“We don’t have the capacity to train these organizations,” Pena said. “I’m hiring you because you’re the expert to do both youth development and coach. If you can’t, we have Positive Coaching Alliance to train your staff. It’s new. We’re probably going to make a lot of mistakes.” The goal is to have four sports or other physical activities taught in all after-school programs during 2022- 23 and then consider if organized teams are sustainable in 2023-24. Intramurals are identified as a potential way to grow sports participation. OAL Commissioner Franky Navarro remembers the value of intramural sports when he was an Oakland student. The model gave many youth their first chance to compete and see if a sport is right for them within their school building. “Right now, they’re competing against other people they don’t know, and that can be frightening for a student,” Navarro said. The biggest challenge to bring back intramurals at high schools is Oakland athletic directors are not full-time. Navarro is making a push for full-time athletic directors, whose duties would include creating intramural sports at their school. “Intramurals can increase school community,” Navarro said. “The principals I have close relationships with are very supportive of the idea. Their challenge is capacity.” Project Play’s Reimagining School Sports Playbook recommended private investment to help fund alternate forms of play in schools, including intramural sports. Brands may be rewarded with product loyalty by reaching a larger segment of the student population than only interscholastic teams. Soccer Without Borders serves as a model to assist newcomer youth. Soccer Without Borders Oakland was recognized as a 2022 Project Play Champion for its work assimilating about 1,900 newcomer youth into school and community teams. Oakland is the
largest and oldest of the seven Soccer Without Borders sites in the U.S. and internationally, with 18 teams and 10 full-time staff. Almost half of its budget comes from government grants to design an inclusive soccer experience for boys and girls. Maddy Boston, Oakland’s senior girls program coordinator, played Division I soccer and was a rare female coach for five years at a competitive Oakland club. “I quit because I couldn’t reckon how different the ideology was from Soccer Without Borders,” Boston said. “I found a lot of male coaches [on club teams] really toxic and really abusive. I tried to speak up about it. Change is really tough when it’s an institutionalized setting.” Sophia Goethlas, a Soccer Without Borders coach, said the program’s model works because it’s based on community and fun. “But we’re unique,” she said. Students who identify as nonbinary are almost three times less interested in sports. In our youth survey, these students were far more likely to report they don’t feel welcome in athletic activities, think they’re not good enough to play, and don’t want to get hurt. While public recognition and acceptance of people who don’t identify as strictly male or female is growing, many sports remain structured or separated by gender. California law since 2014 allows students to participate on school teams based on their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on the student’s records. 38 Oakland youth who are nonbinary identified 15 sports they want to play at higher rates than their peers. (See Scoreboard on pages 4-5 for some results.) Only one-third of Oakland youth who identify as nonbinary said they regularly play team sports compared to 72% of all surveyed children. Separate research shows that 10% of Oakland youth who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual receive at least 60 minutes of daily physical activity, compared to 15% of youth who are heterosexual. 39
STATE OF PLAY OAKLAND
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