Sport is a big part of our communities. We look to it as a place to challenge ourselves and we’re told young people need to do sport in order to be healthy. Now it’s true that health is important, but the parts of sport that create health don’t solely belong to sport. You don’t need big teams, or complex rules or even equipment or arenas to get the benefits of sport.

All you need is a set of rules everyone can agree to, a way to determine a victor, and your participants. The simpler the better, because this means everyone can participate and it means that the true measure isn’t who can play the game the best, but who is genuinely stronger, faster or fitter.

Sport teaches young people about overcoming obstacles, about the importance of teamwork and commitment. It teaches them about managing winning and losing and all of the emotions that come with it and more. However sport continues to struggle, no matter how much money governments pour into it or how it’s marketed.

Whether it’s soccer, tennis or cricket, sports struggle with young people in the modern world. Participation rates are becoming worse and worse, with young people dropping out in droves. Over 70% of kids will cease participating in sport by the age of 13, and then the remaining young people will drop to less than 15% participating in sport by the end of high school.

A large part of this is because sport is in a state of flux. It’s intensifying too much in places, with pressure put on young people to strive for higher standards and aim for state or national standards leading to burnout and washout. In other spaces, it’s de-intensifying too much. Games are being simplified or reduced so much that parents and participants don’t recognise the game. Little league soccer matches are removing rules and in some cases even teams in a bid to try and increase participation by removing the competition. At this point it’s unrecognisable, confusing and directionless.

Another reason is that young people don’t care much for competition. They want something which is challenging, social and fun most of all. They want to experience individual growth, together with others, rather than to dominate or feel superior. Whilst winning can feel good, it rarely leads to fulfilment. Organised sport is challenged by this, because at the end of the day karate’s first objective is to teach karate, gymnastics first objective is to teach gymnastics and so on. They are simplified versions of adult pursuits, where their purpose isn’t first and foremost the betterment of the person doing it, but only their betterment so long as it’s in pursuit of the sport.

We need sports which are better at overcoming these barriers. We need to look to what young people love doing naturally, and turn that into a sport, not take a sport and try and make it fun. The lessons that sport teaches are important, but they can never be more important than the growth of the young person themself.

Chase Tag, especially Chase Tag powered by Risky Kids science, is perfect for this. The act of playing tag is universal, coded into mammals and animals by our genetics to help us experience fear, pursuit, risk and evasion. All kids love tag because the rules are simple, it’s fair and easy to understand and that means they can focus on challenging themselves as much as possible as quickly as possible.

By removing complex and unnecessary game mechanics, the sport becomes more accessible and easy to learn. This means more purity in improving skills, rather than just navigating arbitrary obstacles. This allows more people to play, improving the sport and the community.

Many sports are repetitive and linear in their movements. From a tennis swing to the motion of swimming or running, it involves young bodies completing the same movements again and again when the focus should be diverse and exploratory. The time when bodies are developing are not the time to over-develop movement patterns, and the impact of this is seen with the rising levels of orthopaedic surgery being conducted on young people from sport.

Chase Tag fixes this. Rather than having the same motions over and over, it’s non-linear and exploratory. If you move in a pattern, you’ll get caught. You need to be unpredictable and be able to move forwards, backwards, sideways, roll, swing and vault your way to victory. This means that players need to be training this way as well and will find their weaknesses and improve them.

By learning parkour, freerunning, sprinting and natural movement, young people become more in tune with their bodies, and can also find their own way to be successful. Without narrow pathways to success, people can use their personal strengths and attribute to find a way to win, combining their minds and movements.

Chase Tag gives the perfect, pure opportunity to build resilience as well. People have to experience the fear of being chased, they have to watch and anticipate and read other’s body language, they need to combat uncertainty and risk to succeed. It’s an amazing opportunity to sharpen those senses.

Chase Tag Coaches are all trained and taught how to guide young people in this way of thinking. The goal isn’t to help them win at Chase Tag, but understand why they won, or why they lost, and then use that information to become better and stronger.

By exposing ourselves to this fear and of course the physical side of it, we become more resilient, tougher and stronger both in body and mind.