The Dangers of Increasing Participation Drives

“The demand for greater participation, like the distrust of competition, seems to originate in a fear that unconscious impulses and fantasies will overwhelm us if we allow them expression.

In any case, the fashionable chatter about the need for greater participation in sports is entirely irrelevant to a discussion of their cultural significance. We might just as well assess the future of American music by counting the number of amateur musicians. In both cases, participation can be an eminently satisfying experience; but in neither case does the level of participation tell us much about the status of the art.”

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Christopher Lasch wrote about ‘The Degradation of Sport’ in 1979. his seminal work ‘The Culture of Narcissism’. His argument is that sport fulfills a uniquely human need to heighten the senses through competition. He argues that sport as an activity is ‘degraded’ as a human experience and ultimately becomes mere entertainment. This degradation occurs because of the instrumentalisation of sport. This is where sporting activity is undertaken for a further purpose rather than for its own sake. So for example, sport was used to improve the ‘national stock’ during times of national crisis (after losing war the Boer war or the onset of the cold war). More recently, sport has been used to improve the health of individuals after numerous (and seemingly endless) health panics and scares; obesity and an increasing burden on the NHS being recent examples in the Uk. Whatever example we have for instrumentalisation, the process of degradation is the same. Outside forces are brought into the sporting sphere and they change it for the worse.

Since Lasch wrote this fascinating essay in 1979, the way we participate in sport has changed fundamentally. The essay highlights a phenomena that no-one has been able to explain. How and why does the way that we play sport change? You hear opinions like “there is too much money ruining sport” (the angst over the escalating price of footballers wages is one example). No-one can explain why there has been such a proliferation of non-competitive sport -like activity since the 1980’s. Why did people start running marathons in such huge numbers? I will be looking at the reason for such a huge expansion in non-competitive sport- like activity in future works. What I am now fairly certain of, however, is there has been a been a separation in what I call the Competitive Sporting Activity Sphere (CSAs) that has created two new spheres of human activity.That separation has seen the Elite Sporting Sphere leave the CSAs and upon its departure create a new sphere of Non-competitive sport- like activity. I argue that this process started in the 1980s and was complete by around the year 2005. The separation of these two spheres has had a number of consequences for sport and particularly tennis. These consequences are features of the separation of the two spheres and the creation and expansion of the non-competitive sphere.

The ‘participation drive’

The tennis world has seen a fundamental shift in policy, where national governing bodies are moving resources from improving performance to increasing participation. In the case of the UK this process is most clearly defined and is now complete. The LTA began this process within a matter of weeks. In 2014, the subsidised performance academies had their funding totally removed and the parents of players were left to fend for themselves in financing their offspring’s coaching. It was announced that the money that was spent on performance would now be spent on increasing participation. Whatever the merits of such an historic shift (although it was generally greeted as a positive move), it is a permanent one. I think it is important that we look a little closer at two questions because the consequences of such a move has a huge impact on the professionals involved in the sport and, I think, in particular, the coaches.

A further and perhaps more important question is why the process of increasing participation for the good of the sport, is something that is profoundly misunderstood by governing bodies and coaches alike.

The two questions I would like to pose are:

1. Is an increase in participation necessarily (a priori) a good thing?
2. Does a sport need to continually increase the number of participants in order to remain healthy?

Tackling these questions is easier if we look at the possible reasons for such a participation drive. An organisation that switches from performance enhancement to participation increase as its raison d’etre will experience the immediate advantage of being placed beyond criticism. Trying to improve performance as a governing body is an unusually thankless task and whatever you do you will receive very public criticism for your approach. This state of criticism was a permanent state of affairs for the LTA. It was not helped by the fact that the LTA’s results in this area were very poor. Who can disagree, however, that increasing participation is a good thing. Overnight you can move from villain to hero as soon as you adopt the participation increase approach. Indeed, a cursory look at the UK newspaper headlines in 2013 shows how well received the LTA’s new drive was. Highly unrealistic figures were thrown around and the LTA could play the hero.

Being shielded from criticism and adding an almost new moral purpose to your policy is compounded by the fact that judging whether or not your participation increase has been a success or failure is almost impossible. As long as you are “trying to increase participation” you can get away with doing and achieving next to nothing. This is the secret to increased participation drives. You have moral purpose, you are beyond criticism and you are never held to account because you are doing your best under very difficult circumstances. However, although the motives behind participation increase may be questionable, it could still be the case that attempts at a quantitative increase in the number of participants is a good thing.

Quantity over Quality

The increase in participation drives quickly degenerates into a battle of quantity over quality. It is this aspect of participation increase that can cause the most damage to a sport and cause significant long term problems for coaches. What tends to happen is that in participation increase mode, the governing bodies will grab at anything that they think might help encourage participation. An example in the UK is the current obsession with increasing health. This spawned the promotion of Cardio-Tennis and Cardio Tennis classes. This initiative has provided an increase in revenue for the bigger clubs and more employment opportunities for those working within those clubs. This is a good thing. What it has not done is to increase the number of competitive tennis players that the sport desperately needs and should be part of any drive to increase participation. In fact, what it has done is rather the reverse. It has encouraged people to take up a non-competitive imitation of the game without playing the game itself. This means that those who could have been attracted into the sport proper will now most likely stay in its non-competitive format.

With Cardio Tennis, the LTA can claim that they have increased participation in the sport and in a way they have. They have, however, increased participation quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Solely focusing on the quantitative aspect is more likely to damage a sport than to improve it.

The LTA has carte blanche to continue to roll out ‘initiative’ after initiative. Rather like an embarrassing dad at a disco, these initiatives try to connect with an audience but ultimately fail and disappear. Unlike embarrassing dad, they keep coming with merciless frequency. I think we need to be far more critical of the initiatives of quantitative participation increase that do not include qualitative participation. We need to be able to identify what is ‘good for the sport’ and start innovating ourselves or we will be vulnerable to the mishandling by the well meaning but ultimately self serving bureaucracies, the national governing bodies.

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