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LiFE sports

Posted on | January 6, 2010 | 24,234 views | Comments Off

OSU athletics’ program inspires youth to become future collegians

By Adam King

Get them early and often seems to be a tried and true axiom when it comes to convincing youngsters that a college education is a valuable commodity in their lives. If you introduce underprivileged kids to a college experience at an age where possibilities seem limitless and keep the message fresh, the theory goes, chances are better they will enroll when the time comes.

Ohio State has been reaching out to these children since 1968 through its Department of Athletics as a founding member of the federally funded National Youth Sports Program. NYSP, which at its peak had more than 200 participating colleges and universities, originally was designed to keep inner-city kids off the streets and teach them life skills during the summer using sports as a draw for enrollment.

But starting in 2003, the federal funding was whittled away until it was eliminated in 2007. Now only 24 universities maintain the program, including Case Western Reserve University and the University of Toledo.

Ohio State has continued funding the program as well, and plans now are under way to expand its influence with the campers and create a better model for other universities to follow.

“While our city is struggling financially to hold on to as many youth programs as possible, we felt we could not contribute to the challenge by dropping this program that touches hundreds of young kids,” said Gene Smith, OSU associate vice president and athletics director. “We need this program to continue to be inspiration for young people so they strive to gather the tools to go to college.”

Ohio State renamed the program LiFE Sports (Learning in Fitness and Education) to more aptly reflect the program’s goals, of which the education aspect has become an integral component. The College of Social Work developed a curriculum that teaches the campers key life skills such as social confidence, communication, teamwork, problem solving and critical thinking.

“The NYSP was pretty basic when it was federally funded and they were just saying to the kids, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ but the kids weren’t really learning anything,” said Jerry Davis, who heads the LiFE Sports program and is assistant director of event management in athletics. “Now there are more learning-based activities and there’s a meaning to everything we do now.”

Ironically, when hundreds of higher education institutions hosted the summer camps, none created a research component to track the participants’ success. Davis said when Congress asked for hard data in evaluating the programs for re-funding, all the colleges could provide were feelgood stories.

OSU has been interviewing some children and their parents before and after the camp, but the true measure will be how to track the campers for years to come since having them attend college is one of the program’s goals.

“We’re still looking at the best method to achieve that goal,” said Davis, who added the research couldn’t be done without the critical support of social work’s faculty, staff and students. Dawn Anderson-Butcher, an associate professor in the college, is putting together a course using the camp as a learning lab for OSU students, who Davis hopes will one day run the camp.

The four-week summer camp enrolls 600 youth with the help of the Boys & Girls Club of Columbus, and that makes the camp Ohio State’s largest community outreach program. The Department of Recreational Sports provides the athletic facilities while the Department of Athletics provides the funding, the bulk of which goes toward round-trip transportation of the kids from local rec centers and middle schools and paying the camp counselors and clinicians.

The children receive free physicals, which are required to attend camp, and about 400 were conducted last May.

“Sometimes we will identify a medical issue someone has overlooked, which is beneficial,” said Davis, who added LiFE Sports is considering adding free eye and dental exams through the optometry and dentistry colleges.

The interdisciplinary aspect of LiFE Sports is only expected to grow bigger after the camp hosted its second annual career day in the most recent camp. Student athletes and coaches spoke to the kids, who also were exposed to OSU’s First Year Experience and Economic Access Initiative, the latter of which attempts to entice students to become first-generation collegians. The campers were then sent to one of 19 participating college departments to get a feel for what is taught at OSU.

“A lot of the departments at OSU are getting excited about what we’re doing,” Davis said. “The kids belong to a population that everyone is excited to work with.”

The campers participate in four activities daily — such as volleyball, basketball, football, softball and dance — and a play-based education session.

All campers are required to take swimming (“Many of them haven’t been introduced to that,” Davis said). The Ohio Department of Education’s summer food service program provides the morning snack and a hot meal for lunch each day.

Many of the kids said they wished the camp day would last longer (it currently runs from 8 a.m.-2 p.m.), and Davis said OSU is looking at doing just that, perhaps breaking the day up into separate sessions. LiFE Sports also is instituting six follow-up booster sessions every two months at the Boys & Girls Club of Columbus, funded in part by a $56,000 two-year grant from the Office of Outreach and Engagement.

“We hosted a basketball game as a way to reintroduce ourselves to the kids,” Davis said. “This month we’re hoping to get one of our sports teams to go out there and introduce the kids to their sport. We hope to bring them back to campus eventually and have First Year Experience show them around and get them excited about an education. We’re also talking about teaching the kids financial management or balancing a checkbook — life skills that are often overlooked.

“The hope is they’ll go to college somewhere; it doesn’t have to be Ohio State. We want them to see the value of an education.”

A lasting impression

In 2008, the College of Social Work examined the effect of OSU’s National Youth Sports Program (now LiFE Sports) on participants’ ideas about life skills and attending college. The research focused on four areas:
• Social competence — 77.1 percent of campers reported being good at making friends.
• Relationship with caring adults — 88.1 percent of campers reported that adults at the program care about them.
• Teamwork — 76.2 percent of campers agreed they learned that working together requires some compromising.
• Intentions to attend college — 83 percent of campers agreed with the statement that “because of NYSP, I plan on attending college.”

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