that still counts…right?

In Mindset, Dweck a Stanford psychologist lays out her decades of research on achievement and success.

There are lots of gems in there for parents on how we can help motivate our kids and emphasize work ethic over natural abilities. For example, if your kid does well on a test or during their little league game, Dweck instructs parents to give shout outs on how hard they worked to accomplish something rather than “you are a math genius” or “you are my little athlete.” When they inevitably fail at something, that failure can sometimes be tied to their identity instead of their ability to learn, work and accomplish goals.

It’s a really great book to drive a love of learning and it gives a framework to help our kids dust themselves off and keep grinding when they fall down.

The RSA created an great animated video that dives deeper into Dweck’s research and I think it’s super helpful for moms and dads.

[Daily Genius]